My Journey, my beginning for I am a Wife, Mother, Daughter & Sister!

As a mother of 3 very young children ages 7, 4 and 2, I decided to leave the mainstream workforce a little over a year ago to try and find a way to stay home all day with my 2 younger children who aren’t yet at school age and to work from home. During the time while I was working away from the house, my mother-in-law was kind enough to agree to watch them while I was at work. She had been watching my middle child since right after he was born and I had to return back to work because my maternity leave was over. So after the birth of my youngest she had agreed to watch the both of them while their father and I were at work. Well this was until the youngest who was only 6 months at the time, started crawling and was no longer the cute little cuddly baby anymore.

For those of you who have children know that once they start moving around on their own there is nothing, and I mean NOTHING, that isn’t fair game as far as they are concerned. Every drawer, cabinet, or item that was within their little arms reach becomes part of their disaster zone. If you have a drawer full of cloths you can bet that within seconds of putting them down that drawer was empty with every item of nicely folded cloths were now unfolded in a heap on the floor. Same goes with every pot, pan or utensil in the kitchen cabinets.

So, after just a few short weeks of my youngest doing this while with my mother-in-law and me at work, I got that dreaded phone call! You could hear it in her voice. You know how you get when you finally reach that breaking point and you don’t even have enough left in you to sound mad. All you have left is pure exhaustion and frustration. The first words out of her mouth were, “Where are you and when will you be here to pick up the kids?” After explaining that I was already on my way, what came next was enough to knock the wind right out of me. She says, “Good, I can’t do this anymore. I am too old for this and I QUIT!” followed quickly by the sound of the phone disconnecting.

Needless to say, when I arrived at her home to pick up the kids there was an awkward tension that filled the house. I swear you could almost cut it with a knife. Not much else was said between us in the process of packing up the kids belonging and toting them to my car, I had worked up the nerve to ask if she could at least watch them for the rest of the week. I needed time to make other arrangements. Obviously not partially pleased with having to face another day like the day she just had, she agreed.

After a pretty sleepless night worrying about the day care of my kids, I got everyone ready for the new day and we all headed off to where we belonged. I dropped my oldest off at kindergarten and proceeded to take the 2 youngest to my mother-in-law’s. She seemed to be in better spirits this morning, so I left them and headed off to work. As I pulled into the parking lot for my office building there was a rather usually large group of employees crowded around the front. As I approached I could hear some of them sobbing. I began to walk a little quicker, with 50 million things running threw my head. Did someone get hurt or worse die? What was going on? As soon as I got within a few yards of the group a co-worker of mine and close friend yelled to me, that we’ve all be laid off! The company went bankrupt and we all are out of a job.

Now talk about a bad 24 hours, my mother-in-law baby sitter quits and I lose my job… I quickly got my belonging from my desk and sat in my car and began to sob myself. What was I going to do? I have to get a new job, but I don’t have day care for my kids. I can’t afford a daycare facility, especially without a job. I pulled myself together and went back to my mother-in-law and picked back up the kids. She was surprised to say the least for me to back less than 2 hours after having dropped off the kids. It was my turn, I had nothing left, physically and emotionally exhausted from the past 24 hours, all I could say to her was that I got laid off and didn’t want to talk about it.

News travels fast and it wasn’t long before I got a call from my husband asking me what had happened. Knowing that an “I don’t want to talk about” response wouldn’t suffice, I recounted back to him the events of the day. To my surprise he tells me to not worry, we’ll make it, we always do. Oh my, how the tables had turned! Up until this point it had always been myself giving comforting words to him and here I was worried and scared, listening to him do the same for me. He was calm as a clam. He tells me, “Look it wasn’t working for us the way it’s always been in the past. Maybe it’s time to try something else, maybe you should just stay home with the kids.”

After a couple days of feeling like my world had fallen in on me, I began to realize how much I really enjoyed being home with my kids and didn’t miss work at all. I began looking for work that I could do while at home…. Thus began my journey into being both a full time mother and still being a provider to household.