How do you balance career and motherhood without going crazy?
Tips from a freelance and 9-to-5 African mom.
Work, eat, sleep, repeat – an expression well-tailored to men. But what about working moms? Who's there, or what mechanisms have been put in place to galvanize those for whom the modus operandi is as follows: wake the kids up, wash them, feed them, take them to school, then - work, eat - then back to get the kids cleaned up, give them a snack, play, get them ready for dinner, dress them, read them a story, pamper them, take care of the husband, and ah, yes, finally sleep? This routine, which is virtually impossible to maintain over the long term, easily distracts us from our career ambitions as mothers. Whether in an office, freelance or as a businesswoman, being a mom and working full-time is a double chore. For the woman who commits to doing both, her only leverage is a fierce passion to make her dreams come true and unwavering persistence. And unwavering persistence means organization, discipline and self-sacrifice. Not easy ingredients to find when you're a mom!
I'm an entrepreneur and writer, and I used to struggle with chronic sleep deprivation due to sleepless nights with my baby. And because I slept poorly or hardly at all, I couldn't concentrate on giving my little businesses the attention they needed to get off the ground. As a result? I became somewhat of a procrastinator and often sad that I didn't feel accomplished. Having said that, I'm one of those people who firmly believe in the importance of taking a step back in order to make a bigger leap forward, in other words, studying each failure in depth to find out what the best solution is for moving forward with a project. So I set out to get to the root of the problem, and my solution came very naturally to me during a writing session.
One of my many projects for 2022 was to complete a book on motherhood as seen through the eyes of an African woman. I wrote whenever I felt like it, without any real organization of my time, telling myself that the simple fact of being a mother would enable me to write quickly and well on such an important subject. However, the pages still wouldn't fill up. For me, a successful writing session meant a thousand words minimum. But I wasn't always inspired, and often, because I didn't complete those thousand words, I would take long breaks of two days, three days or even a week, just to get reinvigorated.
One morning, having completed my dawn prayer, with the sweet aroma of my espresso and the breeze as my only companions and my children still sleeping, I began to write. Without any disturbance. This morning session gave me an incredible feeling of satisfaction: not only was I happy to be writing at my own pace and in the ideal environment, but the chapter I was writing was short, concise and interesting. I was even closer to my goals. This taught me two things: firstly, that I needed a time slot during which I could feel free and exploit all my creativity. Secondly, since my goal was to write at least thirty thousand words for the book, and since I'd only completed about nine thousand so far, I set out to write five hundred words a day, every morning, when the children were asleep and before I went to work. This number of words per day seemed reasonable and didn't require a lot of time. Knowing that at the end of a week, I'd end up with two thousand five hundred words, motivated me a lot. If I kept to this pace, I could easily finish the book in two or three months.
The lesson you can take away from this little anecdote as a working mom is that, when it comes to your career goals, you need to be meticulously organized. Blaming everything on people, or on not having the time when you yourself can't develop the discipline to be very successful in your field of expertise, will get you nowhere and make you even more bitter. When you have a long-term career goal, organize yourself to move towards it little by little each day. Be very clear about how much time you're going to devote to this project each day, based on predetermined tasks, and then calculate your expected progress per month, i.e. having made this or that effort per day, where would I be in a month's time? And for each milestone reached, give yourself a gift! You've earned it.
All this will help you to be accountable to yourself, and better still, no one and nothing will be able to stop you from realizing your biggest dreams.
"And what about those days when I don't have time?" you say.
Understand that this is the exception to the rule, and that there are indeed days when we can't accommodate, no matter what we do, for our passion project. An illness in the family, an emergency in the office job, these are all valid, but again, they're exceptional. Don't let yourself be bribed by laziness and excuses, they only slow you down in realizing your dreams. Give your dreams top priority, put them just below the kids in terms of precedence, pick times or moments when the children aren't around, make these moments daily obligations like going to work, or brushing your teeth before bed, and you'll see changes in record time.
Remember, you become what you practice. You are what you do. As proof, I would like to give you the example of my son, who is now learning to talk, point and identify everything he sees. When he sees a dog, he shouts "woof, woof!", he doesn't say "dog" even though we always tell him it's a dog. In reality, my child describes what he observes, what the dog does on a daily basis. A dog barks. Anything that barks is considered a dog. A businessman does business. A writer writes. By simply observing you in your daily actions, one should be able to determine what you do and what's important to you. So if you make a living from your passion, it's easy to see it in your actions and words. When I say "Lebron James", people think of basketball; when I say "Martin Scorcese", people think of cinema. So choose your passion wisely and go for it, so that in a few years' time, when people mention your name, they'll think directly of the discipline you've practiced like no one else.
"Easy to say. And while I'm working and undertaking, who's looking after baby?"
Your concern is perfectly legitimate, but I'm here to tell you it's no excuse. I'm giving you these tips as a part-time entrepreneur who goes to work full-time. This simply means that I've used hours when I haven't yet walked through the door of my apartment and the kids haven't yet woken up to write. If I didn't have a nanny and had to go to work in Europe or the United States, I would still have dropped my kids off at daycare. And if I were lucky enough to be based in Canada, where they've figured it all out and give moms a year's paid maternity leave, I'd make time for writing during baby naps. If, in addition to organizing my time well, I can convince my husband to look after the children for even an hour, there's no stopping me.
In the end, it's all about understanding that every choice has a cost, and making the right choice. Sacrificing sleep or limiting hours spent surfing on social networks to give yourself a chance, however small, to soar and reach for the stars, seems like a good deal to me. And also knowing that in life, as long as we're healthy and our basic needs are covered - we're not starving, we have a place to live, we have enough to visit the doctor if we need to, and we can afford to go to school - not actively pursuing what drives us is a personal choice...but not necessarily the best one.
