WAHM: Business & Parenting
Impeccable Nest is an interior design business ran out of my home office with my partner, and mother, Kim. I also run this business with my two mini-assistants who are 2.5 and 9 months...needless to say, it makes for a creative workday schedule. The delicate balance between working from home, and parenting at home (or being a work at home mother (WAHM)) is a fine line and battle for balance...everyday. The struggle is real.
However, reality has hit this Impeccable Nest hard this week. My girls have been battling colds, and one has had a fever for two days, which means long hours lounging on the sofa. Now, while this sounds like a beautiful plan for a lazy day, work is still calling, there are clients to be met, and installations happening all over our fine city. In fact, I have a couple of MAJOR projects that are in the middle of completion right now, and they need my attention as much as my girls.
So...how do we do it? Well, I couldn’t do any of this without the support my business partner and my family. We constantly pass work back and forth between the two of us, which is quite helpful, however when girls are sick, we are stuck at home. Since there is never going to be a real/true balance of work/life, we have become experts in delegation and in “rerouting.”
I often joke that my life’s motto is “rerouting.” Since becoming a “mompreneur,” I’ve had to do more “rerouting” than I ever thought I was capable of doing before. The plight of the entrepreneur is a Type-A personality, but since throwing motherhood into the mix, I’ve found that you cannot maintain that level of intensity, and you must increase your flexibility. Every single day comes with a new challenge/responsibility for my family as well as for our business, therefore “rerouting” is the way of this WAHM. The best example of this would be these past two days. I’ve been running on little sleep, but lots of snuggles and my laptop and cell phone, which have helped us communicate with our clients/vendors/tradespeople and work on our rebranding effort. We may have had to rearrange our schedule to stay home the past few days, but that’s the best part of being a WAHM, the ability to “reroute” when something comes up.
I wouldn’t trade being a WAHM with anything else out there, but remember:
1. Community/Help is everything: You can’t do it alone, and you need help.
2. Rerouting: It is the most important lesson I’ve learned in the past 3 years. You must be flexible.
3. Family: They are your everything. That’s why we do this.
