Giving up on the rat race
What would make a woman give up her career?
Sounds yet another Ms. Universe question but this was what I kept on asking myself several times over before I finally decided to go full time as mom and wife and kill my career - at 32.
It’s been two months since I left the corporate world. I had a managerial job with above-industry compensation, respectable bosses, and a wonderful team who worked hard and smart with me through the toughest of times.
So when people around me learned that I was giving it all up to be a homemaker, they thought I was going nuts.
Killing my own career hadn’t been an easy decision for me who’s been used to working since college. I had loads of apprehension on, primarily among others, financial stability and security. But my husband was adamant in making me leave my job to focus on the family. And he wouldn’t take no for an answer.
My hubby and I have been married for almost eight years but the demands of our jobs have kept us apart for almost half that period due to our distant areas of assignment - him in Manila and me in either Davao or Cagayan de Oro City. Our now 7-year old daughter lived like a ping-pong ball, staying either with my parents or my husband’s. She’s had seven nannies since birth. Most of them left consequently due to my daughter’s pesky behavior, thus the high turnover.
That alone was alarming.
For two months now I’ve been my daughter’s full-time tutor, bestfriend, and mom. The pesky behavior that the nannies complained about did not at all surface - and that’s not to say that because moms have longer patience for their own kids than how much nannies can muster and stretch.
I realized that her pesky behavior toward the nannies was her way of getting my attention. Afterall, she herself has been prodding me for ages to stop working and stay with her because she felt like she had no parents. She constantly asked why we weren’t living together as a family. Everynight she prayed that the three of us will finally be united and that I quit my job to look after her.
Now her prayers are finally granted and she can’t contain her joy.
Just last week as I was going over my daughter’s writing pad, I saw two drawings she elaborately made that sealed my conviction of being on the right track. She drew pictures of three happy individuals whom she identified as us, holding hands. The captions struck me most because they read “happy family” and “Kami ay masaya!” - a far cry from the previous dark sketches I used to see in her drawing books for the longest time that were reminiscent of images from the horror flick “The Ring.”
From the looks of it, my being around affects my daughter’s psyche and it sure swells my heart. I’ve never been as satisfied and fullfilled as when I was a working mom who couldn’t give quality time for my family.
Time and again, I still get calls from friends who ask me why I choose to rot (yes, that’s how they put it) at home instead of work and put my skills and degree to good use. I wince at the thought that some people seem to fail to see beyond the importance of work even when the relationships they’re in are on the verge of falling apart. I can’t blame them. I used to see things that way too. Work was the center of my world since time immemorial until I began to feel shallow and decided to search for a deeper meaning to my existence.
The adrenalin rush fuelled by challenges in the workplace didn’t anymore suffice to keep me going. Surprisingly, the happiness and fullfillment I’ve been looking for are now beginning to get quenched at home.
For more than a decade of being trapped in the rat race, I thought the biggest stimulus to self-satisfaction was career, more than just a job. While a job is merely a source of income, a career is much more of a calling, a passion in the guise of occupation.
I may have given up on the rat race but I have transitioned my career into something bigger, more meaningful, and more challenging through full-time parenting.
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