I am a work-at-home mom. That is I run my own restaurant and bar in Thailand, and I also live here: so I guess you could say I’m a live-at-work mom too, or that’s more what it feels like most days when I am surrounded by cold cups of tea I haven’t had time to drink.

These days moms who choose to stay at home and do the ‘most important job in the world’ often have to factor work of some kind into their lifestyle choice. For most women the days of being supported while daddy goes out to earn a crust are long gone, and most multi-tasking moms make the compromises necessary to ensure they can stay home, by taking on work they can do from the house. My situation is slightly different in that I actually live in my workplace. The concept of spending a few hours a day accomplishing a task I get paid for, and then continuing to make cookies with the kids, is completely alien to me (as I suspect it is to all but those few boogie monsters we like to call supermoms).

I live my job and my baby does too, and that’s the compromise I have made to make our lives and finances work. Some days I am tearing my hair out: when staff let me down, electrics are on the blink, we’re busier than we can cope with, and my angel baby is tired, or teething, or just wide-eyed-awake. On many occasions I have had no choice but to be in the kitchen trying to crank out food to hungry customers with my hungry baby in my arms. Health and safety in the West would have a field day; but in Thailand it’s a natural part of life that babies inhabit the kitchen as much as everyone else does.

That said, it is incredibly stressful when you are under pressure and you have to make the snap decision between giving your baby what she needs, and letting your business fail in that moment. In the age old manner of mom’s everywhere, I try to do everything, and this sometimes has resulted in me frying food with my newborn nursing in a sling. My mom jokes they don’t make splatter guards for babies- which would be funnier if my baby wasn’t actually in danger at times.

On other occasions if we have late customers or parties that go on until dawn, I am often crawling into bed bone tired, half an hour before my little sunbeam rises and shines. But I suspect all working mom’s have to make some difficult choices, and Laeila hasn’t suffered unduly. Faced with a choice of spending a couple of cranky hours in a hot kitchen, and me having to leave her when she is sick to dash off to the office, I choose the former wholeheartedly.

And whatever the difficulties we do make it work somehow. The benefits we reap from this sometimes difficult set-up are that our daughter is being raised in a social environment, with her large extended family which live and work with us. And she has the benefit of both fully present parents raising her, something very few children with more conventional lifestyles can say perhaps. As for me I have every faith that one day our life-work balance will find its equilibrium and I will drink a cup of tea before it goes cold; until then I’ll just keep nursing and frying as moms the world over have done since the beginning of time.

Author: Natalie Revie
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Gadget reviews