Motherhood is a funny period of your life – especially if you are a stay at home Mom with no plans of returning to work anytime soon. It’s like those years for you are full of fun and frolics with a title given to yourself so that you can justify the job that you do. Those who go back to work will never know the true amount of time and effort that goes into raising kids, especially if they are putting them into daycare and having somebody else do the hard work for them. That’s not to say that daycare isn’t a good option and those going back to work aren’t doing the right thing; different options work for different people, and it may be that they had no other choice. But for those who have chosen to stay at home with their children and raise them to school age, getting back into the world of work can be hard.
So what about those skills that we pick up during motherhood? It may just seem like everyday life to you, but along the way you are doing some amazing things which can be transferable to jobs and careers when the time is right.
Erratic Hours
Early starts and late night finishes? You’ve got those covered. Children have no mercy when demanding that you start your day as early as possible, and it’s something that you just have to suck up and go along with. While they get to nap during the day, you probably have other jobs to be getting on with just so you know that things will keep ticking over; maybe the dinner needs making, laundry needs doing, the lounge needs tidying. The list is endless. Then your little one can keep going back through until the early hours. Yet mothers (and fathers, let’s not forget them) still function. We still keep going. We are resilient and any lapse in our durability can be instantly picked upon and tested by those we are caring for – so we don’t show such weaknesses. This would be great in demanding office job where you need to stay until the work is finished and completed.
Creativity
Children need constant entertainment when you haven’t got something entertaining them for you. You can slip into their imagination and play games easily, and know that dragons can live both under the sofa and up on the ceiling. Things like toilet rolls can have up to a hundred uses if not more, and you know how to utilize anything to its best advantage. You may find that when you do back into the world of work, you are able to mindmap easily, going off on all sorts of tangents whether relevant or not. You can see how all sorts of things relate to the subject or topic at hand, and know how to get there easily. To be honest, it may seem like nothing in comparison to trying to make a plastic bottle into an underwater sea theme for your child’s school project.
Compassion
Your empathy and understanding will have dramatically risen from the first breath that your child took. It’s like you see the world through a completely different, new set of eyes when you become a parent. The pragmatics of every situation are taken into account, and you know that talking in a calm, cool and collected manner is the key to achieving everything you need to that day; but you also know when to implement different voices that you have practiced for different scenarios (the angry voice and stern look combo are something to be marvelled at). You could look at social work jobs if you are interested in taking your caring nature further and using your mothering skills in a position of paid work. There is such demand for those who know what it’s like to manage children of all ages, but even if you’re only experienced with toddlers and babies at the moment, those skills will only grow as your children do.
Bargaining and Reasoning
You want to know what it’s like bartering for a multi-million pound contract? Try getting your toddler to eat their vegetables. The bargaining tactics that you use and the reasoning behind it are something to behold. You know which avenues to go down, which routes to take in order to increase the maximum investment in your work. You know what things work, what things don’t work and more frustratingly, the things that shouldn’t work that do and the things that don’t work that really should.
More and more women aren’t returning to work after their maternity leave has ended. They face challenges when they return due to lack of support and communication from the company that they have left, so try and keep in touch often with them if you are looking to go back. If you are taking time away to go start up in another job in the future, or are worried about what you can do to ‘prove’ your time away, remember that you have a amassed a bunch of transferable skills that no paid management or learning course will teach you. You have experienced situations that would never, ever be put upon you in a line of work (else, quite frankly, you are perfectly within your rights to sue) and have gone above and beyond to prove yourself to somebody who can’t even begin to appreciate it. You have created life! Human life! Start acting like you’ve done the amazing thing that you have! It’ll only be their loss. More companies need to start realizing the brilliant jobs that we are already doing and they’d be lucky to have us. Go in and prove them all wrong.
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