A Day in a Working Mom's Life!

Beep...Beep...the alarm goes off at exactly 5.35 a.m in the morning. You think it is time bomb ticking in your bad dream. But your hand instinctlively silences the alarm clock. By the time you graduate to being a mom, you would have learnt this art of precisely hitting the alarm clock even in your dreams. Unless, of course, your husband decides to change the position of the alarm clock.

But alas, alarm clocks are smart these days, they never give up. Beep it goes again at 5.40 a.m. This time when you are about to hit the alarm again you realise this is no bad dream and in fact you are supposed to get up and send your son to school and get yourself ready for office.

Oh no, no.......you wouldn't have let the alarm clock outsmart you. You are definetely smarter. You know you are supposed to get up at 5.45 a.m. So you have five more minutes to go........you silence the alarm anyway and go back to this five more minutes of 'warm up sleep'. And you have a relaxing sleep for 5 min. All the while you feel good about outsmarting the alarm clock.

When you are almost done cooking breakfast, you wake up your kid who has to leave for school by 7.15 a.m. Now, this requires a bit of people management skills from you. You should wake him up in such a way that he opens his eyes with a smile in his lips. This is a tricky thing especially if you have a younger kid who does not go to school and should not be woken up at this time.

Between packing lunches, feeding kids and sending them off to school, you eat your breakfast with your husband and get ready to go to office. You have a bus to catch too. You are a minute late already and you start making frantic calls to your friends who have already boarded the bus to find out if you have missed the bus. On a lucky day you just manage to get into the bus just before it goes of from your stop.

Office requires a different set of competencies altogether. You must tackle a cranky colleague, lend your shoulder to a crying friend, negotiate with tough boss....list goes on. You can multi-task with ease. Despite the deadline pressure, you manage to finish your work for the day and catch the scheduled evening bus home at 5.30 pm.

On the bus ride back home, you mentally figure out what to prepare for breakfast tomorrow, which uniform your son has to wear and try to remember if you had asked the maid to wash his white uniform and shoes and get it ready. Betweeen overseeing children's homework, dinner and timetables, you find time to exchange office stories with your husband, discuss the next holiday plan (which apparently takes months together to materialise) and catch glimpses of news and soap operas on telelvision.

Before you know, it is time to hit the bed and get a good night's sleep again. Sometimes when I look back with disbelief as to how fast the days are going, I wonder if it is worth doing what I am doing at all.
I had the option of not marrying....but do I regret marrying? no not at all.
I had the option of not having kids......but do I ever regret having kids.........never.
I had the option of working after marriage and kids......but do I regret working...........a big NO.

So how do I describe my normal day? chaotic...may be, hectic.. may be, crazy.....? hmmm let me think about it......."Full of Challenges" would be a more suitable phrase :-)