I’ll say it up front: when you are a working mother, one of the hardest tasks you’ll ever have is balancing the needs of your family with the needs of your career. What makes it hard for me is that I’ve always been driven to be at the top of my game – both as a mother and as an employee. But events of last fall took me off guard and I began to question every part of my life; and it came down to digging deep and asking myself: am I doing what I want to do with my life or am I doing what I think is expected of me?
For a change, I was honest with myself and took a step back: in trying to earn a living, I had sacrificed too much – and my priorities seemed more upside down. I decided it was time to get my priorities in line with what I wanted out of life, not what others expected my priorities to be. So, I took the months of October through December off from work, and focused on my family, my home, and my health. My house was clean once again, my hysterectomy was done, and my children discovered the joys of mom picking them up from school each day.
At the beginning of the year, there came an “offer I couldn’t refuse” disguised as a lucrative consulting position with a small catalog company. I loved getting back in the game, and once again became a ruthless career woman, driven to be the best. My clean house was only accomplished when I hired a cleaning lady, and the kids enjoyed the company of two different nannies. And on March 27th, it was time for a decision: keep the consulting position (which I loved) even though it meant eleven hour days or move on to something different? In taking stock of what had become of my family and my mental state, I decided it was time to make a change.
Then came a question I’d asked myself since I was five: what DID I want to be when I grew up? I suddenly remembered a quote I had come across the last year, “What I wanted to be when I grew up was IN CHARGE”. And that’s what I wanted. I wanted to lavish time on my family, but I also wanted to do something that made me feel useful. I wanted to march to the beat of my own drummer, rather than to the orchestrated arrangement of another. What kind of job would give the kind of options I wanted? I realized the only one who could give me the kind of schedule I wanted was, well, me.
So, that is how Administrative-Pro was born. It’s been a little slow at first, but I’m beginning to see signs of growth in my infant company. Don’t get me wrong, it hasn’t been a bed of roses – unless you remember that there are lots of thorns there amongst the pretty petals.