by Fiona Biedermann (Australia) | Oct 7, 2013 | 2013, Being Thankful, Communication, Economy, Family, Health, Husband, Inspirational, Life Balance, Life Lesson, Motherhood, Oceania, Older Children, Relationships, Stress, Teenagers, Working Mother, World Motherhood
I try to do the right thing most of the time by setting a good example for my teenage / adult children. However, like most mothers, sometimes I’m torn between doing what feels right for me and doing what might be right for the family. I guess that’s because sometimes the two are in direct conflict, or often they seem to be.
On the 9th of August, I walked out of a well-paying job with a company that I’d been with for 12 years. I gave my requisite four weeks’ notice with no job to go to, no immediate plans and only a belief that I had to take the leap because I believed I deserved better.
It was perhaps a little selfish financially in terms of my family, and my husband was totally against me resigning without something else to go to. He had legitimate reasons given that the job market in Australia is considerably flat at the moment, as I’m sure it is in many countries.
I was also worried whether I was setting the right example for my children by just walking away from a good job, I was basically throwing in the towel because things had gotten too hard. My husband is also not a man who likes change, which made my decision even more difficult.
The thing is for many months I felt like I’d been dying inside, I felt like my job was sucking the life out of me. I was working in a company which was under new management and was undergoing massive change and restructuring. The biggest problem was that the importance of change management and communication had gone out the window, things that I hold in very high regard.
Morale had dropped, staff were miserable and were leaving in larger than normal numbers. In the end I decided that my family deserved more than my misery and unhappiness and more than that, so did I. Home was not a happy place for those first few weeks after I resigned, but it hadn’t been for months anyway.
Seven weeks of job searching and plenty of soul searching and I finally have landed the job of my dreams. There are many who voiced their concern and worried about the mistake I was making, those loved ones are now eating their words and telling me that I did the right thing and how brave I was to do it.
My brother recently sent me the following quote, which ironically also arrived in my letterbox in the form of business coaching advertising material in the same week I got the job offer.
“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got” Henry Ford
As scary and as uncertain as my decision was, I fully believed in myself and I took the leap. I knew what I wanted and I was determined to find it, plus I was totally prepared to accept whatever might be.
I knew that I may have to take an interim job in the meantime, if that’s what it took to find the right job and still keep my family on track financially.
My decision could have gone pear shaped and turned out badly, but I’m a big believer that sometimes you just have to believe.
The biggest lesson I’ve taught my children is that you have to believe in yourself, fight for what you are worth and be brave enough to follow your dreams. I’m doing exactly that, I’ve landed my dream job with the financial and personal rewards I know I’m worthy of. I’m now excited about going back to work.
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve taught your children and do you back up your words with action?
This is an original World Moms Blog post by Fiona from Inspiration to Dream of Adelaide, South Australia. Fiona can be found writing or reading in every spare moment that isn’t filled up with work and her family.
Image credit Cliparto ID 3130264 – This image is used in compliance with the terms of the Cliparto Standard Royalty Free License Agreement.
Fiona at Inspiration to Dream is a married mother of three amazing and talented MM’s (mere males, as she lovingly calls them) aged 13, 16 and 22, and she became a nana in 2011!
She believes she’s more daunted by becoming a nana than she was about becoming a mother! This Aussie mother figures she will also be a relatively young nana and she’s not sure that she’s really ready for it yet, but then she asks, are we ever really ready for it? Motherhood or Nanahood. (Not really sure that’s a word, but she says it works for her.)
Fiona likes to think of herself as honest and forthright and is generally not afraid to speak her mind, which she says sometimes gets her into trouble, but hey, it makes life interesting. She’s hoping to share with you her trials of being a working mother to three adventurous boys, the wife of a Mr Fix-it who is definitely a man’s man and not one of the ‘sensitive new age guy’ generation, as well as, providing her thoughts and views on making her way in the world.
Since discovering that she’s the first blogger joining the team from Australia, she also plans to provide a little insight into the ‘Aussie’ life, as well. Additionally, Fiona can be found on her personal blog at Inspiration to Dream.
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by Sophie Walker (UK) | Sep 18, 2013 | 2013, Being Thankful, Competition, Health, Inspirational, International, Life Lesson, Sophie Walker, Sports, UK, Uncategorized, Womanhood, Women's Rights, World Events, World Motherhood
Hurrah for Diana Nyad!
In a few short weeks she has overturned long-established ideas about age and ability and strength and given us all a reason to keep swimming.
Nyad, in case you’ve been looking the other way, is the 64-year-old woman who recently became the first person to swim the 110 miles from Cuba to the U.S. without a shark cage, taking almost 53 hours.
This would be a marathon effort at any time, but when you consider that it was her fifth attempt over some forty years; that she had to wear a mask to protect her from jellyfish stings; that she took in so much sea water it caused her to vomit constantly for almost all of that 53 hours; that she arrived finally with face and lips swollen from sun and sea water – well, then her achievement, and her insistence not to be deflected from her aim, would seem to reflect almost superhuman levels of endurance.
The word endurance does not typically bring to mind 64-year-old women. In our culture, it is often used to describe young men – runners, rowers and cyclists at the peak of their profession or pushy capitalists doing extreme sports to fill that adrenaline void when Wall Street is closed.
Google “Endurance” and up come pictures of young, lean, tanned male muscle in a celebration of machismo as traditional now as images of mustachioed weight-lifters once were in Victorian times.
The same web search also shows sepia-tinged photographs of the tall-masted Victorian adventure ship christened Endurance, on which British polar explorer Ernest Shackleton set off for Antarctic expeditions in the last century. (Twenty-first century sailor Ellen MacArthur’s solo circumnavigation of the globe strangely does not feature.)
Nonetheless, I think many women, hearing Nyad’s achievement, will have given a little nod, and maybe a small smile, of understanding. Many more will never hear of her, yet understand without discussion the will that kept Nyad going.
Though they may not be sports fanatics, or travelers with a yen for the toughest destinations, many women set their own personal standards of endurance in their day-to-day existences.
Their marathon may consist of walking for hours to find water and food in conditions of extreme poverty and hunger. Their endurance training may consist of watching their children die for the lack of a cheap vaccine. Their 53-hour record may be for the time worked within a dangerous and miserably uncomfortable factory, to earn a tiny amount with which a family can just about be supported.
For the luckier ones, endurance may just mean a bleak commute, juggling the needs of employers and families and ever-mounting bills. It may mean keeping smiling when a child is in pain, it may mean getting up for the fifth time in one night to attend to small, fevered offspring while knowing that big important morning meeting is looming. It may mean getting over the disappointment when that male colleague got that promotion. It may mean an ability to keep walking with head high when the cat calls keep coming.
Endurance can mean many things. Diana Nyad has reminded us that it is not an exclusively male domain. Already crowds of cynics are assembling to cast doubt on Nyad’s achievement, wondering how an old woman could have completed that swim in that time. Clearly her next endurance test lies just ahead.
But whatever the outcome, she has broadened the parameters of what the will to keep going looks like. And that is no small feat, either.
This is an original post to World Moms Blog from our writer in the UK and mother of four, Sophie.
The image used in this post is credited to Alan Cleaver. It holds a Flickr Creative Commons attribution license.
Writer, mother, runner: Sophie works for an international news agency and has written about economics, politics, trade, war, diplomacy and finance from datelines as diverse as Paris, Washington, Hong Kong, Kabul, Baghdad and Islamabad. She now lives in London with her husband, two daughters and two step-sons.
Sophie's elder daughter Grace was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome several years ago. Grace is a bright, artistic girl who nonetheless struggles to fit into a world she often finds hard to understand. Sophie and Grace have come across great kindness but more often been shocked by how little people know and understand about autism and by how difficult it is to get Grace the help she needs.
Sophie writes about Grace’s daily challenges, and those of the grueling training regimes she sets herself to run long-distance events in order to raise awareness and funds for Britain’s National Autistic Society so that Grace and children like her can blossom. Her book "Grace Under Pressure: Going The Distance as an Asperger's Mum" was published by Little, Brown (Piatkus) in 2012. Her blog is called Grace Under Pressure.
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by World Moms Blog | Sep 16, 2013 | 2013, Adoption, Adoptive Parents, Africa, Being Thankful, Cultural Differences, Discipline, Ethiopia, Family, Guest Post, Health, Humanity, Humor, Inspirational, International, Kids, Motherhood, Multicultural, Netherlands, Parenting, Special Needs, Uncategorized, World Motherhood, Younger Children
Sometimes I’m really weary of explaining. To grannies in the supermarket. To teenage girls at the playground. To fellow mums at school.
My daughter is clearly adopted, yes. She’s from Ethiopia, yes. She’s had a rough start, yes. She’s lost part of her eyesight, yes. And she’s got some countless more issues, yes.
But she’s still a four year old. And I’m her mother. I’m raising her my way. Just like I’m raising her big brother, who is blond and looks a bit too much like me.
The big difference between raising my daughter and raising my son, is that people seem to feel a kind of responsibility towards my girl. It feels like adopted children are in a way public.
I do understand how we stand out, in our not so worldly little town. We are getting used to the extra attention she brings with her, although I admit I have been thinking to teach her to growl when a stranger touches her hair and skin unasked.
We were prepared for all this. We knew we were going to feel like we have arrows flashing around our heads when taking her out. Now that she’s been with us for two years, we’ve all grown a thick skin, filled with humor. We have a series of catchy replies to go with all the ridiculous questions. The next one who dares to ask me what we feed her, will be answered ‘grass’, without even a blink.
But I still can’t really cope with all the unwanted ‘advice’ we get about raising her. When my son was little, I never ever had some stranger giving him candy or cookies. I never had to explain myself in the supermarket when I refused to let him take everything he wished for. And I certainly didn’t have to listen to people telling me how neglectful I was for letting him cry out a tantrum.
With my daughter, I do have those encounters. This one time in the supermarket, I was truly abashed. I had just taken away some nasty sugar bombs from my daughter’s hands and put them back, much against the little miss’s wishes. An elderly lady came over, took the candy and handed them over to my girl again. I was confused, believing she misunderstood. So I explained I didn’t want to buy that rubbish for her. At that moment she cursed me for being so horrible towards that poor little black girl that has been hungry all her life. She put the candy in my cart, ordered me to buy it, and took off while nodding her head.
At such encounters – yes, plural – I have the urge to scream.
For one thing. She’s NOT a poor little girl. She’s in most ways an ordinary four year old preschooler. She can throw the worst tantrums I ever witnessed, just because I can’t peel an apple while driving my car or because I can’t make the Easter bunny magically appear in August. The last one was about having only six colors of nail polish to choose from. Poor girl indeed.
But most importantly, I’M THE ONE raising that ‘poor little girl’. Of course we are aware of her issues, mostly the ones regarding attachment and anxieties. We try to give her everything she needs, truck loads of patience and care which unfortunately aren’t always replenished in time. But she doesn’t need everything she wants. Just like any other child doesn’t. Unless you plan to end up with a spoiled brat that demands a yellow sports car at age eighteen.
Spoiling her will not make right all the things she missed out in the first two years of her life. Maybe that sounds harsh and loveless, but I can assure you it isn’t meant that way. I cry with her when she mourns her lost heritage, when she is homesick. I’ve swallowed away rivers of tears all those times I had to explain her history to medical doctors and hospital professors.
But I can’t raise my daughter based on pity alone.
This is a first-time, guest contribution to World Moms Blog from our friend and mother of The Penguin and the Panther in Belgium, Katinka. Her Flemish blog is in transition over to an English-only blog. Stay posted to World Moms Blog for more from Katinka.
The photograph of the author’s daughter used in this post is credited to the author.
World Moms Blog is an award winning website which writes from over 30 countries on the topics of motherhood, culture, human rights and social good. Over 70 international contributors share their stories from around the globe, bonded by the common thread of motherhood and wanting a better world for their children.
World Moms Blog was listed by Forbes Woman as one of the "Best 100 Websites for Women 2012 & 2013" and also called a "must read" by the NY Times Motherlode in 2013. Our Senior Editor in India, Purnima Ramakrishnan, was awarded the BlogHer International Activist Award in 2013.
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by Frelle (USA) | Sep 13, 2013 | Friendship, Health, Home, Homeschooling, Kids, Motherhood, Parenting, Working Mother, World Motherhood
The truth about motherhood is that no one prepared me for this.
No, really.
Have you ever actually admitted that, out loud? That you feel lost, unprepared, five years behind where you “should” be in raising your children?
I just did. (more…)
Jenna grew up in the midwestern US, active in music and her church community from a young age. She developed a love of all things literary thanks to her mom, and a love of all things science fiction thanks to her dad. She left the midwest in her early twenties and has lived in the south ever since.
On her blog, she tries to write words that make a difference to people. Long before she attended college to major in Special Ed and Psychology, she became an advocate for special needs and invisible disabilities. She's always been perceptive of and encouraging to those who struggle to fit in. Having been through several dark seasons in her own life, she's found empowerment in being transparent and vulnerable about her emotions, making deep and lasting friendships, and finding courage to write from her heart. Her biggest wish is to raise her kids to be compassionate people who love well.
She's been online since 1993, with a total of 19 years of social media exposure. Having friends she doesn't know in real life has been normal for her since her junior year in college, and she's grateful every day for the ways technology helps her stay in touch with friends from all over the world.
Jenna lives in a suburb of Raleigh, North Carolina, and is a freelance writer and a stay at home single mom to 3 girls and a boy. She blogs at MadeMoreBeautiful.comMadeMoreBeautiful.com.
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by Ewa Samples | Sep 6, 2013 | Babies, Being Thankful, Cancer, Childhood, Family, Health, Hospital, Kids, Life Lesson, Loss of Child, Motherhood, Parenting, Polish Mom Photographer, Tragedy, Working Mother, World Motherhood
I am a wife.
I am a daughter.
I am a sister.
I am an aunt.
I am a friend.
I am a blogger.
I am a photographer.
I am a glass half empty.
I am Polish,
I am an expat,
I am a coffee lover,
and I am more than that…
I might have been a globetrotter. I am nothing like, for example, our contributor The Third Eye Mom, but I wish I was, if I only could. I don’t deserve to be called globetrotter but deep in my heart I know I would like to live like one. (more…)
Ewa was born, and raised in Poland. She graduated University with a master's degree in Mass-Media Education. This daring mom hitchhiked from Berlin, Germany through Switzerland and France to Barcelona, Spain and back again!
She left Poland to become an Au Pair in California and looked after twins of gay parents for almost 2 years. There, she met her future husband through Couch Surfing, an international non-profit network that connects travelers with locals.
Today she enjoys her life one picture at a time. She runs a photography business in sunny California and document her daughters life one picture at a time.
You can find this artistic mom on her blog, Ewa Samples Photography, on Twitter @EwaSamples or on Facebook!
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by Mamma Simona (South Africa) | Sep 4, 2013 | 2013, Death and Dying, Family, Grandparent, Health, Hospital, Parent Care, South Africa, Spirituality, Uncategorized, World Motherhood
Some religions have followers who refuse to accept blood transfusions, and other religions actually prohibit medical intervention of any kind. They believe that prayer alone will save those who are ill or injured, and if it doesn’t that it was “God’s will” for that person to die.
Those of us who don’t belong to those religions tend to shake our heads and feel that they are being unreasonable. After all, if medicine and/or medical knowledge is available, why should we allow our loved ones to suffer or even die without making use of it? Some would even argue that “God’s will” has allowed us to create the life-saving hospitals and medicines in the first place. Surely, if we love someone we will do everything in our power to save them, won’t we? We pray, but we also avail ourselves of doctors and hospitals.
The question we must then ask ourselves when someone we love is suffering is: At what point are we just prolonging the inevitable demise of a person? Is it “living” if we are not aware of what is going on around us and can’t breathe by ourselves, or talk, or feed ourselves and have no control at all over our bodies? How much is too much? (more…)
Mamma Simona was born in Rome (Italy) but has lived in Cape Town (South Africa) since she was 8 years old. She studied French at school but says she’s forgotten most of it! She speaks Italian, English and Afrikaans. Even though Italian is the first language she learned, she considers English her "home" language as it's the language she's most comfortable in. She is happily married and the proud mother of 2 terrific teenagers! She also shares her home with 2 cats and 2 dogs ... all rescues.
Mamma Simona has worked in such diverse fields as Childcare, Tourism, Library Services, Optometry, Sales and Admin! (With stints of SAHM in-between). She’s really looking forward to the day she can give up her current Admin job and devote herself entirely to blogging and (eventually) being a full-time grandmother!
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