#Mumswithoutbabysitters: Rakshita Dwivedi, ListYourGrocery
“No, no. Don’t do this,” she said, while he throwing darts at the back of her chair.
“Shhh, I am on a call. Please don’t interrupt,” she said, almost pleading--and as softly as she could. “Whom are you talking to?,” he shouted, to let even the neighbors know about his curiosity.
“Can you sit quietly for 15 minutes and let me finish this work, so we can go for a bike ride,” she tried to strike a deal. After two minutes, he asked, “Are 15 minutes over?” She ignored him. A minute later, he tried again: “When will 15 minutes get over?” She kept working. Thirty seconds later, he took her face and turned it towards him saying, “Mumma, I think it’s time for the bike ride.”
Don’t worry. As a mum would say, we are making memories, and this one is from a flexi-mom’s diary. ?
I love the themes SHEROES comes up with, and this one is definitely close to me heart. Kudos to team SHEROES for coming up with #Mumswithoutbabysitters--I am one.
In my journey of working flexi with plugHR for almost four years now, I never needed an in-house babysitter, and that’s all because our founder, Prashant Bhaskar, understands how it is to have kids between conference calls. Now, I do send my five-year-old to daycare for a few hours, only because my job also needs client visits on some days, and I don’t want my commute to hamper his buddy-time and school schedule.
However, on most days when we both are home, it starts with a planned agenda and we mostly try to stick to it. Now, this doesn’t mean he stops asking me questions during my Skype meetings, or that his other needs go unattended. There have been days when I had to explain to him the difference between a client and his grandmom, and why he can’t ask my client for a ‘red horse’. But, the good part is, now he knows that I work from home and I need to finish my work just like he has to complete his ‘homework’.
It is not always the same, for there are days when he would want to play hide and seek under my computer table and quiz me on my general knowledge about dinosaurs, and I would just have to practice yoga to keep myself cool. Yes, after all I am human with finite patience. ?
Amidst all this, the beauty lies in not missing out on being a mom, nor letting myself lose my personal identity, the one I dreamt of. I feel lucky to have my grey cells actively engaged professionally, along with the curious little five-year-old boy, who has endless stories to narrate while I try to ‘blog’ mine.
So in-spite of my ‘bad hair’ days, we both ease up with a bedtime story and a warm cuddle, and that is what makes me a happy working mom. Needless to say, my husband makes sure he dons the ‘daddy-hat’ the moment he steps in, and gives me my ‘me-time’ of the day. The credit for my stepping into a world of easy and healthy cooking via RecipeDabba, my food blog, goes to both of them. I couldn’t have done as much had it not been for my two boys--the father and the son.?
Being a hands-on mom was a decision I took without letting my dreams go unfulfilled. It is not a choice between two paths, but a path of coexistence, and that’s where I am and I will continue to be here.
Rakshita Dwivedi is a HR professional with 10 years of experience. She is currently working as Product Manager at plugHR. She is also the founder of ListYourGrocery and RecipeDabba.
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