I have had many moments in my life where I made a single choice and it profoundly affected the course of my life. In these moments, the choice was between Love or simply to go with Fear. The times I chose not to crumble and to go with fear, I have been rewarded with open doors.
The path leading to my dream started with moments, moments that appear to be fearful. And each time I had to make the choice, between love and fear, I went with the decision to go with strength and love.
Each time I am face to face with those moments, these words will be brought to mind;
Motherhood is my defining moment that presented a path of the yellow brick road towards my dream. Very much like what Dorothy experienced when she followed the Yellow Brick Road in The Wizard of Oz. It has, and still is, a journey of self-discovery, change and growth.
The 1st 6 months of being a new mom was difficult, K and I stayed apart from hb after a melodrama of accusations, frenzied tears and threatened suicide from my MIL, who was emotionally unstable at that time. When the dust settled, hb got her another place to stay, while K and I moved back home. Hb and I knew that we needed to make up for lost time in our marriage, and I struggled with the choice to stay in my full time job in regional marketing or be a SAHM.
The fear that confronted me was the loss of financial independence, which kept me in limbo for another 4 months. Until I finally convinced myself that financial well being is relative. I asked myself, suppose I did reach the financial goal sometime in the future, what would I have for the time in between?
A Companion to Walk Alongside
Having my little boy made me listen to my heart, his presence made me confront some difficult issues and make tough decisions. So I chose to go with love, quitted my full time job to be a SAHM and pursued further education in Early Childhood. I wanted to be a better mother, to learn how to raise my son well in his formative years.
My dream, at that point, was to be a curriculum specialist in a preschool. Or if I had some capital to start a business, to open a preschool of my own.
A year and a half later, the dream to work in a preschool industry included a companion who will walk alongside with me. I met up with Pauline. 4 months later, we founded an Early Childhood Education website and conducted home-learning workshops to train moms to coach their children at home. The first prayer we made together before the first workshop in 2010 included these words, “God, please use us to help other moms.”
We are no saints for sure but that prayer came from purest of our intentions. We hope to use our knowledge in Early Childhood to help moms coach and bond with their kids at home through home-learning. But a year later, the business slowed down as we were bored conducting the same workshop repeatedly.
Crafty Interests
I spent the last 6 months in 2011 to pursue artistic interests. I toyed with the idea of setting up an Etsy shop with my interest in crafting. Myplayschool.net started a new feature on crafting moms, Pauline and I created a video, and wrote posts on the website in the hope that hand-mades will have more awareness with the mom community online. We started up a ZAKKA Mom’s Facebook group to bring together the mom crafting community and organized a private fund raising activity for Children’s Hunger Fund.
The path leading to my crafty dream derailed when hb closed down his business and had to go into employment. The next defining moment came when we sold our home, and I had to look for full time work in the last quarter of 2011 to supplement household income.
I went for many job interviews and believed that getting a full time job was the solution. The interviews proceeded to final stages, but there were no news from any of the jobs after that.
I struggled to cope with the situation and it felt like a total eclipse of my world…
Read on to Part 2 of this post.
