The thing that I never wanted, chose me. Sticking with it was the best decision I ever made.
“A stay-at-home mom is a working mom. Being a stay-at-home mom is a job.”
Cobie Smulders
Looking back to the time before I’d ever dreamed about being a fitness coach, I was a working mom, a photographer, and a fitness enthusiast.
Now, I have to go way back for you to understand why I never wanted to be a stay-at-home mom.
You see, at the age of 14, I had my first job as a store clerk in my beautiful homeland of Trinidad & Tobago. I liked working not because I had a choice but because I had to survive, we were dirt poor to the point that some days we couldn’t go to school because the food was scarce. There were seven mouths to feed every day in my house fast forward. As the years went by I knew nothing but how to work. I became a hustler of sorts after realizing that I could use my job computer to type up paperwork for some friends and charge them a fee. I even made business cards that said “Computer Services by Joy”. Haha!
Those were good times….
I was a workaholic in a sense and never saw life as a stay-at-home mom to be very fulfilling.
Besides I didn’t have my personal life planned out like that, you know marriage, kids, etc. I was a typical tomboy in so many ways - shooting hoops with the fellas, hanging on the block on Friday nights.
Years later when I became a Mom to my first son Jo, it totally changed my life. I still continued to work and do the Mom thing with my now husband who was my boyfriend at the time.
In May of 2010, I left for work around 1 pm at an airport in the northeast to do my 8-hour shift. We had hired a neighbor’s daughter to pick up our son from school and help with homework until one of us got home.
That day I got the call from the sitter saying she wouldn’t be able to pick up my son anymore. I didn’t panic, but there was a somberness in my heart and I knew what I had to do.
I ran to my supervisor and told her that I had to leave as soon as possible and I won’t be back.
That was the last time I worked as an employee for any company.
It was a choice made in the moment, as I didn’t have the luxury of planning this thing out.
Being a young wife and Mom in a new country (USA), building a life, and trying to figure it out as the days go by was hard enough.
In the end, this thing I wasn’t planning for chose me and although it was unsettling at the time, it gave me time to focus my efforts on building a lucrative business doing what I absolutely love to do.. Are you a stay at home mom, if so how are you doing with your health and fitness journey?
