Being a housewife 😃

A housewife is a relatively new acquired title for me. :) It has been more than a quarter since I quit my job and have been at my home full time. And I mean it when I say full time - no vacations, no outings, no partying. My health kept me home bound all this while. In my new year post, I had mentioned that this transition from working to staying at home was one of the scariest things I have ever done. It had only been a month back then but I was coping well.

I was quite sure I would lose my mind in some time if I am constantly at home but that didn't happen. In fact for the large part, I have been busy and that was the reason I was not able to complete a couple of my draft posts and publish them. Talking about not publishing for more than 2 months, I want to thank all my dear readers who were still nice enough to drop by and make my blog and me feel special and cared for. Also, please bear with me about the length of this post :)

Coming back to how I am dealing with the transition, there are certain things on top of mind about the changes and my mindset about these changes that I want to share with you:

• My transition was self-imposed so I know that it is my decision completely. I think that is one of the major reasons why I am able to live with it.
• For the first one month, I was convinced that I should find some work from home kind of assignment. In that period, I was still convinced that working is better than staying at home. The paradigm shift happened sometime in the second month and was an important step in the transition.
• Although I was at home, I still had a couple of major life changes happening which kept me preoccupied. Moving from KL to my home country was one of the bigger changes.
• So it has been three months and I am not even thinking about finding a job or any kind of work now. I am now investing more time on me, my hobbies and my family.
• I was convinced that sitting at home is going to be boring but trust me it isn't. There's so much more to life than the corporate job. In fact, I think I value my and family time more than ever now and will want a lot of flexibility on my corporate job if and when I join back.
• I was also convinced that I am going to lose my sense of self-worth if I am not working in a corporate job. Contrary to that, my sense of self-worth has now expanded. I am not just the person leading a team of people in an IT firm. I have realized that my job was just one of my capabilities. Just the same, being a daughter, daughter in law, sister, wife and friend are all parts of me but none of these define me completely.
• Meditation and music are two key things that keep me going. Also, I might take similar time off for traveling somewhere down the line,
• Since we went from being a double income household to being a single income household, the manager in me turned to money management. Never in my life have I been so efficient with finances. I am quite proud of myself for this ;)
• I am still thinking about either joining an NGO or looking for a job by the end of this year when I am done with the self-imposed break. However end of this year is still a lot of months away so I will keep you posted on how that goes.

I figured that there would be a lot of women like me contemplating this scary transition and sharing my experience might help them move closer to the right decision for them. Your reasons and path might not be the same as me but trust me you are much more than your corporate title. The only piece of advice I would like to leave you with is to make sure that it is your own decision to cross the bridge. I think living with someone else's decision is like having a safety net so that when things go wrong, you can blame the other person for it.

P.S. I considered using the trendy label of 'Homemaker' while writing this post but as you see I didn't. The reasons are simple: I live in a home that my mom-in-law immaculately created spending all her life. All the chores in our house are taken care of by hired house help. My father-in-law manages the house in general. And I have a husband who is an equal partner in everything I do. The contribution I have to home-making is limited to cooking some of the meals that our family enjoys and enjoying life with the family while being at home. I consider myself lucky that my life doesn't look like this at all.

So I couldn't really justify the 'Maker' in homemaker and preferred using the traditional label of 'Housewife' for myself:)

As I said at the start of this post that my title is newly acquired, so I would love to hear from women who made this transition and have lived with it for much longer. Are there any challenges you faced in the long term or do you have some special advice for me?