The essay that got me in....

CAREER AND/OR FAMILY
The true choice that haunts every urban woman of today, including me is this, Career or family? Of course, I am not talking about the cool single woman here. It sounds simple enough to those who have solved the puzzle successfully but I believe, we, urban women, can be categorized into 3 groups:
The career woman
The family woman
The 'sitting on the fence' woman
The career woman is the one who gets back to work the day her maternity leave ends. Of course she has her moments when she feels like throwing in the towel, the day the maid decides to take off. But overall the ambition drives her and with some misses and a lot of stress she manages to steer on ahead.
The family woman is the most contented lot, according to me. She has been raised with the idea that one day she will be married and she will have a family who she will have to tend to and look after. Of course she has her own set of stress but nowhere is there confusion or the thought to 'throw in the towel'. She needs her occasional 'me' time and she is rejuvenated.
Then comes the third, which sadly I am a part of. According to me, majority of us fall into this category. We have tasted what it is to be home with the little one and tasted how it is to have the financial independence. There is the joy of the 'first time he/she did this'. But then there is also the constant craving to do something and to achieve something. There is a lot of restlessness and very little mind rest.
This is the difficult situation I have had to deal with for sometime, the choice I have had to make. The first 4 years of motherhood was a conscious decision to stay clear of confusion. But who can suppress long standing ambitions for long? It had to rear its head sometime and so it did. I decided I had to go back to a job.
The first issue here was child care. Who was going to take care of my son in my absence? I interviewed a few nannies. It took sometime to find the one I was most comfortable with. The next step was to train her. I had given myself a couple of months to start work so that I could be sure of her capability. I was very proud of all the planning I was doing.
Then finally I started work. It was all great for sometime. I started interacting with people in my field after a long time. I was talking about things which didn't comprise of the words 'diapers', 'playtime' ,'nap time' ,etc. But like I said before, once you taste what it is like to stay home with your little one, it is very difficult to let someone else do that while you sit at your desk. All the planning could not save me from my own guilt. So I quit and was back home again.
The grass always being greener on the other side, within no time the previous restlessness set in again. I read an article in the BBC news columns which said that 'According to a survey, working women with children are significantly happier than stay-at-home mothers, regardless of how many hours they work. ' I truly endorse this.
This time though, before the job hunting process, I decided that a full time technical job was not going to be a solution for me. It was not going to give me the work-life balance I needed. So the process involved in finding a job had to be different. I spoke to recruiters, got a list of job sites which posted freelancing, part-time and telecommuting work. I read a lot of articles including the “6 Tips for On-Ramp Moms Returning to Work” (Collamer,1).This was a very interesting site and provided the information I needed. Initially the results of my searches were disheartening. But slowly and steadily I realized that these terms were still at a very latent stage in India. Of course there would be articles published, saying that companies were looking for women who wanted to rejoin workforce after a long hiatus. But I could not see any real proof of this. I came across “Luring women back into work” where apparently a Swiss bank had come up with a pretty clever way of getting women back into the workforce “(2). Why could not companies based in India be coming up with ideas like this? All I was seeing were postings where it would clearly say 'Work from Home-- Degree not required'. How can I, a Masters graduate, put it all aside and apply for a post like this?
Then out of the blue I stumbled upon "http://www.academia-research.com". I read it and then re-read it. I looked for possible loopholes since by this time all my hopes of finding the perfect job,were lost. But there were none. I told myself not to get too excited. I just went ahead and applied. How liberated I felt! Amidst all the inner restlessness I might have just found my own Right Job.
Thats whats life is all about isn't it? First we grow up looking for The Best Friend. When that search ends, we start looking for Mr. Right. Then before we know it, its all there but we have started to look out for the Right Job. Well, I hope this is it.