It helped her come to a realisation.
Rasha Rushdy has been a stay-at-home mum for more than three years.
But late last month, she got an email from a recruitment company that put her on a “trip to a parallel universe in which I wasn’t one”, and it left her reeling.
The mum-of-two, who blogs under the name The Tuna Chronicles, explained that she had been sent out a salary guide which included rough ranges of likely salaries in her line of work.
She wrote:
“Out of curiosity, I scrolled through it. My eyes widened incredulously at the numbers in front of me – what I could have been making if I hadn’t become a stay-at-home mom.
“My mind started racing down that path a little further: the title I could have held by now; the places I could have travelled to with my job and the experience I could have gained.
“And then, almost simultaneously, the “I wouldn’t haves” came hammering down, one after the other.
“If I existed in that parallel universe, the universe in which I am not their mother, I wouldn’t have half-moons quite this puffy under my eyes.
“I wouldn’t have those scars, or those irreversible, yet hard-to-exactly-identify changes in my body.
“I wouldn’t have that gap in my resume, on which, although it is the greatest and most important work I have done, society has yet to place the right value.
“I wouldn’t have the worries and anxieties that I do about re-entering the workforce – have I forgotten everything? Has my brain turned into mush? How will I ever balance it all?
“I wouldn’t have any of that.”
But she quickly also realised that if the alternative universe were true, she wouldn’t have her two kids.
She continued:
“I wouldn’t have them. Them. The ones I’m responsible for raising, nurturing, and loving.
“The ones who test my patience in a way I never could have imagined. The ones who have turned a mirror inwards and forced me to grow, just when I thought I was already a grown-up and had it all together.
“I wouldn’t have learned what limitless really means. You think you love them, and then another day passes, and the well of your love burrows further into the rich earth of your heart.
“You think you can’t anymore, and another terrible, sleepless night passes, and somehow, you can, again.
“You think you couldn’t ask for one more ounce of joy, and then you watch them grow into their future selves, you get a flickering preview into the depths of their characters, and you know, there is no limit to this.
“I will take those trips down memory lane, and those trips to the land of Could and Would Haves, but my children have not limited me.
“Giving up my former career, for now, for them, has not limited me. It’s changed things, sure, and it’ll influence the curves and bumps in my path going forward.
“But I’ll take it – every last little bit – because there is no way I’m giving up what their existence has given me.”
Featured image via The Tuna Chronicles • by Rasha Rushdy/Facebook.
