After 12 years as a stay-at-home parent, my divorce forced a reckoning: I had to learn how to support myself and rebuild a professional life from scratch. I had become pregnant with my first child in my early 20s before I’d established a full-time, steady career, and after years out of traditional paid work, I struggled to see the value in what I had done. Questions about what I “do for a living” began to feel haunting.
Before, my days were structured around the rhythms of the household and the endless invisible labor that made life feel seamless for everyone else. Now, I have my three kids — a teen, a tween, and a preschooler — half-time, and the precarious balancing act during this life transition is exhausting.
The mosaic career I’ve been able to piece together is a patchwork of projects, day job shifts, and side hustles. I write and edit essays in the spaces between hockey practices and dance rehearsals, research podcast guests from the laundromat at 9 p.m., and chase creative ideas that might grow into income streams as I try to fall asleep, furiously typing into my notes app, hoping none of my kids wake up in the middle of the night vomiting.
This time period has reframed how I think about work
And I’m far from alone. Across the US, millions of workers are piecing together multiple income streams, whether through gig work, freelancing, or side projects, to make ends meet and pursue meaningful work on their own terms. Between 25% and 43% of US workers have taken on some form of gig or nonstandard work. And about one in 10 people rely on freelancing, temporary, or contract work as their main source of income.
Knowing so many others are navigating work this way helped me reframe my own interrupted career ambitions. Every day, I make an effort to shift my perspective and view a nontraditional trajectory not as a setback, but as part of a larger shift in how people, especially mothers, manage work, ambition, and income.
Somewhere in the midst of this rethinking, I came across Neha Ruch’s book, “The Power Pause,” which helped me find the words for what I’d been feeling: time spent outside the workforce doesn’t silence ambition, it just changes its rhythm. Still, reclaiming my professional identity and laying the foundation for financial independence meant facing another truth: the work I’d done as a stay-at-home parent had been largely invisible and undervalued.
I started reaching out to other moms who had made the transition from staying at home to working outside the home, asking how they thought about their time at home in hindsight and what strategies had helped them balance their careers and families. I read books, watched Instagram Reels, joined online communities, and listened to podcasts. In the end, shifting how I thought about work meant seeing my own experience as a resource, not a liability, in the life I was building.
I’m also rethinking what success looks like
This untangling and restructuring process in my late 30s hasn’t been tidy. Most days, I feel a mix of doubt, exhaustion, and guilt. But the work feels meaningful because it’s mine, shaped on my terms.
I used to think success was a salary or a title that sounded impressive on paper. Now, it’s messier than that, nothing like I imagined. A successful day might mean I got some writing work done, remembered to drink water, put in the hours at my day job, and got all the kids to their extracurriculars on time. A successful week is when all of that happens without me feeling like I’m about to spin out completely.
While it’s exhausting to manage all the moving parts, it’s also liberating, and I feel proud because my kids have had a front row seat to watch me build things from scratch, to see ideas take root and grow. Because I want my kids to see me working hard, being creative, and following my intuition. My plan for the future is to keep adjusting, learning, and making space for both work and life in ways that feel sustainable and meaningful.
