Coasting
From Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Multitasking Mom’s Survival Guide
By Amy Newmark

A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.
~Edward de Bono

I was blessed with a career as a financial analyst while I was raising my kids. I could work from home and I could also ratchet up or down my commitment depending on how much time I had available to work. I was even able to take a whole year off when I moved from New York City to the suburbs and had my second child. Then I gradually ramped up the job again, ultimately doing it full-time from home. With the proliferation of cell phones things got even easier. I remember talking to one of my traders while watching a bunch of kids on the roller coaster at a local amusement park one day and thinking I can’t believe I am trading stocks and chaperoning a class trip at the same time. I even ran my own hedge fund from home — after all, the market was only open from 9:30-4:00 — so I could trade during the day, spend the afternoon and evening with the kids, and then prepare for the next trading day after they went to bed.

My kids were two years apart, so I had twenty years of childrearing until the second one turned eighteen and went off to college. I managed to work from home for seventeen and a half of those twenty years. The problem was the other two and a half years, when my kids were preteens, during which I commuted to New York City and traveled all over the country in a very intense senior executive position with a technology start-up. I also got divorced and moved twice during that same period. (Keep reading)