Working mom & Second Pregnancy

After four years I’m again experiencing the amazing journey of pregnancy for my second child which of course has every good & bad. As a working woman & a mom to a four-year kid is really challenging to manage. Due to the COVID-19 impact without having any external support for babysitting my husband & I are sacrificing our professional lives & time to take care of the child while managing our careers.

Now we are facing another milestone of our lives filled with many hardest situations. Unfortunately today Sri Lanka’s inflation rate is 18.8% & as a nation, we are facing an economic crisis that is impacting all aspects of everyone’s living struggle with a high cost of living.

Life is worth nothing if there are no challenges & difficulties. Finding the best root to survive has become the new goal for our lives now.

Second-time pregnancy is really more difficult than I thought & most probably it might be difficult for most working moms like me.

Read all my articles about pregnancy

To me, I need to:

• Manage all the day-to-day house works
• Keep eye on the four-year-old kiddo
• Take care of the family without falling physically & mentally whatever my pregnancy symptoms hit me harder
• Have to be responsible & productive in professional life & carrier
• Have to balance my studies (currently I’m reading for a master’s in Business Administration)

Today I’m nearly 16 weeks pregnant & my 1st trimester was very harder with fatigue, vomiting & loss of appetite than my 1st pregnancy. Without juggling pregnancy symptoms I decided to find options.

If you are a working mom, you can try what I have tried, no matter if it is your very first or repeated pregnancy.

• Be prepared for morning sickness & vomiting feelings at the workplace. I used to bite something every time (Olives & cracker biscuits work on me)
• Announce the pregnancy to your superiors & co-workers, be open & honestly discuss how you feel
• Start thinking & discuss the options for your difficulties

Because of the COVID 19 pandemic & its varieties still we have to take all health precautions & wearing a face mask is a must at the workplace. Personally, I feel very difficult in breathing while wearing a face mask. I openly discussed my difficulties & the HR team allowed me to continue working from home without physically attending to the office.

Due to the foreign currency reserves are shrinking, now Sri Lanka facing a shortage of fuel & we are suffering from long power cuts of nearly 13 hours per day. So I couldn’t take the advantage of remote working from home even though found a solution for power backup at home, experiencing the interruption of signal losses of internet due to signal towers are also outage with power & its capacity.

However, I couldn’t contribute my 100% for all as before with all physical & mental ups & downs yet I’m trying to be patient with myself & trying to balance professional life as well as family life hoping my comfort zone is not so far.