WHEN I said I would be ending my voluntary stay-at-home mom status, I was imagining a slow transition back into the game. After all, when I agreed to turn my back on my exciting career, it took a few months before I got pregnant and nine months of growing a baby in my tummy. At the end of nine months, I was already so eager to get on with my stay-at-home mom status out of boredom.
But this – whoah! There was no primera or segunda. It was straight to tersera! Suddenly, I was back to having meetings and talking in public, and I haven’t even had the time to shop for non-mommy clothes!
But you know what dearies, I realized something important. Perhaps it is because I now look at the world from a different perspective, or because I have aged and somehow have learned lessons that were never taught inside the classroom, but things are vastly different this time.
When I was back to speaking in front of a crowd after a five-year hiatus, introducing our CdeO.ph, a website that allows people to make their FREE website, to small and medium scale entrepreneurs during one of DTI’s seminar workshops, I realized that my lack of makeup and bling is reflected by most of the women present. These women might be entrepreneurs, but they are also moms, who like me, also have to juggle managing a business and raising kids.
After half a day of learning and talking about business related stuff, we all had to rush home in order to be there when the kids get home.
It didn’t matter to these moms that I was not in corporate attire and was only wearing my ever dependable soft leather flats because they too were dressed in simple and comfortable clothing. A little bit upgraded than what moms would normally wear, but one glance would make you realize that it was definitely a choice of comfort over style for most of us.
With nobody showing a bit of cleavage or a slab of thigh in the room, the men were focused on business talk and clearly acknowledged and respected the intelligence and power these mompreneurs have.
And things were not really different when I would meet with the wife of a prominent CdeO personality. I smiled when I realized that we both have the habit of using hair clamps to put our hair up.
Now back when I was a manager, back in the corporate days, I could still remember the Training Manager forbidding everyone to wear hair clamps, saying that only labanderas wear them. And not only that, we both are also in the habit of wearing slippers, she in her original Havaianas, and me in my Birkenstock-inspired one. As to makeup – oh, let the God-given beauty shine through without it.
Back before mommyhood took most of the glamor I had, I would never, ever, even think about meeting important people without makeup and lipstick. I might sacrifice killer heels, but I would definitely arrive in some sort of corporate look, or a corporate look pretending to be casual get-up, or an understated corporate look that says look-at-my-clothes-I-mean-business.
Tomorrow I will be meeting with the key person of an important online campaign, and perhaps with the marketing team of a retail store. On Thursday, I will be the host and speaker for a seminar on CdeO.ph’s Basic SEO for Article Writing. On Friday, I will be meeting with my team of writer, graphic artist, photographer and social media assistant.
Today is already Tuesday and I have yet to buy a corporate attire and a lipstick. But perhaps, I don’t really need to do that. Five years of motherhood made me master the art of getting my kid to take me seriously despite unkempt hair and motherly daster. I should be able to pull it off without the corporate look.
Cheers to raising kids and to new adventures!
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