What is a WAHM?

 

While the first week of October I focused generally on blending the areas of our lives and last week I focused on homeschooling, this week I will focus on working from home. If you work at home, feel free to chime in on the comments. If you don’t, my hope is that this will give you a better understanding of the blended life that includes working from home.

It seems that acronyms define a lot of people these days. A high school student chats on the phone with her BFF. Executives call themselves names like CEO and CFO. For many professionals, the degree they achieved in college becomes their identity as well: M.D., R.N., PTA.

Moms like you and me are not exempt. If we don’t have a professional acronym, we can still be a SAHM. The friend that loves to be neat and organized confesses that she’s afraid she’s a little OCD.

It bleeds over to our children’s lives as well. If a son is a little more active than others, concerned people offer suggestions and ask, “Do you think he’s ADD?” Temper tantrum in the supermarket? “That child must be ODD!” (It stands for oppositional defiant disorder. If there is such a thing, I don’t know that labeling a child odd will improve the situation.)

And so, all these things we do become labels to tell us who we are. Frankly, I’m not sure I like it. I’d much rather be Jennifer without additional letters that try to put me in a box.

So, why did I use one of the acronyms in the title of my post? WAHM is simply an update to the older, much abused title of SAHM. Stay-at-home-mom becomes work-at-home-mom. Because we all know we sat on the couch eating bonbons before. (Excuse the sarcasm.) I’m not exactly sure what a bonbon is. If you have some, I’ll be happy to try them for you and let you know. But I digress.

A WAHM is just a mom that works from home. It’s not who she is, but what she does. She is a woman that has children. She is a woman who makes crafts in her living room and sells them on Etsy. She is a woman who owns a laptop and a contract with a book publisher. She is a woman who invites children into her home and instills in them the love of music or cares for them while their parents work. She is a woman that packs up kitchen items or purses or home decorations, visits your home and entertains your friends while selling them things they love. She is a woman who takes customer service calls, manages social media for a blogger, or sells advertising for a magazine.

The list could go on and on. These are things that WAHMs do. Some of them I have done. And so have you.

But who am I? I’m just me. I still have a unique personality, gifts and purpose no matter what letters are chalked up by my name.

And so have you.