I’ve had a rich life full of extraordinary opportunities and many accomplishments that I am proud of. Through it all, my greatest role has been raising my two children. I was thirty-four when I became a mom for the first time and confronted the dilemma of splitting my time between working and parenting. At that point, I had worked professionally for ten years, including a few wonderful years on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. I was building my career. Nevertheless, I left the full-time professional workforce to raise my children. I wanted to be the best mom possible to my children, and for me, that meant being a hands-on and present mom. So I decided to take a risk and launch my consulting career, even if it meant turning my life upside down.

I’ve learned some difficult lessons as a working professional woman who slowed down and interrupted her career in order to be ‘there’ for my children, Citlali and Diego. I learned that I couldn’t have both 100 percent. As a result, I passed up multiple professional opportunities when I was in the prime years of my career, especially when Citlali and Diego were little, because I didn’t want to miss precious time with them. I wanted to watch them grow up and be there for special events and milestones. Despite other working professional moms’ advice to me to hire a full-time nanny and raise the kids to be “totally independent,” I resisted being that parent – the one who got home just in time to tuck the kids in at night, and spent minimal time with them, even on the weekends. That would not be me.

As a first-generation Mexican daughter, I have always wanted to honor the sacrifices my parents made for me; and a big part of that was fulfilling my potential as a college educated working professional. It was hard to put aside my lifelong mission of creating positive socio- economic impact in under-resourced and marginalized communities in order to devote myself fully to raising my children. The work I had been doing professionally and civically before parenthood was very important to me – it was about creating change in the world. But as a mom, my attention turned completely to my children. Ironically, I wanted to be an exemplary mom, and that meant being present first and foremost – the very thing I had learned from my own mom. This was my instinct and what I wanted wholeheartedly – even if it meant putting my career second for a while. Not everyone has the luxury to make that choice, and I never took that for granted.

Years later as I struggled to re-enter the workforce full-time when my children were in high school, I started to feel frustrated and often hopeless. I thought of my father and identified with what must have been his anger and hopelessness when he failed to find work. I was middle aged at this point, and started to feel like the world was shutting its doors on me, just like they had shut on my father forty years earlier. My father’s inability to deal with his despair when he became unable to provide for his family was a crushing blow from which he never recovered, and I didn’t want to end up defeated like that. I anchored back to the valuable lessons I had learned following my father’s death with the will to move forward with faith and courage. This is what I call the process of reclaiming myself, the true me I had worked so hard to discover and embrace over many years. I hope you also may learn something about the road to your own happiness and inner peace through my story.