Valerie Tching is a senior engineer at SlideShare, LinkedIn who develops in Ruby and Javascript on the team that monetizes an awesome platform for sharing presentations. She is also a mother to a five year old boy and a two year old daughter.
I have seen her stay late at office on several occassions trying to ensure the last deploy was successful or debug a last moment bug in a product that has to be shipped on that day. I wondered, how is she able to maintain the work-life balance.
Here is a chit-chat that I had with her once to find out what keeps her motivated.
Valerie: Its about the individual ambitions and support of the family. I like to work and I can’t imagine how would I be if I am not working. Being a good mother also means being fulfilled. My husband is very caring and supportive and strongly believes that career of a women is very important. Ones’ cultural background and upbringing also plays a role in making career decisions and choices. In France, its pretty common to see working women and uncommon to find stay-at-home moms.
What is your motivation to keep working?
Valerie: Personal accomplishment drives me. Work gives me satisfaction as I feel improving my skills. If I will not work, I might feel that I’m missing something, that could affect my wellness and have repercussions on my family and kids. In my opinion, women shouldn’t feel blocked by having kids. Kids are a part of their life but they still need to follow what inspire them. Some mothers who devote themselves to the children completely end up forgetting themselves, to them I only want to say — Don’t forget yourself.
So, what does your typical day look like?
Valerie: On a typical day, my kids come and wake me up before 7 (haha!), we then go to the kitchen and I prepare breakfast for them — milk and bread with cheese or chocolate spread, or something I baked if I had some time to. Then we get dressed and we drop them to pre-school/daycare while going to office. Yeah, in US I have to take care of one additional task — prepare lunch for the children as the daycare/pre-school don’t provide meals (it was really good in France.) Then, its usual day’s job — code, test and deploy. I get back usually around 7 and my husband has picked up the kids and prepared dinner (yay!) Then I bathe the children and we have dinner, after which we play until we take them to bed around 9. If I don’t have any tasks that need to be done, we watch a movie before going to sleep around 11. I usually don’t take work back to home. On weekends we usually go to park or meetup with friends.
What is your advice to other women like you?
Valerie: As I said — Please don’t forget yourself. Nanny/daycare search can be a nightmare but there’s always a solution out there. It really helps if you are organized and have support. There is a lot more to manage when you have kids. You can’t just take a day off, but it has its advantages. Sometimes after a tiring day at work, seeing your children smile takes away all the tension. Also, things become more manageable once the children start to be more independent. First years are great but also usually mean more work. Just hang in there and don’t beat yourself. You need to setup reasonable expectations for yourself.
Originally published at www.pimothers.com.
