Striking the Perfect Balance: My Journey of Balancing Motherhood and Career

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There’s a version of “balance” I used to believe in, one where the shift ends on time, the house is calm and nobody, not my patients and not my kids, ever gets the leftover version of me. I don’t believe in that version anymore. I don’t think it exists.

What I do believe in came slowly and mostly out of necessity: I moved here without the village I grew up assuming I’d have. Back home, motherhood was never a solo act. A neighbor watched your toddler while you ran an errand. A grandmother showed up unannounced with food and opinions, both welcome. Balance wasn’t something you created, it was something the people around you helped carry. Here, in a new country, on shift work, that safety net was gone and I had to build a new one from nothing.

Back home everyone knew the nurse, the midwife I was. But still, my aunts and grandma’s opinions carried more weight than that 4 year degree I had. Not that it didn’t matter, but because sometimes the experience of someone who had raised babies before you, is what you need, for they may anticipate your needs before you even know what you needed. I saw how they took care of my sister, I remember growing up and every neighbor was responsible for us kids as long as we were out playing while my mom and aunts took care of the little babies.

Balance isn’t a schedule. It’s a set of decisions.

The advice I used to read color-code your calendar, wake up at 5am, “just” delegate assumed a life I didn’t have. What actually changed things for me wasn’t a system. It was a handful of decisions I had to make on purpose, more than once, because they didn’t stay made.

I stopped trying to be fully present in both places at once. On shift, I’m a nurse. At home, I’m mom. Trying to hold both at the same time just meant I was half-doing each one. Naming which role I was in, even silently, in my head, at a shift change gave me permission to actually be there instead of guilty everywhere.

I let shift work be an advantage, not just a hardship. A 7-on, 7-off or rotating schedule is brutal in some ways, but it also means I get stretches of daylight hours with my kids that a 9-to-5 parent doesn’t. I stopped mourning the schedule I didn’t have and started using the one I did.

I built a support system on purpose, not by accident.

Without extended family nearby, “it takes a village” had to become something I actively assembled: another immigrant mom I trade pickup duty with, a neighbor who knows our routine, a group chat that runs on nothing but honesty at 6am. None of it happened organically. I asked. I let go of guilt as a productivity tool. For a long time I thought feeling guilty meant I cared. It doesn’t. It just meant I was tired. Guilt didn’t make me a better nurse or a better mother, it just made the good moments harder to actually feel.

 What this looks like on a hard week.

Some weeks, balance looks like nothing at all, it looks like surviving until the next day off. I’ve learned to stop treating those weeks as failures. A week where everyone was fed, safe and reasonably loved on is a week that worked, even if the laundry has its own zip code by Sunday. A month after coming home from the hospital, I had imagined a different outcome. I would have a routine that worked and I would have it all figured out as I was good at planning and organizing, but that wasn’t the case on this specific Tuesday morning in a T-shirt crying as I held my baby, missing my mom more than I ever thought I would, but somehow I knew I had to pick myself up and gather all the strength I needed to be there for us. So take outs and leftovers carried the week and we survived, on tears, worry calories and hope.

The tools that actually earned a place in my routine

I’m careful about what I recommend, because most “productivity for moms” lists are written by people who’ve never worked a night shift. These are the few things that genuinely held up for me. Remember you don not need a new thing just something that works for you and keeps your mind light and clear for productivity.

– A weekly planner built for irregular schedules, not a standard Monday-to-Friday grid. Shift workers need to see the whole rotation at a glance.
– Freezer-friendly meal prep containers, so a full day off can produce three days of dinners for the days I don’t have the bandwidth to cook.
– Noise-reducing earplugs or a sleep mask are non-negotiable for sleeping through daylight after a night shift.

– Blackout curtains are a nice touch for that daylight sleep.

Finding home in the balance

The tagline of this blog is “find your way home, wherever you are,” and this is where it came from. Home, for me, stopped being a place I left behind in Kenya. It became something I had to rebuild here in a new support system, a new rhythm, a new definition of what a good day looks like. Balancing motherhood and a nursing career didn’t get easier because I found the perfect system. It got easier because I stopped expecting perfect and started paying attention to what my family actually needed from me, one shift at a time.

If you’re in the thick of it too, new country, new schedule, no village yet, I promise the balance you’re looking for isn’t a system you’re missing. It’s something you build, slowly, out of the decisions in front of you today.