Mothering in the Corporate Voyage
By Teri Burgos-Gutierrez

Teri Gutierrez is a corporate trainer, author, speaker, and web columnist. She is the wife of a dentist and mother to another dentist, an IT specialist, and a high school junior at La Salle Green Hills. Email the writer at gutierrez_teri@yahoo.com.

Smooth and Rough Sailing

ions to the surface. We try to do our utmost best in raising our children. Sometimes we sail through our mothering voyage smoothly. Sometimes we encounter despair, tempests, and tidal waves. Sometimes we get so weary that we just want to give up and let the storm take us where it will. With the increasing demands in the workplace, the mothering voyage has become more tumultuous and difficult to handle.

Power of Communication

But here’s something for us mothers! We don’t have to be consistently tossed and turned by these winds of change. Nor do we have to be perfect moms! We can start right now – this very minute, in fact – in making a positive difference in our child’s future. It’s never too early and never too late. It doesn’t matter if the child is two years old and close to perfect, or twenty years old and going through adolescent concerns. Just as communication is essential in the workplace, it likewise plays a vital role in the family.

Modern Mothering

Just like everything else today, the role of moms is becoming increasingly complex and complicated. There is a growing realization that child-rearing doesn’t end with ensuring our children’s material or physical well-being. Life in today’s world calls for so much more. Fortunately the trend of child-development studies in recent years and their application to modern mothering have helped a lot in making parents aware of their role in various areas of their children’s growth.

Varied Roles

Sara Ruddick in her book Maternal Thinking said that the four elements that make up the role of mothers in this busy corporate world are:

Protection

Protection is the first parental role. It is absolutely important for children’s protection from everything from infection, illness, abuse, or harm. Protection of children’s gifts and rights; their unique talents whether those of singing or dancing, protection embodied in laws that would extend health care, schooling, and safety to each of them..

Nourishing

Nourishing is the second component in parenting – nourishing and nurturing. The nourishing of the body is partner to the nurturing of the spirit of the child – in some ways an even more delicate activity. Nourishing needs to go on in such a way that children have room to get-to-know who they are and to discover whatever poetry and passion exist inside their hearts.

Parent’s Unity

Training encompasses so much that parents may feel a little discouraged. “Where do we begin? One key factor for making any element of training children work is the unity of the mother and father. It is important that both parents approach the training of their children together. They need to spend some quality time discussing what is going on with each and every child. Their children should realize that both mother and father are united in their approach to raising them.

Guidance

Guidance is the fourth component. The guide is one who walks alongside, who points the way, and who conveys knowledge of the territory. Guides take measure of their companions; they use listening skills with great care in order to assess just how much their companions are able to do.

Loving

None of these elements in the roles of mothers are possible, however, without one further element: loving. Loving means that mothers offer their children the vast reservoir of their own humanness, spirituality, and their own adult-hood – weak and fragile as these might be – and make their resources of body and mind available to their children for the duration of every child’s life. It means they are willing to give their lives, themselves, and their fortunes so that this new generation might live.

(Writer is a corporate trainer/author, wife to a dentist, and mother to 3 adolescent boys.)