I love my baby girl. There is not a second I spend with her that I wish she was asleep in bed or that her daddy was playing with her. There are many times when she is asleep that I go in to just watch her sleep. And if I’m not watching her sleep, I will go to the computer and look through the hundreds of adorable photos that I’ve taken of her in the passed 8 months since her birth (and yes, that includes photos that I took while watching her sleep!). I am obsessed!

But come weekday mornings, I drop my daughter off at daycare and begin morphing into a full-time Site Manager as I make my way down I-35 toward work. I review yesterday’s events and mentally prepare myself for another unpredictable day in the world of Internet marketing. Upon arrival at my desk, I start pouring myself into my websites, and the only evidence of a life outside this building is the collection of family photos on my cubicle walls. It isn’t until I hear the bustling of coworkers leaving work for the night that I snap out of my webby world and remember that I have a daughter, and she needs to be picked up from daycare!

My mind races with work-related issues until I arrive at her daycare. She greets me with that toothless grin, and I am a mommy again. All thoughts of Internet marketing are long gone, neatly packed into a corner room of my brain, lights off, door closed.

This is the system I’ve designed for myself, to keep my life in balance. I’ve made myself two people, the career marketer and the mother, and each gives 100% to their responsibilities. But each knows their boundaries, and these boundaries must be maintained if I want to continue being successful at both things I love. I cannot be the best mother if I allow my work to occupy my evenings, and I cannot be the best marketer if I’m pining away at my daughter’s photos during the day (Disclaimer: The “mother” personality always takes precendent over the career personality in case of emergencies. That should go without saying!). These are the commitments I have made to maintain balance in the busy life of a working mother.