One of the hard parts about being a stay at home mom is that you aren’t making money on your own. You rely on what your husband brings home. Sure, you say the money belongs to both of you, but there’s often that feeling on both sides that it isn’t quite true.

How do you cope?

1. Talk over your feelings.

Communication is important in any marriage. If you’re feeling as though you’re less important because the things you do raising your family at home doesn’t bring in money it can build resentment.

It can be a help to realize that you do make a financial contribution. You’re saving money on child care by being home with your kids. You’re probably shopping for bargains more. You’re probably cooking more meals at home and thereby saving on your family’s food bill.

It’s important that the partnership that is a good marriage recognizes both earning money and helping to keep the family’s spending under control are both important contributions. It can be hard to do that if your husband acts in any way as though you’re using “his” money, and if that’s the case his feelings need to be discussed also.

2. Decide if you want to earn money from home.

Some stay at home moms decide that they need a work at home job or home business so that they can bring in more money for their family. Sometimes it’s also necessary to the family’s overall budget.

Stay at home moms today are lucky in that they have so many ways to earn money from home, some of which are extremely flexible. It’s not just the traditional jobs such as running a daycare or joining a direct sales opportunity. There are customer service work at home jobs, online home businesses and much more.

There are a lot of risks to getting started working from home, and generally laws to be aware of. Make sure you learn about the common scams and don’t fall for hype when you’re picking an opportunity. Too good to be true usually is.

3. Be yourself and enjoy what you have.

Just because you’re suddenly such-and-so’s mom and you’re home all day doesn’t mean you lose your identity. Make time to be yourself.

Keep up your hobbies. You might even be able to get one or more of your kids interested in it. But don’t drop the hobby just because you don’t think you have the time or shouldn’t spend the money. Unless it’s really expensive or your budget is that tight you can probably find a way to enjoy your hobby while being with your kids.

Also read the kinds of books you enjoy. The Cat in the Hat is a great book, but reading any children’s book over and over will get to you eventually. Read something you enjoy. Let your kids see it. It’s a part of encouraging them to love reading too.

And remember that even when staying at home with the kids makes for a tight budget you’re lucky to have what you do. Many parents would love to do what you’re doing but just can’t afford to. It’s one of those jobs that even on a bad day, it’s pretty good when you think about it.

Finally, remember that being married, especially with children, does a lot to your finances no matter whether you work outside the home or stay at home. You most likely won’t have the freedom you once did no matter what you do. The needs of your family come first in most cases.

Getting work done is so challenging just now. Selene’s all the way up to walking while holding just one of my fingers in one of her hands, so you know I’m about to enter the toddler years. And she already gets into everything!

Makes working at home really interesting. And not just because I’m sometimes blogging while half asleep.

Blogging while Selene’s trying to pound on my keyboard is interesting too. So is preparing meals while she’s trying to eat whatever random something she pulled from an obscure part of the floor. So is trying to home preschool my son while she tries to simultaneously eat his papers and crayons.

It’s a good thing the benefits of this job are good. You don’t get such sweet smiles or sloppy kisses from just any job. At least I sure hope not!

Working at home with a crawler/soon to be toddler is an adventure. It doesn’t matter if you’ve done it before or if it’s your first time. Babies at that age are a challenge to the work at home mom. To the work at home dad too, for that matter.

There’s the interrupted train of thought when she start crying.

The messed up sentences as she pulls up on my desk and pounds on whatever part of the keyboard she can reach.

Taking a break from work as she breastfeeds.

Running to doctor’s appointments, dealing with the classes for the older kids, doing all the work it takes to keep the house running. And sometimes even trying to get to bed at a decent hour, hah!

Yet somehow it all comes together. There may be weeks where it seems like not enough gets done, but other times things run more smoothly.

There’s the fear of working too much and the fear of working too little.

There’s trying to decide whether to work or take a much needed nap when she takes a nap during the day after being up half the night.

There’s all the self questioning that all parents go through.

There’s that favorite pan lid, being banged on by that favorite wooden spoon.

Being a work at home mom is an amazing opportunity to learn just how much you really can get done. There aren’t many other jobs that can teach you to make the most of a few spare minutes so quickly, whether it’s a few minutes to play with the kids or a few minutes to just type something, anything up. Some days the pressure is amazing while other days things are so laid back you can hardly believe it’s real.

One thing I have to do periodically is revise my work at home schedule. My daily schedule changes often enough that I can’t stick with one for too long. Something happens and the old one quits working, and suddenly I’m scrambling to get anything at all done.

Such as right now. It’s a real push for me to get even half the work done I used to each day. A big part of that is having a very active 9 month old. It’s just not possible to care properly for her and get everything done in a day that I used to.

Add in that my husband now regularly has weekends off, when in all his old jobs he had to work most weekends. Complete change of routine there!

How Do I Change My Schedule?

Changing my schedule isn’t easy. It means changing habits too. I’m used to thinking of things in a particular way, and even when it’s not working I’m likely to keep thinking that way.

Fortunately, I have the previous schedule listing my various work activities already. Things such as blogging, blog commenting, article writing and so forth. If you want to work up a schedule, you need to figure these things out too, as well as about how much time you want to commit to each.

My goal has always been to get a lot of my blog posts written ahead of time. Something comes up I can still change the schedule, but I like to have posts done in advance. This hasn’t been happening of late because I used to do a lot of my blog post writing on weekends. That doesn’t work at all now. Too often we’re all but obligated to visit family or have some visiting us. It’s all not conducive to productivity.

This means I’m often scrambling to get something written. That’s not the way I like to write. So it’s time to rethink things.

Think About Productive Hours

I’ve always been a night owl. Mornings are not my friend. But at this particular point, nights haven’t been working so hot either. Something about a baby who doesn’t always sleep well, especially those nights when she decides to be bright eyed and bushy tailed and needy for four hours in the middle of the night.

Makes working at night a little less practical when I have to also get up in the morning to take my oldest to school.

So I also have to consider my next most productive hours. In this case, it’s defined as when can I get the baby to take a nap. Please? And then hope that it wasn’t one of the really tough nights where I’m considering a nap too.

Writing It Out

My schedule is one of the few things I do write or type out for my work. I keep going between typing it on a spreadsheet set up as a weekly calendar and writing it on paper. They both can work when I’m paying attention.

Writing it out helps by giving me something to focus on. I know exactly what I mean to be doing that day.

If I’m really getting going on a spreadsheet version, I can also add in the little things that aren’t regular enough for my regular schedule, but need doing on a particular day. That’s one thing I like pretty well.

Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3…

Any schedule I write is nothing more than a best guess until I’ve tried it out, of course. There’s no way to be sure what will work until I try to work that schedule. Often enough I have to refine things as I realize one day has too much or too little going on.

The good part about scheduling is that it keeps me from neglecting various aspects of the work I need to be doing. It’s easy to just write and write and write and forget to do any marketing. Writing’s more fun for me. But it won’t get me anywhere, or at least not very quickly if I don’t market also.

What about you? Do you schedule your work or just wing it as best you can?

The decision to work at home is one I’ve never regretted. It’s challenging, exhausting, takes up pretty much all of my spare time plus any other time I can give it, but it’s still a great experience.

I have to admit, though, the ups and downs can be pretty rough. Especially the financial ups and downs. But it’s all part of the game.

Dealing with the Financial Ups and Downs

I must say, the financial ups of working at home, and particularly of running a home business have been pretty amazing for me. I don’t just mean not paying for daycare, which would be a pretty big expense with 3 kids.

I mean the months where I get really good commission checks. Bringing in a really healthy check (by my standards) feels great.

On the other hand, those months where it seems like I can’t earn a decent check no matter what I do really suck.

That’s something you’ll face in most home businesses and many work at home jobs. It’s a reality.

Demand for your business goes up. Demand goes down. Competition comes. Competition goes.

For work at home jobs, sometimes there’s tons of work to be had. Other times things are just quiet. That was true even when I was a medical transcriptionist, and that’s a pretty high demand field.

If you aren’t ready for the financial ups and downs (especially the downs), working at home in any capacity is going to be pretty hard on you and your family.

Dealing with the ups is pretty easy. Just don’t overspend in the good times. You need money ready for those times when things aren’t so good.

Dealing with the downs is harder, especially if you haven’t prepared well for them. It’s easier if you have enough money to get by for a few months despite a low income.

But even with that, it’s going to be rough emotionally.

Dealing with the Emotional Ups and Downs

How you feel about working at home in part echoes how your income goes, but not entirely. You can get frustrated even when your income is great, and you can feel great about the work you’re doing even when it’s not yet bringing in any real money.

This is where you need family support. When things just aren’t running smoothly, you don’t want to hear “I told you so” from anyone. You want and need support.

Family’s the best place to get it, but you can also get great support from online friends. Just don’t let it lead into so much goofing off online that you don’t get any work done.

You can share your problems in your favorite forums. You can tweet about them, share with your Facebook friends, whatever and wherever you like to do to vent your frustrations.

Just don’t forget to share your triumphs too.

Enjoy the Ride

Working at home can be a roller coaster in so many ways, but you can’t let it get to you too much. Enjoy the good, deal with the bad and don’t give up. Believe in your ability to make it work, and eventually you will.

I posted last week on how many people set their sights too low when working at home. There’s a flip side to challenging yourself, of course, and that’s working too much.

This is a mistake you can make even if you haven’t set very high goals for yourself, and what defines it is quite vague. It much depends on you and the needs of your family.

Sometimes a particular schedule is just right, but then circumstances change just a little bit, and the schedule is overworking you.

This is something I’ve dealt with quite a bit lately. Having a new baby, moving, getting settled, taking my son to speech therapy, figuring out if we can manage preschool classes for him, taking my daughter to and from school… it all adds up and really makes for a more challenging schedule for me to work.

And so I work fewer hours on my business than I’d like because my family has a lot of needs right now.

I’m much prone to overworking, and I know it. I’ll stay up late even when I know the baby hasn’t been sleeping well and I’ll just be dragging the next day. It’s not the best of habits, really.

It doesn’t feel like overwork; I enjoy what I’m doing. But when I’m that tired later on, I know.

So how do you balance your ambitions with working an appropriate amount?

It’s not always easy. You need to pay attention to your own needs as well as the needs of your family. You don’t ever want to forget why you’re a work at home parent.

Make sure you take some time every day with your family. Eat meals together whenever possible. Play as a family before putting the kids to bed. Take a break with your spouse.

Sometimes, yes, you’ll overwork yourself by working more after doing all the fun stuff. That’s how it goes at times. Just don’t let overwork be your entire way of life.