3 Things I Wish I Did Before My Kids Were Born

With the ever-changing environment right outside our doorstep, I’ve been thinking a lot about ways to create pockets of time and freedom in our life. This thought process came about as I was brainstorming for our next Refresh Podcast on what we’re unlearning in Motherhood, because I got to think about what I wish I did learn as well. If I were to go back and have time pre-kids, I would have spent that time on the following:

Attaining beneficial knowledge: Anyone with kids will tell you how often they are met with philosophical, big-picture questions posed by their children. Alhumdulillah for their innocence and fitrah-grounded hearts as they are a significant motivation to seek knowledge and grow as a Muslim. Even though I attended Islamic courses and halaqaat throughout my University years, I still feel I have a dearth of knowledge overall and constantly find myself looking for sound answers as I go through my journey of parenthood with my husband. Had I spent my time grounding myself in serious Islamic studies, I believe I would have been better equipped not just to answer my children’s questions but also to lead my life in a confident way as a Muslim mother in the west, facing the number of challenges we have in our society that are only growing by the day.
Creating passive income foundations that would allow us to have financial freedom while homeschooling. My work as a clinical social worker is now on the back-burner as I’m homeschooling. My work gave me a deep understanding of community challenges and allowed me to help families in a meaningful way – a gift I will always hold close to my heart. However, now that I’m homeschooling, my husband is our main provider which is balanced out quite well alhumdulillah, but when I see how hard my husband has to work, it makes me wish both of us spent time in our college years thinking forward by creating passive income streams. Had we done that, we would have been able to build wealth in a way where we wouldn’t have to trade time for money, and instead could pursue our familial and personal interests while giving back on our own time.
Time is a resource we’ll never get back and right now, my kids need my time to build their future foundations more than anything else. In the spare time I do have, I’m grateful I get to pour into my projects and interests such as attaining Qur’an reading qualifications, helping psychotherapy clients, creating a community for creative mothers, and lots of writing. These projects are now occurring alongside motherhood which is beautiful and hard at the same time.
If you are not married yet or married but don’t have children yet, consider the number of ways you can create financial freedom so that when you have your family, you can truly be with them in those formative years inshaAllah. You won’t have to compromise your precious time (or even your values, by working jobs that may ask you to divorce your values to earn money) to earn while homeschooling or doing what you truly love.
Understand time management around my values instead of work/school/external entities. I believe the way our society works is it programs us to schedule our lives around external schedules which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it can become overbearing when your own values start to take a backseat. Or worse, you lose sight of your values all together while running around the societal hamster wheel. Before my kids were born, I wish I spent a lot more time focusing on building the discipline and time management habits rooted in my values instead of revolving my life around expectations that were handed to me. This was one of the reasons I created my Seeking Jannah life planners as well as my plannings kits used by women and mothers all over the world alhumdulillah. In relation to point No. 2, Momentora and all that I offer in this space has been a great source of passive income, but only when I focus intensely on marketing and finding the right audience, which can be exhausting when you’re already short on time and there are competing priorities.