My Kids Made Me A Better Person

This post is part of a sponsored campaign with DiMe Media and Pampers.  All the opinions expressed are mineThis is how my kids made a better person. If something changed my life forever and, more importantly, for the better, was having my two children. My 14-year old, Andrés Ignacio, was the one who made me a mom against all odds. I’ve always called him my first miracle, and he’s blessed my life in ways that I never would have dreamed of. That being said, it wasn’t until my second son, Tomás Eugenio, was born, that I felt my life completely changed: it was love at first sight as soon as I locked eyes with that precious boy. I remember kissing him and thinking, as I held his little body in my arms, that I wouldn’t be able to live without him. When Tomás came into my life, everything else made a 180º turn. I was a single mother and decided to work from home: I stopped being employed, and decided to start a business that would allow me to support my family while I worked from home and took care of my kids.

With Tomás’ arrival, I became a businesswoman and the mistress of my house, my time, and my destiny. Newborn baby in my arms and a marvelous client backing me, my house became a Public Relations boutique agency. I remember breast-feeding Tomás Eugenio in the first few months of meetings with my clients while my assistant took notes; he ended up being exclusively breast feed until he was about 8 months old. My business thrived along with my children. When they were old enough to go to a daycare and school, my house became, from 8 in the morning to 4:30 in the afternoon, both maternity ward and meeting room, where ideas and strategies were born, sketched, and thrown around. We threw ourselves into press releases and marketing campaigns, and I presided over it with more creativity and productivity than I had in my entire life. And at the end of the day, the kids came home.

When I debated increasing my head count and looking for an office more “comfortable” than my house so the business could keep growing, I made another very important decision, one that would impact my entire life. I chose to look for a better future for my kids, then 3 and 5 years old.  I liquidated my assets and dispatched what had been my life in a container that departed from Puerto de La Guaira in my native Venezuela to Puerto de San Pedro in Los Angeles, California. After moving to the United States, I had to reinvent myself. I started in Southern California, where we lived happily for 5 years, and then chose to move to Miami. We arrived a little over three years ago, a little scared, and I was forced to reinvent myself yet again.It doesn’t matter how small they are, children are powerful agents of change and their presence has an enormous impact on our lives. They make us better people, and force us to do what would be considered extraordinary or even impossible under “normal” circumstances.

As if it was yesterday, I remember the very day in which I decided to come to America for good. It was September 2007 and I was watching the news. A representative of the Venezuelan government had announced that they would start imparting the communist doctrine and socialist values in schools across the country. Halfway through 2008, my children and I had become permanent residents of the United States, and by 2014 we proudly became US citizens.

That’s the power and the strength that you get when you have kids. You want to see them live better lives, by whatever means necessary. It’s a universal power that anyone lucky enough to call themselves a mother can learn to harness.