What is your career plan?
I stopped asking myself those questions when I decided to have children.
Not because I threw my life away, but because I understood that raising children was already a long-term project. A project that would require almost all of my energy, attention, patience, organization, and emotional availability for many years. At that moment, my priorities shifted naturally. While the professional world kept moving faster and faster, I quietly stepped out of it and left that race to the younger generation.
So if a career simply means a job we do to earn money, then honestly, I have had no career plan since 2005.
But the older I get, the more I realize that work is not limited to salaries, business cards, fancy titles, or social recognition. Some of the most demanding work happens quietly inside homes, far away from offices and professional meetings.
Raising children is a project. Not a small one, either. It requires vision, adaptation, problem-solving, crisis management, emotional regulation, and long-term planning. A child does not grow in a straight line. Every stage demands a different version of the parent.
And then there is the house itself. People often reduce housework to simple daily chores, but in reality, it is an entire system made of countless sub-projects running at the same time: meals, schedules, laundry, budgets, appointments, logistics, emotional balance, school papers, forgotten shoes, family discussions, and the invisible mental lists that never completely disappear.
If these activities were recognized as professional work, I think many mothers would qualify as project managers without hesitation.
So maybe I do have a career plan after all.
I may never return to the traditional professional world. I may never have a fancy title attached to my name again. But I still see myself as someone building, organizing, coordinating, anticipating, solving, and managing. The projects simply changed shape.
And my plan now is quite simple: to continue working on meaningful projects, even if I still do not know exactly what the next ones will be. Because one thing is certain… I never really stopped working. I only changed departments.
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