Working At Home With Family, For Family

“I don’t think I can come over today… I’ll just video call you later tonight okay?” 

Working with your sister is a privilege. You’ve spent your whole life with that person, you know them inside out – their strengths, their capabilities and what drives them. You’re already comfortable with each other, which makes bouncing off ideas easier, and it’s a lot more flexible. It also means being able to feel less guilty when you’re having an unmotivated day, because you know you can count on your other half to drag you along… and you don’t actually mind that they do. 

Now that we each have our own kids, our “meetings” sometimes allow us to cross three things off the list at once: visit our parents, let the cousins meet each other and clear work-related matters together. 

We never thought we’d end up here though, because we went through what we feel is the “typical Singaporean route”. We both graduated from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and then we both went on to become teachers while getting married and starting our own families. 

Somehow today, we have had 10 books and 2 card games published under our own company name all in a span of 5 years, with more products in the works. Believe us when we say everything came as a surprise.

Being authors and business owners were never something we dreamt of as little kids. When Hafeezah left her job to be a SAHM, there was never an intention to publish a book. Instead, it was staying home raising her daughter and discovering the dearth in resources when it came to introducing Arabic letters to the very young that sparked the idea which eventually led to The Arabic Alphabet of Huruf Island. But still, at that time we believed it would just be a side hustle. Hanan continued to teach through our first 2 books because we weren’t sure if it would even work out. So much so that we chose to remain anonymous and use a pen name “Ukhti Husni” (Sisters of Husni, our brother who passed on in 2009) instead of our own names.

Needless to say, that very “side hustle” quickly turned into a full business and we’re now both full-time WAHMs with 6 children between us! And it’s not an easy feat! 

Being more of the “go-with-the-flow” kind of people with little children to manage and a business to run, it’s challenging on most days to stick to a routine. We keep our mornings free to handle family and personal matters and try to meet up 2-3 times a week to sort out work. But motherhood is never predictable so sometimes we end up cancelling plans and settling for an impromptu video meeting once the kids have gone to bed. And when we do get to meet, we’ve gotten used to getting interrupted every 10 minutes or so.

But it’s not all an inconvenience. Our children sit at the very center of what we do. We see the problems they encounter, the questions they ask and we aim to address them in our stories. We get their opinions on a lot of things during the production process. We read to them the first draft of our books to see if they enjoy them, we show them the illustrations to see if it appeals to them and we test our card games with them to see if it works for their age. 

We enjoy the flexibility of working at home. No matter how distracting, being able to work and watch our children play at the same time is a blessing, one that we are thankful to be able to have. If anything, we hope that watching their mothers hustle at home inspires them to pursue their own passions (in fact, it already has: Hafeezah’s youngest is an aspiring author and our older 2 children enjoy illustrating). 

Our journey has been beautiful, albeit unexpected. So for other SAHMs who are starting to feel like your life is going nowhere besides round and round your children, find a way to keep your passions burning. And when you get that one idea, just go at it. Don’t think too much. If we had sat on the idea of writing a book instead of just diving into it, we wouldn’t be where we are today. 

Photo from Homely Hammock.

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