The Power of Her

‘The Perfect Voice’ celebrates strong, trailblazers in this series with stories of women who brave battles every day that serve as an inspiration to the next generation. We have daughters fulfilling their parent’s dreams, victims of domestic abuse rebuilding their lives and professionals dealing with the famous ‘mom guilt’.

Part - 2

Getting over the ‘mom guilt’

Resham Deshpande, Mumbai

Brushing off pangs of ‘mom guilt’, Resham Deshpande flourishes in her profession as a dentist while balancing her domestic responsibilities

It was a routine and happy life with a flourishing career as a dentist, a doting husband and a sprightly daughter when suddenly fate had other plans for Dr Resham Deshpande. An illness in the family shook her and sent her happy life into a state of chaos — what followed were endless hours in numerous doctors’ clinics that needed manoeuvring through Mumbai’s traffic snarls, late nights and juggling work appointments and her home duties. “When I first went back to work after an almost three-year-long maternity sabbatical it took me a while to learn to juggle multiple roles as a mother, working professional, wife, daughter, and daughter in law. That mom's guilt is real!” she says. And then her father’s illness struck.

Even as the family settled into a routine, Deshpande’s mother was diagnosed with cancer, a report that left them all distraught. Her daughter was growing up and needed attention and Deshpande’s career graph was on an upswing. The troubles didn’t deter her resolve to balance her responsibilities. The journey ahead wasn’t easy. But she didn’t let the smile fade off her face. Few people around could guess at what she was going through.

Anxiety, sleepless nights and long drives from her Kandivali home to her parents’ doctors in Dadar left her exhausted. Her patients needed her attention even as Deshpande had to double up as a chauffeur for her daughter, ferrying her to classes.

She didn’t let the pressures and the worries pull her down. Instead, despite the growing demand on her time, the Mumbai-bred dentist enrolled for a course to update her knowledge. Sundays were spent attending online classes and travelling across the city for lectures and seminars. Few hours stolen between home duties and work were used to study and prepare for her examination. While acquiring new skills as a professional, the studies also helped take her mind off the fears and stress that her parents’ ill-health brought.

“Some days being a working mom is a struggle just by itself! With the added worries there was a point where I felt emotionally stretched so thin that I was perpetually exhausted and distracted at work and at home. So, studying a new skill at my age, felt like 'self-care' amidst the chaos around me,” she says. It helped.

In 2024, after months of having no weekends to unwind, Deshpande completed her ‘Fellowship in Orofacial Pain and Temporomandibular Joint Disorders’, an area of study that will help her expand her work as a dentist. “I've learned in the last couple of years that I choose my career to be as important a part of my identity as being a mother, wife and a daughter. My child deserves quality time and attention but I also owe my patients the best upgraded version of myself. I'm learning to accept that I have to step up or down from these roles from time to time as need be. My biggest motivation to excel in the last couple of years has been my teenage daughter. I hope to be a role model and embody the spirit of ‘I can and I will’ so that she can grow up to be smarter and more confident than what I am,” says Deshpande.