Survive the vertigo of a working mom's life.

(From Philippine Daily Inquirer)

Byline: An Mercado Alcantara

THE HUSBAND is surfacing from a severe bout with vertigo. For an entire week, he was lost in a spinning dizzy world that swallowed up all his energy and his will power. A bad case of nasal congestion and fatigue conspired to put him through the torture. His ears played tricks on him, creating a sense of imbalance. He groaned, winced and yelled, as his mind took him on a wild rollercoaster ride. He felt himself whirling, turning and spiraling out of control, even though he kept perfectly still, tightly curled in fetal position. A website on vertigo aptly described the condition as the "hallucination of movement." You think you're moving but you're really not.

A hallucination of movement-isn't that what we working moms go through all the time?

We're constantly on the move, constantly trying to stand on our heads just to get all that we need to do done. We're spinning and twirling as fast as we can so that we don't drop any of the pieces of our juggling act. And then at the end of the day, we go through our to-do list and find there's very little we had actually accomplished. We spiral through our day, doing a lot but not really moving very far.

In the book, "Margin" by Dr. Richard A. Swenson, he explains women are reaching saturation point by trying to do just "one more thing." Long after many people would have called it a day, we're still cramming things in, pushing one more chore, squeezing in one more call. And yet, the more we try to fit in, the clumsier we become, the more mistakes we make, and the less able we are to listen. As a result, we find ourselves in the same spot we were before.

To deal with his vertigo, the husband had to choose his movements carefully. One fast turn of the head could send him spinning into oblivion. There was no way of telling which movement would ...