Maybe you’ve noticed her out of the corner of your eye – the woman in pumps and a suit sprinting towards a Little League game, the Latina professional zooming to a parent-teacher conference with her BlackBerry poking out of her purse, the businesswoman who pauses during a day of rapid-fire deal-making to take a call from the school nurse. Who is she, you ask? Well, prepare to be amazed. Not only is she a working mother, she’s also a single mother. She’s a SuperMom!

SuperMoms come in many different varieties, but they all have something in common: They have successfully balanced the demands of single motherhood and the challenges of a high-profile career. How do they do it? Just ask Lupita Colmenero, Lourdes Hassler, Ruth Sandoval, and Deborah Rosado Shaw—four energetic Latinas whose well-adjusted kids and rewarding professional lives can serve as an inspiration to single working moms everywhere.

The first thing these four SuperMoms will tell you is that their successes didn’t come without a lot of work—and a whole lot of scheduling. As every working mom knows, simultaneously meeting the demands of careers and kids can be a constant juggling act. For those single moms who are the sole breadwinners in their families, the pressures can be even more intense.

Ruth Sandoval, who is vice president for Strategic Partners & Alliances at Sodexho North America and whose two sons are now 19 and 14, raised her children largely without her ex-husband’s help. She recalls the hectic period when her youngest was still a toddler and her older son was in second grade: “I would leave work, pick up my older son at 5:20, then get all the way to [my younger son’s] childcare center at 6:00. Then we’d get home and they had homework to do, and as they were doing homework I would start dinner, and then we’d check the homework. There just wasn’t enough of me to go around!”

Ruth Sandoval with sons Adrian and Alejandro	Lupita Colmenero with her children at daughter Eileen’s graduation

Lupita Colmenero, who is the publisher of El Hispano News and the president of the National Association of Hispanic Publications, has a daughter who is 18 and a son who is 13. Even though she is still on very good terms with her ex-husband and they work closely together to raise their kids, she, too, performed a balancing act in managing the schedules of her kids and her career. “At a certain point when they needed me the most, I worked while they were at school,” Colmenero says. “And then I picked them up from school. I was driving them to basketball games, helping with homework, and doing my own work at home. It was absolutely a full day for me—I had moments when I just wanted to quit and disappear.”

According to Deborah Rosado Shaw, author, motivational speaker, and the founder and CEO of DreamBig! Enterprises, coordination and organization—as well as Microsoft Outlook’s calendar—are the keys for survival. She, her ex-husband (who remains extremely close and involved with the family), and their three sons, who are 15, 18, and 20, merge their calendars at the beginning of every school year. When the calendar is done, it is a color-coded compendium of the whole family’s travel, work, and school plans. Rosado Shaw even gives the calendar to her executive assistant. “There isn’t a work life and a home life,” she explains. “It’s all my life!”

The blending of home life and work life is something that Lourdes Hassler, who has a 13-year-old son and an 8-year-old daughter, knows very well. After her divorce seven years ago, she had to develop strategies for caring for her children when her ex-husband couldn’t. A self-described workaholic, she is director of Latin America Sales, North America, at American Airlines. “Whenever there is an opportunity with my work, I bring [my kids] on my business trips,” she says. Aside from increasing their quality time together, bringing her kids along has another benefit: “It showed them from an early age how to behave around strangers and adults who are professionals.”

	Lourdes Hassler (left) speaking at a LULAC event and (right) with daughter Michelle and son Chris

Despite such successful strategies for meeting the needs of children and the demands of the office, most working mothers must occasionally choose between one or the other. Rosado Shaw recalls one such painful moment, when she was dropping her then-2-year-old son off at daycare. “There was one day when he didn’t want to stay, and he grabbed my leg—I had to take this little boy and pry him off my leg and go to work, and I cried all the way there.”

Rosado Shaw has also turned down some amazing professional opportunities, including an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show, in order to meet commitments that she’d already made for her sons. (Luckily, she eventually got another chance to be on the show.) Nevertheless, she acknowledges, “I could have grown my business to 100 times its size, but I was not willing to be gone 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You have to start asking questions like ‘How much is enough?’ and ‘Whose life do I want to lead?’”

Knowing when to call on others for help is another necessary skill for single moms. Rosado Shaw also describes how the need to “go it alone” can sometimes overtake the need to ask for help. “We’re so busy being superwomen,” she laughs. “It was hard for me to find someone else like me in my immediate family, so I really had to reach out and find other women like me. You have to build a network of peers, and that’s what I did.”

Sandoval describes the moment when she realized she needed to ask for help as her “come to Jesus” moment. When her son was 10 years old, he fractured his wrist during a baseball game, and Sandoval found herself trying to drive him to the hospital while simultaneously trying to arrange care for her other son. It took the kind words of another mother at the game to make her realize that she needed to accept some help. “I thought to myself that I was in my ‘supermom’ mode, the mode I had been in since I became a single parent. I wasn’t even thinking about it—I was just doing what I always do: take care of it and go.”

Often, help can come in the simple form of a sympathetic listener, says Colmenero. “Sometimes you just need someone to listen to you without giving advice—just to listen to you crying so that at the end you can feel relieved.” Hassler has a very close girlfriend whom she knows she can always rely on when the going gets tough. “Just the thought that she’s there gives me peace of mind—I know that if I’m in a bind, I have that support system.”

While the kindness of strangers (and of friends) is something that single working mothers can come to depend on, they sometimes face criticism from others who are not quite as well-meaning. “It’s always the mother who faces the blame,” says Rosado Shaw. “People would look at me and say, ‘Oh yeah, she’s never home’—and literally, I never missed an event at school for any of my three sons.”

Sonia Maria Green’s sons accompany her on the red carpet at the Premio de la Gente awards.	Maria de Lourdes Sobrino with daughter Monica

Sandoval, too, received some criticism as a single mother, especially when she became a baseball manager and coach for her older son’s teams. “[The other coaches] were an entire group of dads, and here’s this mom in the middle. They never assumed that I knew what I was talking about, like they would with a man.” Sandoval even faced a challenge from a young baseball player who said he didn’t have to listen to her—but she challenged him to a race and won both the contest and the boy’s respect.

Hassler describes how she has occasionally been subjected to criticism for enjoying her time away from her kids. When the kids spend Wednesdays at their father’s, Hassler plans a “girls’ night out” with her friends, a bubble bath with candles, or “whatever feeds my soul.” Her alone time allows her to decompress—and ultimately to enjoy her kids even more. “I love being with my kids and I miss them when I’m gone, but I think I feel that way because of the time I have for myself,” she says.

Luckily for these SuperMoms, the occasional criticisms and crises have been outweighed by the reward of knowing that, thanks to their decisions as mothers, their kids are happy and well-adjusted.

One of Colmenero’s best moments was bittersweet: One night soon after her divorce, her son began crying, asking questions about what had happened and telling her that the divorce was her fault. Her daughter, who is older, comforted him and explained the situation to him in gentle terms that he could understand. “When I saw my kids talking to each other that way, I knew that everything was going to be all right,” she recalls. “They are such normal kids, they have their self esteem in place, and they love each other.”

Sandoval feels a deep sense of gratification when she hears about her children from other people. “Everywhere I go, everybody notices that they are different, that they are well-behaved, well-accepted, well-mannered,” she says with pride. “They’re comfortable with adults, and one of the reasons is that they had to be adults when they were growing up.”

For Hassler, an experience on a recent vacation with her son and daughter encapsulated the closeness that her family feels. During their time away, the three of them became engrossed in a Monopoly game, which they played on and off for a total of three days. “When we came home, that was the most memorable experience of that trip for my children. We had a great time and the beach was beautiful, but that Monopoly game was the highlight for them,” she explains. “It’s those simple things that mean a lot to them and that they will remember tomorrow, so when we’re working ourselves to death we have to remind ourselves that it’s the simplest things that give us pleasure.”