If you’re a new mom or a mom of a baby with a newborn at home, you may see all of the inspirational quotes about pursuing your passions and reaching for the starts and starting each and every day with a fresh new start and think something along the line of:
Give me a freaking break.
And trust me, I get it. There are times in every mother’s life that I like to call Pure Survival Mode.
Those are the times when you’re literally not sleeping at all, when all you can do is try to catch your breath between diaper changes and doing laps with a fussy baby and nursing 24/7 or washing 10,000 bottles. Those are definitely not the times that it may feel like you can conquer the world. (Although, I would argue, you kind of are conquering the world already, that’s not the point…)
The actual point is that if you are a work-at-home mother or hope to become a work-at-home mom, it’s important to realize that working on your business will take structure by working within the seasons of your life as a mother.
Maybe the newborn stage isn’t the best season for you to launch a business or start your book or maybe you happen to have the kind that sleeps and actually, that season is one rich with creativity for you.
Maybe the baby stage is mind-numbing for you, but you find starting a blog the only way you are able to hang on.
Maybe the toddler stage is sapping your strength and you have nothing left at the end of the day or maybe you find that letting a two-year-old run around the house lets you work on a few projects.
Maybe you want to savor every last second before your preschooler heads off to school (sob) and you just want to hold off on marketing yourself to new clients. Or maybe you find all those fellow school parents a great place to pass out your business cards, after all.
The point is simply this, my friends: your life as a mom moves in seasons and waves and is constantly shifting and changing. And that will look different for every mom, so there’s no magic formula I can give you to say: OK, your child is X age, so you should be able to do Y.
Photography courtesy of my five-year-old. Hashtag deadlines.
Only you know your own unique energy levels and how you can structure your day and find what moves you. I’m not saying that there will ever be a season when everything seems to magically fall into place, but I am saying that different ages with your kids bring different seasons of motherhood for you. And those seasons can translate into how you approach your own passions. There may be a season of dreaming and a season of building and a season of have-no-brain-power-just-have-to-power through and a season of hunkering down for product development.
So mommas, I just want to encourage you not to get discouraged with yourself if you happen to be in a season that might seem a little harder than others at the moment. If you’re in a survival season and just can’t seem to see the other side, know that it will come and instead of fighting whatever season you are in, try to work within that season. If you’re in a sick kid season, maybe you can focus on resting to keep up your own health for work later. If you’re pregnant, maybe you can focus on home projects and take advantage of that nesting instinct. If you’re in the newborn stage, maybe you can focus on doing some late-night reading in your industry on your phone.
The seasons of motherhood are sometimes hard and sometimes, beautiful.
But they can work for your business, and not against it. You might just have to look at the seasons a little differently
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