How to balance motherhood and business?
You don’t until you do. This is what changed the game for me.
How many times have you thought to yourself: I can’t do this?!
And yet, you still do it.
You’re showing up. Every. Single. Day.
That’s simply what it means to be a mother. You don’t wake up one day saying: Nah, I’ll call in sick today. You can’t.
Your children adore you even if you didn’t shower since last week. It doesn’t matter.
Imagine if we treated our creativity the same way? Like it’s our own little baby that we always show up for?
Guess what: It will adore you even if it means that it’s at the expense of your 10 minute shower window. Screw it - just shower tomorrow. Put on a clean t-shirt and your good to go.
Before baby, you can theoretically sit on your ass and work on your own sh*t for AS LONG AS YOU WANT (I know, crazy isn’t it?).
You can attend all the live webinars at odd hours.
Get nerdy on editing your work to perfection.
Spend hours responding to every DM and comment to boost your engagement.
Do whatever the algorithms want you to do to get the greatest exposure you can possibly imagine.
It’s funny really. You rarely realise just how much time you actually have (even if you work), before you have children.
And ones they are here, you desperately try to find some kind of balance in the juggle only to realise that there’s none to be found.
Spoiler alert: YOU have to create the balance. It won’t just magically appear, even if that would’ve been really convenient…
One thing that you quickly learn as you enter motherhood is that nothing turns out the way you plan it to. Even mothering itself.
Before being a mother I thought I would do things a certain way only to be proven VERY WRONG ones it came down to it.
When I got the advice “Expect the unexpected” from my new landlord upon arriving in rural South Africa soon 10 years ago, I could never imagine how useful of an advice that would be as a mom (and creative business owner?!) later on.
Now my motto is:
Expect the unexpected and plan for the unthinkable.
How does that look like in reality?
For some that means to bring their whole house in the car whenever you go out. For us, having moved internationally THREE times within the past year (that’s another story), it simply means to wing it and be flexible with whatever comes your way.
It’s one thing to learn about something in theory. A completely different thing to do it practise.
If there was a school of mothering where all mothers would go while pregnant, it would still not cover even a fraction of the *actual* transformation from womanhood to motherhood that women across the globe experience.
We’re all the same but also so different. Most importantly, everyone’s experience is just as valid no matter where on the spectrum you end up.
You cannot know how an experience will impact you BEFORE it happens.
You think you do. But again, that’s just a theory.
I think of business much the same way.
We think we know how it works, but then there comes a pandemic and puts everything on its head. Or a war, or another baby to use a more positive example of a massive personal change.
And imagine the unthinkable… ALL of the above things happen almost at the same time (or within a relatively short time-span from each other)? Talk about whirlwind, girl.
Well, that’s about as close to reality as it gets for us who have been mothering and simultaneously tried to run a creative business in a globally intertwined online climate for the past few years.
How do you even do it?
I don’t know. But I still do whatever *it* is. I show up. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. Because that’s what mothers and passionate creatives do. And I know you do it too, even if you may not give yourself credit for it.
How does this help you to find a balance as a mom and creative business owner?
To embrace the unthinkable and accept that nothing will go as planned are the two main mindset shifts that have had the biggest impact on whether I feel balanced or not.
Before continuing, I’ll be straight with you: I don’t think you’ll ever find THE balance. Because whenever we think we’ve got a routine down, it changes again due to another tooth coming through or some other developmental phase that spice things up.
Suddenly you can’t make it to your 8pm livestream, because baby decided that daddy isn’t as fun to hang with anymore.
Instead of looking for balance from the outside, the balance has to come from within yourself. To allow yourself to become in tune with the season you’re in and adapt accordingly. Nothing lasts forever for good and for bad.
How can this look in practise vs in theory?
In theory, daddy pushes through and manages to keep baby entertained.
In reality, mommy feels stressed out to hear baby cry downstairs and her brain is severely struggling to remember what it was she had to work on in the first place (hormones!).
She either tries to push through as well, but will inevitably feel frustrated for not being at her best (and not to mention, the famous mom-guilt that never fails to kick in). Or she gives herself and baby some grace, go down to recalibrate her own and baby’s balance before she returns to her work with a content baby tucked into the carrier.
Your initial 30 minutes got drastically reduced to 10. But those 10 are balanced and peaceful and you can address the most urgent emails before time is up.
This is not a failure. This is what it looks like to be a mother and to run a creative business at the same time. For certain seasons, you’ll have to find a way to merge the two, even if society (and the pro-hustle work culture) theorises otherwise.
In theory it’s easy to do anything. But in reality (including the aforementioned BROAD spectrum of the unexpected emotional response to the transition into motherhood), you’ll most likely feel attuned to act differently than theory tells you to. And that is OK.
I’ve noticed a trend over the past few days, where many share their wins from the past year. This is fabulous. Especially for mother makers.
Our children bless us with the need to be present. The side-effect is that we don’t realise all that we’ve accomplished in the day-to-day unless we actively zoom out.
The saying goes “Rome wasn’t built in one day”. It was built one little stone at the time and never seemed to get finished… until one day it was.
In the day to day, it may seem like there is no balance. You’re running on caffeine and general overwhelm of being needed all day all night. Yet, as you zoom out you realise: Hey, I actually did that! And that too!
What has kept me anchored to my creativity and online art business are the small incremental steps that seems invisible to the eye but has an impact on the overall continuity if the work.
Sometimes that’s all that is needed. You don’t have to be in growth mode all the time.
We’re so wired to always look for “more” and “bigger” and “better” that we sometimes miss the incredible feat of being able to just “remain”.
To grow a creative business to a certain income is no guarantee that it will remain that way. So rather than feeling like a failure for not growing, recognize your achievements for not hitting rock bottom either.
A mindset shift that has been a game-changer for me to find balance between motherhood and business
Before ending this article, I want to give you something tangible that you can experiment with right away.
GO ALL IN on whatever you’re doing at the moment rather than “half-assing” your way through everything.
Let’s explain that a bit further.
For example, I spend the first three hours every morning with the kids while my husband work.
If my mind is pre-occupied with all the things I *should* or *have to* do I will end up feeling incomplete and out of balance in every area. I’ll have mom-guilt for not having been present with my children. And I will have business-guilt for not having achieved any of the things I needed to do for work (simply because I was with the children).
Instead I try to “block my mind” to immediate tasks and let the “mind-wandering” happen whenever it’s nap-time and I know that my mental presence has no difference to my child’s well-being.
That is why I (just like I read many of you other creative mamas) do most of my writing during said nap-times. When my oldest dropped her naps (just before little sister was born) I first panicked. How am I gonna get ANYTHING done now?!
Even though the adjustment took a little time, we found a way to still hold “nap-time” (now adjusted to little-sisters’ floating schedule) just that she can choose what she does during that time.
It can be to read a book, do some play-doh, drawing, watch a show, play some Montessori on the iPad or *the favorite* play with daddy if he’s not working. She knows that nap-time is mom’s work-time now and she’s doing really well with it.
Does it mean we don’t have our frustrated moments? NO. She’s 3.5, tantrums are an inherent part of these little lovelies being haha.
As aforementioned, when you think you’ve got something working be prepared for it to change soon. But rest assured, that when it does, you’ll find a new solution that will work for some time.
Because that’s what you do now. You work with what you’ve got. You expect the unexpected and plan for the unthinkable and adapt accordingly.
I’ll leave you with this:
You can’t be everything to anyone at the same time. That’s not what balance is about. Nevertheless, you ARE something to someone at any time and you CHOOSE when and how that is distributed to find as much internal balance as you can.
Thank you for reading!
Elin, x
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Loved your piece and also dislike the word balance. It gives me an image of a woman holding a giant platter over her while standing on a ball and the platter is filled with all the stuff she has to do and she has no free hands and she’s wobbling and looks ridiculous doing it. I just don’t know of a better word! Like you said, go all in on one thing at a time. Half assing is no good for anyone! I think the reality is that something always has to give. Some days I’m better at my creative work, and some days I’m better at being a mom, and some days I feel like I’m bad at both.
I wrote a piece on this topic recently entitled “Wow, How Does She Do It? She’s Not. She’s Drowning.” I wrote this piece during one of those work breaks that turn into bout 14 minutes of focused time, and I was hanging by a thread. Thanks for this refreshing perspective, and also, it’s good to hear from another woman living this life.