Having a baby made me successful
There is a story that society tells about women who have babies.
That they need to “get off the ride” of their career, business, or professional trajectory.
That they must step back from ambition and veer towards their children.
But what if for some of us, instead of disembarking, we’re simply recalibrating and what we really need isn’t support to give up what we love, but support to keep it. What if we are allowed to redefine our definitions of success, rather than giving up on it.
In studies of tribal communities a mother would spend, on average 7 hours of the day caring for her child. The rest of the time? That child is handled by up to 13 other caregivers including matriarchs, and other older children, with each caregiver naturally having their own influence & expertise on the upbringing of that child, while always ensuring the child was loved and cared for.
We don’t live in that world anymore. But maybe the reason you cannot juggle it all, is because we never ever did.
I realised I was successful after the birth of Darcy. But I feel like its important to define that, because success is relative. Success isn’t hit when your bank account reaches a magical number (unless thats how you personally define it). When I think about success, I think about a lifestyle of freedom & service. Where I can help people but not be tied down to a way of living, a place, or even a business. Running yoga studios isn’t about the money and NEVER has been. However if I can make good money to grow and move to a larger location to fit more people in, pay my staff sick leave (even though I don’t legally have to), and pay staff to run our free community events, or add more offerings to the timetable, and donate chunks of our takings to charity… that’s success. If I can make enough money to not even need to teach a class, while paying myself a living wage, and to travel with my family while the business runs itself… that’s success.
But I had been waiting for some sort of sign that THIS was it.
Before Darcy arrived, I’d been pushing through my pregnancy in a number of ways;
1. It wasn’t the pregnancy I’d hoped for and infinitely harder than my first. All the “time” I thought I had to prepare my new business location for my maternity leave was sucked up in pain, perinatal depression, and bed-ridden nausea.
2. I was absent from the business for weeks and weeks on end. It was surviving, but not thriving, so I felt like I was always chasing my tail.
Darcy arrived with a huge amount of turbulence in November 2019 and the giant hand of the universe smacked me down. Oh boy I remember, after I came out of the ICU, how long it would take me to walk just from my front door to the mailbox (a mere 20 metres). How could I possibly run two studios and manage 18 staff while drugged up to the eyeballs and unable to shower myself properly and feed a tiny human who needed me so?
As it turned out, I didn’t need to.
It was in the process of healing my way out of this hole, navigating newborn life again for the first time in 6 years, that I began to look objectively at my livelihood, how I operated, worked, lived, and what it meant for me to “thrive”. And as Darcy grew I was delighted with what grew in me too.
When you have a baby, alot of shit ceases to matter. You save your cares only for the most important things and either delegate or ignore the rest. Are they warm? Are they safe? Are they fed? Are all the basic needs met? Good… ok. Then that’ll do for today.
The same applies to business. When you start to prioritise things in your business out of absolute necessity & survival, it becomes part of your real world, your modus operandi. When I had no time and even less energy, when I was chronically sleep deprived, I focussed on the tasks or projects that either a) generated direct revenue or b) reduced our overheads. Everything else could bloody well wait. It forced me to streamline so many of our processes that my business literally thrives on processes now. It forced me to critically assess my financials month apon month to see where we could trim the wastage and thus correct hundreds of dollars of wasted funds a month. It forced me to delegate & hire to fill my gaps in time so that now I have a cracking team under me.
I realised, that I could work just 10 hours a week and still draw a wage.
I realised I didn’t have to work IN the business anymore, but ON the business. I could stop teaching yoga classes completely and the studios would carry on fine without me.
Like, what?!
How was it possible that I was working less yet achieving more.
I had been working so hard for so long, marinating in the “growth phase” of my business and get wholly used to that life that I didn’t realise that I’d tenderly moved into maturation phase. That I no longer need to push the cart, I can ride in it, and that was all thanks to a challenging pregnancy, birth trauma, and a newborn. Sometimes we don’t know what our life can look or feel like until we’re challenged to reassess it. Sometimes our children don’t highlight our shortcomings, sometimes they highlight our strength.
x Kaye
Imagery by Belle Verdiglione
