No One Born Ready: Underappreciated Virtues of Motherhood
This post is about:
A gentle reminder of three skills that are part of being a mother but can remain underappreciated. Staying present, self-regulation, and resilience.
My wife was relatively similar to her present self before she became a mother. She was capable, honest, and I deeply admired her for her virtues. After our child arrived, my admiration deepened in a way that was completely unexpected to me.
The change happened gradually with gentle ease. It was a daily, relentless process of becoming the mother her child needed her to be, while still being there for herself, for our marriage, and for the business she was building at the same time.
She remained the same honest person I fell in love with. The skills, however, she did not choose to develop so much as was required to develop them, are the same skills that make her a relentless creator.
The connection didn’t happen by chance. If you are a mother building your business, it is not a coincidence for you either.
No one is ready for motherhood
You can read books, attend classes, speak to mothers all day long, but the moment it becomes real you will stand on a boat without a manual while the wind is howling stronger by the minute. The same is true for building a business.
You will (hopefully) plan, research, model, and prepare, and you will still encounter sleepless nights trying to figure out how to turn your ship in the right direction. You learned the most in those moments if you think about them in hindsight.
What you could and continue to do, in both cases, is adapt and endure.
You have to.
This is the actual skillset which you don’t give yourself the right amount of credit for. Let me give you three examples.
Tolerating uncertainty by staying present
Motherhood is an uncategorized synonym for uncertainty. It gives you a child who changes rapidly, constantly emerging personal development topics reaching back to your own childhood, and a job description that rewrites itself every other month.
You will learn, slowly and sometimes painfully, that if you try to micromanage, you’ll end up forever frustrated. You can only show up for what is in front of you right in the given moment.
In business, this is called emotional resilience. In motherhood, it is called Tuesday.
As you practice staying present with uncertainty instead of trying to resolve it forcefully, you build emotional capacity that most people never develop. Which in return will let you make decisions without needing to know every answer, and instead you become stable enough to move forward with incompleteness.
Lingering thoughts have no time to stay. You learned how to control your attention to solve the momentary chaos, because you became the mother you once needed.
Regulating your own emotions
The second kind of strength that does not get celebrated enough is the strength of staying regulated when the world tries to fall apart. When your child(ren) is in the middle of a tantrum, when the team becomes undecisive, the steadiest person in the room becomes the anchor.
Instead of suppression, which is a short-term solution with long-term costs, I mean regulation. You allow yourself to feel but decide how you react, if at all by holding them, then processing it because you do not let it become the room's problem to carry.
Mothers learn these physically and emotionally exhausting ways that are relentless. They learn it at 2am and at school pickup and in the middle of difficult conversations that demand attention. Every time they choose to regulate instead of unloading, they are building the exact leadership capacity that businesses need most.
Your steadiness is a virtue. It is what makes other people feel safe enough to grow.
Keeping going without applause
There is no performance review for raising a child. No quarterly bonus, no recognition email, no moment where someone pulls you aside to say you are doing a remarkable job. You keep showing up because stopping is not an option, and you love what you do. Well, most of the time, anyway.
Building a business is similar. The early stages in particular are long stretches of effort without external feedback. You do the work without a meaningful response, but you keep going anyway.
This is one of the hardest things to sustain without a foundation of internal recognition, and it is exactly what motherhood builds. Capacity to find the beauty in the mundane, even when no one else is pointing it out.
See how far you have already come
Before you look at the future, look back at how far you have already traveled. You cannot accurately assess your own resilience if you only ever measure yourself against what is still missing.
Think about who you were before you became a mother, or before you started building your business. Think about what you could not have handled then that you handle now with ease. Think about how you became stronger to carry.
That is the result of years of deliberate, hard-won growth.
If slowing down to take stock feels uncomfortable, Are You Allowed to Progress Slower? might be a worthwhile read as well.
You changed, and the road ahead is still long, which means you'll have to keep learning. But if you remember where we started, there’s peace in that.
What is one thing you handle now that you could not have handled three years ago?
Appreciate that with an open heart.
It’s perfectly okay to ask for support. You don’t have to figure everything out on your own. While I believe everyone is their own best expert, I’m also a big believer in asking for help to create change together. It’s comforting to have someone by our side as we go through transitions. If you’re feeling motivated to expand your comfort zone and curious about how I can support you on your journey, let’s talk.
The parent you swore you'd never become has a way of showing up anyway, usually at the worst moment. Online parenting coaching helps you catch it before it becomes the pattern.
