Centering Motherhood: How Embracing This New Role Reshaped My Time, Productivity, Money, Career, and Boundaries
I didn’t know before becoming a mom just how much being physically with my baby would mean to me. I’m aware that every mother’s circumstances are different — some work because they want to, some because they have to, some because they’re parenting alone, and some because staying home simply isn’t an option. I hold all of those realities with respect. I’m going to write from my experience: that being able to stay home with my baby has awakened a shift in me. Through pregnancy and now four months postpartum, I’ve felt my relationship with time, productivity, money, career, and even boundaries change in ways I couldn’t have predicted. Motherhood didn’t just add a new role to my life — it reorganized the entire structure of how I move througI didn’t know before becoming a mom just how much being physically with my baby would mean to me. I’m aware that every mother’s circumstances are different — some work because they want to, some because they have to, some because they’re parenting alone, and some because staying home simply isn’t an option. I hold all of those realities with respect. I’m going to write from my experience: that being able to stay home with my baby has awakened a shift in me. Through pregnancy and now four months postpartum, I’ve felt my relationship with time, productivity, money, career, and even boundaries change in ways I couldn’t have predicted:
Time — moving from efficiency to presence
Productivity — redefining what “a good day” means
Money — shifting to shared household contributions and roles
Career — letting go of old identities and opening to new ones
Boundaries — learning to protect your energy, your happiness, and your baby
Time & Productivity
My relationship with time started to evolve after my near-death experience, and when I decided to get pregnant (and leave social media) just a few months after that. I wanted everything to slow down and feel a lot more present. We’ve all heard parents say, “It goes too fast!” or “Blink, and they’ll be eight years old!” I’ve also heard many moms regret that they didn’t enjoy their childrens’ younger years more. It’s such a short period of time that they’re babies. And only 18 years where they live with us. I’m aware of how precious this time is.
To slow down, I’ve really had to look at this internal part of me that’s always rushing.
Rushing speeds up time. When we rush or cram a lot into a day, we can accomplish more faster, but also, time slips away from us. We’re not present. It’s a frenetic energy that steals our own beingness away from us.
Slowing down, on the flip side, makes time feel sticky and long. Sometimes this can make the days feel stretched, but mostly it just makes them feel whole.
I caretake nearly 24 hours per day. That’s a lot of hours dedicated to one facet of my life. It would be easy to feel stressed about that. When am I supposed to work out? Get work done? Bake banana bread? Read a book?
And while sometimes those thoughts are there, I’ve been altering my relationship to time. I accomplish all of the above in little slivers and pockets. I do as much as I can with my baby. And whatever needs to be done solo, I get pockets of time here and there. I am brutally aware of time in a way that I’ve never been before. If my husband has our baby for a few hours, I have a clear sense of what I’d like to do with that time. And if I don’t finish it all, that’s ok. Another pocket of time will come soon. And nothing, literally nothing, on my list is as important as our child. I drop everything on a moment’s notice to return to our baby if I’m needed.
They say parents are the best at time management, and I get it now.
But taking it further than that, we don’t have to rush or cram in this season. Nothing matters, nothing but our time with the baby. That is my energy these days, and wow, what a change in priorities.
Deprioritizing everything, but being with the baby is ironically freeing. There is a clear #1 priority, and I live and breathe this priority every day. I celebrate that.
Career
I will say: some moms are accomplishing a lot more than me.
They’re earning more than me.
They’re stacking up accomplishments.
But there is only one accomplishment on this Earth that I care about:
Raising my children
I cannot outsource my job on this Earth.
The way my child smiles at me and only me… I cannot be replaced here. I am most valuable here. I feel like society has fed into women all our lives that we will need our work. Our brains will need it. Our sense of independence. However, I find that to be rather false for me. I believe independence is a myth. If you’re married, so is the idea of having “your own money.” Being a part of a family means you’ve entered into an ecosystem of roles. That’s all they are: roles. Here’s a list of a few different roles / jobs:
Earning money
Childcare and pet care
Cooking and groceries
Cleaning
Planning events, trips, managing the schedule, and buying gifts, etc.
Managing finances
It seems, in a two-income household, that the only job worth having is the one that earns money. Hardly true. What about everything else on this list?
Plus, if you outsource everything within your home, then we are just a group of individuals working. No one is home. Everyone is at work or at school. Everyone in the family is separated.
Further, ever since getting married, I’ve been thinking about partnership and income on a whole new level. Hear me out:
If one partner has a predictable and stable income (trading their time for money) why not have the other person take on a risk with a much bigger payout? For example, one partner works corporate and the other starts a business?
The only way to make good money is to divorce your time and money. One partner can work on divorcing money from time. And when they accomplish it, perhaps no one in the family ever needs to trade time for money ever again.
My ambition didn’t go anywhere when I became a mom. I just now fit it into very few hours each week. What if that was the whole point? What if we were more powerful than we even realized? What if we could earn a whole salary and then some on a few hours per week?
No one said women have to stop having a career or stop working to be a good mom. Creativity keeps us whole and happy. I believe women make great entrepreneurs for a reason. We’ve been doing this forever. We’ve been working with children forever. Just not corporate. Not 40+ hours.
So there’s a lot here…
1) Valuing work that isn’t paid
2) Recognizing our innate power as creators. We not only create humans, but also businesses, books, ideas, and anything we could possibly want to birth.
3) Remembering our time as mothers to young children is unbelievably short in the grand scheme of our lifetime. By the time I’m 40, I’ll likely be done having babies in diapers. That’s a mega shift in time caretaking once they’re walking, talking, and potty-trained. The “baby” stage is short and time-demanding. Why try to “do it all” in one crammed season when we can spread it out and actually enjoy each stage?
4) And last, reshaping what working means. What if being a SAHM was actually a secret little hatch into your most powerful version of yourself? What if you understood your value in a new way that actually unlocked your greatest self?
5) What’s the rush? We don’t need to conflate our worth with our work. We can slow down. The option is often right here in front of us.
Money
Money can buy you a lot of things, but it can’t buy you more time with your baby.
It can’t raise your kids.
It can’t reassure them when they’re sick.
It can’t hold them close or make them giggle.
Kids don’t care about money. They don’t care about your car, your vacations, or eating out at nice restaurants. Kids want to hold your hand and jump in puddles. They want you to be present. They want you to notice the moon with them. Kids enjoy simple things, and I believe adults do, too. That’s one of the joys of having children: they bring us back into the present moment and the simple things.
When I think about money and my family, I mainly just think about leaving as much as I can for them. I don’t think about money for myself. Again, everything is for them. If I’m trying to earn more or save more, it’s for them. There’s no ego in it. There’s no fancy car.
Even still, I have downgraded the importance of money in my life. It’s one of the reasons why we’re budgeting so much lately in my marriage. We’ve cut our spending and I’m…happier?
Having a budget is so clarifying and it makes me realize more isn’t…more.
Clarity and precision is more.
Contentment is the answer.
Morgan Housel writes in his book, The Art of Spending Money, that desiring less can have the same impact on your well-being as gaining more money. In fact, desiring less often leads to “durable contentment.” That is something worth seeking. He said when it comes to wealth, it’s all relative. We all want some increase in our wealth. For some people, that’s from $1k to $5k in net worth. For others, it’s $1M to $5M in net worth. The percent increase in happiness might be similar for these two different people. We just want contrast.
But at the end of the day, the increase we’re all seeking in income and net worth is just a form of security. And after a certain level of wealth, you’ve gone past security into a different stratosphere. I believe that’s where desiring more can start to deteriorate something else within us. There’s a diminishing gain there. Like vanity, it’s a trap.
Boundaries
My energy these days is powerfully reserved for our child. It can’t be fragmented in different directions, and if it gets like that, I’m not a very good caretaker. If we have too many social plans on the weekend, then I’m not present in my role. Worse, I’m tired. When I’m tired, I get cranky, and I’m not the mother I want to be. This is truly the root of everything in this article: being the mother I want to be so that my children have the kind of mother they deserve.
Mothers are the power grid of a family. Every electrical current in the home runs through us. We all know the old adages:
“If mom isn’t happy, no one is.”
“Happy wife, happy life.”
“A man’s character is revealed in the happiness of his wife.”
They’re clichés because they’re often true: the emotional climate of a home is set by the woman at its center.
I protect my happiness not just for me, but to keep everyone else in my family happy, too. Here are a few boundaries that have helped me through trial and error:
We’ve learned to only have one social plan per weekend.
We’ve learned the rhythms that support us the best, such as groceries and cooking on Sundays.
We protect our time. When we protect our time, we protect our energy. And when we protect our energy, we have a happy home.
I’ve often struggled with saying no to plans and feeling guilty. But I know that being social often drains me. If I say yes to something, it has to be 100% with intention. I’ve started assuming everything is a “no,” and then work backwards if it deserves my “yes.” This is a powerful place to come from. I don’t need to make everyone happy. I need to make myself happy. I need to be a happy mom for my child. My boundaries protect this.
Centering motherhood
I’ve found that when everything is centered on motherhood and my baby, it unlocks something primal, true, and resonant within me. It sharpens my focus. If you think of it like an athlete, this purpose makes me lift heavier and run faster. If you think of it like an artist, this purpose makes me think more clearly and write with more acuity. Everything is sharpened into a focus unlike anything I’ve had before. That is the drive of purpose. That is what centering motherhood has done for me.
When you become a parent, your child becomes the center of your universe. Even when you’re apart, everything is about them and for them. I find that to be the most powerful thing in the world. Even before our children are born, I believe this to be true, as well. We march toward the creation of our children, knowing we are en route to building a life for them. The men we marry are our childrens’ fathers. The homes we buy are the setting of our children’s childhoods. We create for our children and for the next generations.
What is everything we are doing if not for humanity to thrive?
What role do we all play in that? In small and large ways? Whether as mothers, parents, aunts, or creators. Perhaps you are writing books or building a business. How will your business go on to nurture humans through the next hundreds of years?
I believe the driving purpose behind what we do (whether it’s caretaking or something else) is truly a mission worth fighting for. Perhaps this is about more than centering motherhood. Perhaps it’s about centering what we want the world to look like for everyone who comes after us... and in a weird cyclical fashion, I’ve been finding myself thinking about that for the next generation:
I want to protect the role of staying home with children.
I want to protect this as an important role.
I want to protect our ability to live in a one-income household.
I want to protect our raw instincts above all else.
What about you? Is there something central to your life that commands all your energy? What is your #1 priority that everything else centers around?
