292. Redefining Choice, Identity, and Ambition in Motherhood

So like I mentioned already, I used to be an engineer when I started this whole journey, when I started this podcast, when I entered motherhood myself.

I was working as a HVAC mechanical engineer.

That was my path, my trajectory.

That was the life I was living, the life that I felt I was supposed to be doing.

I lived in a very... structured, logical systems lifestyle.

I was all about predictability and schedules and very organized and set in these ways of working in corporate, working nine to five, sending my children to daycare.

It was very much...

the lifestyle I felt was going to be how things worked out.

And after my daughter was born, who just turned seven, I felt stuck in that place at first.

And while I valued my job and that was very much a part of who I was, Motherhood really just opened me up to different possibilities and showed me things that I didn't expect.

It really forced me to see who am I outside of my work, who am I outside of engineering, outside of my profession, outside of my degree.

And it really had me thinking, what do I actually want to do and what do I want my days to look like? What do I enjoy? What do I want life to look like? Do I want to be doing this for the next 30 plus years? And what kind of life do I want to build while raising my children? What do I want their life to be like? What do I want to show them? How do I want to express things to them? What kinds of dreams and ambitions do I want them to follow and go for and think of and understand what's possible? And I think a lot of women quietly ask themselves some of these same questions when they enter motherhood.

And when they're going through this process and not enough of us really say this out loud because I hear stories of people saying, well, I didn't want to send my kid to daycare, but I had to.

I didn't want to particularly work, but we had to.

And this kind of correlates back to birth as well.

There's a lot of this, well, I had to do this.

I had to be induced.

I had to have a cesarean.

I had to go into the hospital because my water broke.

There's a lot of this, I had to.

And sometimes we don't know that there are other options or that there is a different possibility.

And we're stuck on this conveyor belt of the next thing just coming at us.

And nobody says, would you like to have a cervical check? They just say, hey, we're going to do a cervical check.

And in life, you know, nobody says like, would you like to take a step back from work? And and be with your child more, and then you can come back when you're ready.

You know, it's, oh, I get eight weeks, six weeks, 12 weeks, whatever it might be.