Mom at 36
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02:44:04 pm on July 11, 2007 | # |
To follow up on my previous post of mixing career with pregnancy, here is a discussion from an academic environment, where pregnancy is discussed (heatedly within the comments section) within the context of job search and attaining tenure.
What I want to touch upon is an article I read recently on parenthood and its impact on ambition. Although this article focuses on the effect of a newborn on a working woman’s ambition, it made me think about how pregnancy itself affected my ambition as a solo entrepreneur who works from a home office.
Women like me are in a different environment than those who work in the office: I am almost always working in isolation, I don’t have the luxury (and bane) of an office-based community, I can easily - and do - overwork because I set my own hours and goals.
For the first 3 months of pregnancy (April, May, and June) I cut back 95% of physical productivity and about 99% of ambition. I was literally, physically incapacitated. The 5% physical productivity I could muster was focused across a total of 5 days of out-of-state business trips and 3 separate speech competitions I participated in. My wishful thinking of recovering quickly from pregnancy symptoms and general travel fatigue were quickly dashed when I became sick with a cold and cough in May ~ probably from both emotional and shear (mechanical) bodily stress. At the beginning of the end of my first trimester, I realized that:
1) I may end up being one of those women whose “first trimester” symptoms of nausea and fatigue carry on (this was ultimately the case, because I’m now in my 18th week and I threw up last night). Therefore, I must come to terms with the reality that my tendency for perfection and unrealistically high expectations were wreaking havoc on my mental health, and I have a history of clinical depression that I must be careful about.
2) I am in a position where my income generation abilities are still directly proportional to my need for “getting out there” ~ that is ~ my business is too much like a job, where my income drops when I can’t show up on the job each and every day. Granted, over the past two years I’ve worked diligently to change the ratio of active income residual or passive income, but this ratio is not yet where I want it to be.
3) Suddenly I care a lot less about how much I want to achieve toward my future goals when I feel as sick as I do. When I was feeling well enough to do an iota of work, I did what I needed to do to prevent fires. The rest of the time, I resigned to accepting that “I may be missed, but the world is not going to end if I disappear for a little while.”
This last point relates most closely to my ambition.
When I am faced with a fraction of physical energy compared with what I used to take for granted ~ and even took advantage of without regard for my long term health ~ I am forced to prioritize. I’ve heard new parents often use the word prioritize. This is because we are reminded each and every day that time is finite. Our energies (physical, mental, and emotional) are bounded by within this physical plane called time, while our desires and ambitions can be boundless.