Not everyone has exactly nine months to plan ahead and prepare for motherhood — sometimes it can happen overnight, and other times it can take years.
The process of adopting a child can be long, laborious and fraught with uncertainty. You never know when you’ll get the call or how long it will take, or when you might become a parent. For Priti Krishtel, she got the call late one night that her kid was here, and she jumped on a plane to be at the hospital on the other side of the country just 24 hours later.
On today’s episode, we talk to Priti about her journey to parenthood, and her thoughts about becoming a mother, and how she felt about parenthood in her twenties and thirties. For a long time, she wondered if it was in the cards and whether or not motherhood was right for her. When she met her partner in her late 30s, she tells us how it was early on that he brought up adoption and kids. She was thrilled to find someone on the same page as her.
But, as always on this show, our work lives and our parenting lives often have interesting intersections—neither is done in a vacuum.
Priti is a human rights lawyer and the cofounder of a company called I-MAK. They are a company focused on changing the way that people have access to medicines. Today, over 2 billion people live without access to critical life-saving medicines that are often priced so high as to be unattainable. One of the root causes that they’ve identified behind this problem is the outdated patent system which enables drug companies to get hundreds of patents and set high prices for extended amounts of time. This can be crippling to people who live in poverty. Her work is all about how to medicines more accessible for everyone particularly vulnerable populations.
In today’s show, we hear the story about how she took a sudden, short leave from her company to welcome her child to her family, and how her company rallied behind her throughout the process. We’ll hear about her process of adoption, how becoming a parent influenced her work, and how her work changed in becoming a parent.
LISTEN TO THE STARTUP PREGNANT EPISODE #136:
SOME QUOTES FROM THE EPISODE
- I turned around yesterday and he had climbed up on a chair and I realized that it’s game over for us now, we can’t turn our backs even for a minute.
- I’m 41. When I was in my 20s I thought that I wanted to become a mother someday, and in my 30s I really went back and forth about whether it was going to be the right choice for me.
- I was publicly at the height of my career and my role as executive director of a nonprofit. I was busier than I had ever been. I was managing a larger team than I had ever managed. When our son joined our family, my husband said, “I got this. I love newborn babies. This would be my dream to be his primary care giver in the first several months.”
- my husband spent the first 3 to 6 months of our son’s life with him. He was doing the skin on skin and the feeds and waking up at night. I was working.
- Until more and more members of the public are willing to speak up on behalf of families and communities who are really suffering because of the inequity in the world today, I don’t think we can reach that next step of reimagining and building a more just world.
- Over time, humans have been conditioned in a fight or flight mentality, and a scarcity mentality. It’s also not our fault that we think in terms of scarcity, but if we do the work to shift our consciousness, to shift away from scarcity and to think from a frame of abundance and expanding that abundance, then we actually can get there. It takes inner work.
- When I’m learning something new, I ask myself, “Is this an opportunity to practice a new skill?” I try to recognize that it’s going to be hard 25 times before it gets easy.
FIND OUT MORE ABOUT PRITI AND I-MAK
- Follow Priti Krishtel and I-MAK on Twitter
- The company website: https://www.i-mak.org/
- Watch Priti’s TEDWomen2019 talk, now live on the TED website.
THE WISE WOMEN’S COUNCIL 2020 IS NOW OPEN FOR APPLICATIONS
Want to be part of the magic that is gathering together with smart, talented, wise business women? The 2020 Wise Women’s Council is now open for enrollment. Early bird applications are open through January 20th, and the program kicks off in March. Yes, we want you—all of you in your messy, imperfect, parenting-business-what-am-I-doing-madness. Apply here.
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