Life Happens
Despite our best efforts to be prepared, life happens.
Case in point, I planned a trip to be there for my sister during her birth, but Baby was working on his own timeline and had yet to arrive at the end of my scheduled week in the Bay area.
Society claims to value flexibility and laud the ability to adjust on the fly, yet somehow when it comes to pregnancy and birth, we view it as an inconvenience. What if we learned to see the unpredictability of it all as an opportunity—to gather data, make projections and then pivot as necessary? What if we stopped trying to maintain such a tight grip on control and developed the skills necessary to plan for things that don’t have specificity?
Today, I’m celebrating the honest conversations we’ve had in my first 25 interviews on Startup Pregnant and sharing my insight on pregnancy and childbirth—being in the thick of it again with my sister this past month. Listen in for my take on the illusion of control, our lack of candor around the hard work of pregnancy and childbirth, the significance of taking the time to recover, and the dedication required to breastfeed your baby.
The Startup Pregnant Podcast Episode #045
Some quotes from the episode
- “There seems to be this idea that we think birth and human life is so inconvenient at times. We’d like to just organize it and put it all into boxes.”
- “Taking a closer look [at pregnancy and birth], which is one of my goals with this podcast, can help us actually make more reasonable expectations and plans, and maybe even help us do business better.”
- “We can pretend to have control, but we don’t.”
- “We make a plan, and then things don’t go according to plan.”
- “Birth is really, really hard work.”
- “Trying to have control is kind of a losing game. The best I can really do is make a rough plan or a sketch or an estimation or a vision, and then play like heck with the tools you’ve got—and dance with what life offers you in response.”
- “Your body is doing an amazing amount of work [during pregnancy] … it’s fabulous and it’s cool and it’s unilateral and it’s focusing and it’s messy and it’s extraordinary. I just wish we knew, I wish more people talked about it or told me, and I wish we would honor it better—this amazing thing that women are about to do.”
- “I wish someone had told me to lie down more: ‘Your only job right now is to recover.’”
- “Life happens. We can shift business to better fit this kind of cycle and process, rather than trying to stuff pregnancy into business.”