Little Hands, Big Plans - Motherhood and Business

Motherhood as Opportunity: Reimagining Career After Baby

• Emilia Coto • Season 1 • Episode 2

Share episode

Motherhood isn't a career killer but an invitation to slow down and reimagine work in ways that prioritize what truly matters. I share how becoming a mother transformed my approach to my law career, from planning for minimal interruption to making the bold choice to pause and eventually restructure my business around family priorities.

• The common narrative that motherhood harms careers and what challenging this belief looks like
• My pre-baby plan to take minimal time off and return to work "without skipping a beat"
• The unexpected shift in priorities as my due date approached
• Letting go of my legal assistant and pausing firm growth despite fears about career impact
• The transformative moment of holding my baby and realizing I couldn't return to business as usual
• Practical strategies for planning a career pause including client management and financial preparation
• Understanding how little we actually need when priorities shift to family
• Why I partnered with a colleague to build a part-time practice structured around family
• The ongoing journey of finding balance through different seasons of motherhood

Remember, motherhood isn't the end of your dreams—it's just the beginning of a different kind of adventure that might slow us down for a purpose.

To keep the conversation going, let's connect on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/

This episode is brought to you by Sisu Legal. Learn more at: https://sisulegal.com/


If this episode resonated with you, please share it with another mom who needs encouragement. Subscribe so you never miss an episode, and connect with me on LinkedIn.

For other episodes and resources, visit our website at https://littlehandsbigplans.co/pages/podcast

Speaker 1:

What if babies aren't the career killers we once thought. What if their purpose is to slow us down just enough to help us see what really matters? What if, instead of ending our dreams, they're actually making space for them? Becoming a mother changes everything, including how we view our work time and priorities. But too often we hear the narrative that motherhood is a setback, that if you want to be successful, you have to keep pushing, keep growing, keep moving without missing a beat. And for a long time I believed that too. But when I had my first baby, everything changed. Welcome to Little Hands Big Plans the podcast for moms who want to reimagine work after kids and build a life where family comes first, without giving up your dreams. I'm Amelia and I know firsthand how much motherhood shifts our careers, our priorities and our pace. But instead of seeing it as a setback, what if we saw it as an invitation, an opportunity to design a life with a little more freedom, a little more presence and a little more fulfillment? Each week, we'll have honest conversations with moms who've shaped their work and business around what truly matters. Whether you're considering a career pivot, dreaming of a slower pace or just wondering what's possible, you're in the right place. So grab a little something warm, settle in and let's explore the possibilities together. Today, I want to share my journey about how I went from growing a law firm and planning for an uninterrupted career to making the bold decision to pause, embrace the newborn season and ultimately restructure my business in a way that allows me to be present for my family while still making an impact and you will be hearing my newborn in the background throughout. I want to invite you to consider what if motherhood isn't the end of your career dreams but the beginning of something even better.

Speaker 1:

Before my first baby was born, I was in full career mode. I was working full-time hours, running my own law firm and my husband, who was also an entrepreneur. We were both pouring long days into building our businesses. I had spent over a decade growing my career and I didn't want anything to slow that down. I had heard all about the baby penalty. You know how having kids would derail my progress, how women struggled to regain momentum and how I needed to be strategic about keeping up. I even hired a business coach to help me map out my maternity leave, because I told myself I just wanted to have enough time to recover and then I wanted to be back without skipping a beat.

Speaker 1:

But as my due date got closer, something shifted. I started to feel conflicted, because I realized that I didn't want to miss the magic of those first few months and moments with my baby. I didn't want to be. You know, we've all heard one too many stories about lawyers answering their emails in delivery rooms, working through labor, feeling stretched so thin that they don't get to enjoy those precious early days, and I knew that deep down. I just did not want that for myself, I didn't want that for my family. So I made the decision that I never expected to make and I chose to pause, and I'm thankful that the business coach that I had worked with really encouraged that. Even though I had a specific goal and things that I wanted to achieve, it was okay and it was going to be the career, the work that was always gonna be there.

Speaker 1:

And it wasn't an easy decision to make. I had to let go of a wonderful legal assistant that we had been working with for a couple of years. I had to step back from growing the firm. It meant slowing everything down and even though at the time I just I wanted to keep going and I was scared. I was scared that I was going to lose progress. I was scared of disappointing clients, of losing referral partners that I had worked so hard to build that relationships with. I was scared of being viewed differently, like now that I'm a mom, I'm going to be too busy, I'm not going to get clients. I was scared generally about what this pause might mean for my long-term career and in the end I'm so happy that I did it, because the pause gave me something that I wasn't expecting and that I've now come to really value, and that is flexibility. I knew at the time that taking the pause meant, if I wanted to come back and ramp it up, I could. If I needed more time, I also had options, and that option was the tough decision that I had to make to let go of my wonderful legal assistant, but by the way, she ended up becoming an entrepreneur herself and last time I heard she was doing great. In general, I was met with much more understanding than I expected. There was no backlash, there was no angry clients. No one except for myself was questioning my decision, and something that I realized was that the best part about being an entrepreneur is the ability to build a business around family, and that realization was really powerful because it changed the way after I came back, of how I structured my business to now be able to really support my growing family.

Speaker 1:

If you're not a mom, if you're pregnant, I'm going to say that nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing can prepare you for that moment when you first hold your baby for the first time, and I clearly remember an even bigger shift happening at the time. I just cannot imagine something more beautiful, something more like. Your whole life just changes the moment that they put them on your chest. And at first I had planned to take just four months off, so that would be just enough time for my baby to get a daycare spot. In the US, you know, many moms are expected to be back at work at six to eight weeks, and so four months felt generous, and four months would give me enough time to get into daycares that I really liked.

Speaker 1:

But as the months passed and as I grew more and more attached to my baby and as I started to think about what kind of life I wanted my child to have, what their childhood to look like, I started to realize that I wasn't going to be able to go back to business as usual. I started to realize that I wasn't going to be able to go back to business as usual. I you know daycares there's some really nice ones in our areas and I toured I'm going to say at least a dozen, and I liked some more than others, but I never really felt the right fit. I couldn't. When I thought about it, I just couldn't picture me going through the procedures of going through the drop-off line and dropping my baby off and this isn't any type of judgment to anyone that does or anyone who really likes their daycare and I know lots of wonderful moms that do that. I also know moms that don't have a choice but to do that.

Speaker 1:

But just for us, I did not feel like it was the right fit. I couldn't see us going through it. It really felt like it just was not a good match and the long hours that I had been working again, it just didn't align with the kind of life that I wanted for my family and it didn't align with the childhood that I wanted my baby to have, the childhood that I wanted my baby to have. You know, with all the fears that I had about finances, about the impact on career, the business. I just really shifted into that slowing down to think about next steps because it just the coming back to business as usual just wasn't going to be an option and maybe I think all those insecurities that I had were sort of leading up to this moment to. You know, maybe deep down my body knew that it was going to be a bigger change than I could have expected.

Speaker 1:

I wanted to share a couple of key lessons that I learned from my first maternity leave, and so planning ahead was really key. It felt like I was planning in advance for so long. I started just when I was past the first trimester, but it was key because I was able to really assess each file that I had. I was able to give clients a lot of notice to make the transition smooth. So what I tried to do was that I tried to let clients know what their deadline was for submission, if they wanted to work with me to submit their files, and then if they didn't, then I gave them some really good options for other lawyers that could help them and just let those files go. And that meant everyone was happy.

Speaker 1:

And then the other thing is that I basically after three months I started to save, save, save as much as I could, because I knew that there was going to be a long period of time where I wasn't going to have a lot of income or the income that I was used to, and so that gave me more option to have more of a runway to continue. Because for lawyers and I know for many other professions you still have to pay. You still have to pay insurance, you still have to pay dues. For me, being licensed in two jurisdictions, it was about $10,000 that I had to pay, even if I wasn't taking any clients. So it was important to save. That was another good lesson that I learned how little I actually needed, because everything just went for necessary, expensive.

Speaker 1:

In my personal life, too, we made the decision to spend as little as possible. My husband and I were both starting our businesses. We didn't take fancy vacations. We just decided that for now, our priority was going to be family, and this was more important than a lot of material things. I also, with the files that I had, was able to submit. I was still able to keep clients up to speed. I was able to communicate with government entities, so I still worked a little bit through my maternity leave and throughout the pause in my business and one or two hours a day was really manageable, even in the newborn phases, and it gave me a little bit of routine as well.

Speaker 1:

The other thing is that, even though it was hard, the first year of a baby's life goes by so fast and I'm starting to realize childhood too, as I am in my second round right now, as I recorded this, with my little newborn in my arms. But infancy is still fleeting and I'm so grateful that I didn't try to multitask and keep growing my business through those moments. I mean it's I'm amazed when people are able to do that, but I didn't feel like I could, and I'm glad I didn't try, because I didn't feel stretched thin. I really felt like I could be present and work is always going to be there. New clients are always going to be there. You can always rebuild the business, even if it first comes to us. You can always get a job, but those moments your child's infancy once they're gone, they're gone. There's no do-overs and they're not always going to be there. So where am I now?

Speaker 1:

I never did go back to full-time work. I'm a good friend, christina and I partnered up, and so when my baby was about nine months which ended up being January of the next calendar year we partnered up, we came back together and we built something we're proud of. We both work part-time and I've really structured my business and my work around my family this time, not the other way around, and while I did things differently the second time around, so the second time around I only took two months off instead of a year. I'm still adjusting, I'm still shifting, I'm still learning what balance looks like in different seasons, and it's been a whole other adventure, I'm going to say, to adjust the second time around with having a toddler and a baby. Now, the best part of everything is that this journey has led me to connect with so many other moms that are in the same path. They had a different idea of what work might look like before kids, and then kids come along and they just have different plans and it's a whole other dream.

Speaker 1:

It doesn't necessarily have to be the same. A lot of the time it's different, and that's what I want this podcast to be about. I want to share conversations about the many ways that we can make this work and that moms do make it work. And so if you're in a season of where you're questioning what your next step is, wondering if you can do both, wondering what it looks like, wonder how others do it I want this podcast to be there as a resource, because I really, really have come to believe that motherhood isn't the end of dreams. It's just the beginning. It's just a whole new, different adventure that could slow us down for a purpose, could slow us down just enough so that we can realize that there's more and that we it might not look like what you had pictured, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. It can be the best thing that ever happened to you.

Speaker 1:

So in future episodes, I'm going to share a little bit more about how I structured my business, especially because this is now the second maternity leave that I've had to navigate as a business owner, and I'm going to be bringing on guests that have found ways to blend their family and work, and I want to mention that I'm going to be not just doing people that are business owners. I also want people that just fully step back and just decided to pause, you know, fully for a bit, and also people that are still working on growth, and I want this to be a resource where there's real life examples and real life strategies that you can use if you're considering options, if you're not happy with your current situation, and I can't wait to hear the stories of so many inspiring moms that I've met along this journey. So make sure you subscribe, share with episode with a fellow mom who needs that encouragement, and I'll see you next time. That's it for today's episode.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much for spending this time with me. I know how precious time is. I hope you're walking away feeling encouraged and inspired to dream a little bigger about what's possible for your work and family life. If you enjoyed this conversation, it would mean the world if you'd share it with a fellow mom who needs this encouragement. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. I'd love to keep the conversation going. Connect with me over on LinkedIn. Emilia Cotto it's spelled E-M-I-L-I-A and let me know what resonated most with you today. Until next time. Remember motherhood isn't the end of your dreams, it's just the beginning.