Before I became a mother, I thought ambition meant saying yes.
Yes to another assignment, even if the pay was mediocre. Yes to the meeting that probably could have been an email. Yes to the opportunity that sounded impressive, even when it wasn’t especially interesting. I wanted the byline, the invitation, the proof that I was moving forward.
My calendar was full, and I rarely stopped to ask whether the work itself was worth my time.
Then, in the terrifying early days of the pandemic, I became a mother.
Everything felt frightening and surreal. I was exhausted, overwhelmed, and suddenly responsible for keeping a tiny human alive during a global emergency. The competent, confident version of myself I had known — the writer who interviewed people, met deadlines, and understood how to navigate her professional world — felt very far away.
A few weeks into motherhood, I received a freelance assignment from a brand that sold one of my favorite cheeses. I remember sitting at the table with my baby on my lap, my laptop wedged precariously against its edge. My dog kept dropping a toy at my feet, hopeful that this might finally be the moment I agreed to play. The whole setup was absurdly inefficient.
And yet, I felt exhilarated.
Here was something I knew how to do. I could open a document, ask the right questions, arrange words into sentences, and turn those sentences into a story. I might not have known why my baby was crying, whether she was eating enough, or how any of us were supposed to live through that time. But I knew how to write about cheese.
The assignment felt like a blessing — not because it was prestigious or especially career-changing, but because it returned me to a version of myself I recognized. For a little while, I was not only a brand-new mother fumbling through an impossible moment. I was competent. I was confident. I was a writer.
Before my daughter was born, I had talked to several women who told me that motherhood had fundamentally altered their priorities. They had once been incredibly ambitious, they said, but after having children, the things they had cared about professionally simply didn’t feel as important. They were happy to scale back.
Becoming a mom refined my ambition
I believed them, and I wondered whether the same thing would happen to me.
It didn’t.
I still wanted to write. In some ways, I felt more like a writer than ever. Sharing my own stories, and the stories of the people I interviewed, felt not less important but more so. Motherhood had expanded my emotional world. It had made me more curious about families, bodies, work, and all the complicated ways people build their lives.
I had more to say, and I felt a new urgency to say it.
What changed was not my ambition but my tolerance for work that didn’t matter to me.
During those first years after becoming a mother, childcare often arrived in tiny scraps: two hours of help, a 90-minute nap, an unexpected stretch of quiet. Every hour I spent working was now an hour I was paying for childcare, an hour carved out of a nap, or an hour away from my child.
I learned to sit down and work with ferocious concentration. There was no time to warm up, reorganize my inbox, or wait for inspiration. I opened the document and began. The cost of my time, once largely theoretical, became startlingly clear. I stopped wanting to fill my days simply to feel productive. I became much less interested in assignments that looked good on paper but left me depleted.
Less time forced me to focus on what matters
Having less time made me more focused. It also forced me to ask a question I had rarely considered before: Is this work important enough to justify the time it takes from the rest of my life?
That question has transformed my career.
Since becoming a mother, I have walked away from work that no longer aligned with my values. I have broken into publications I once dreamed of writing for. I built a writing community. I finally made space for the novel I had been postponing for years.
I am not producing the greatest possible quantity of work. But I am pursuing work that feels more meaningful and more distinctly mine.
Balancing ambition and motherhood remains an impossible ask. There is no clever trick that allows me to be fully present for my children while also giving every professional dream the time and energy it deserves. Sometimes I am working while wishing I were with them. Sometimes I am with them while thinking about the essay I want to revise.
I want my children to know they matter more to me than any byline or professional achievement. But I also want them to see that my dreams matter, just as I hope theirs will matter to them.
Motherhood did not shrink my professional life. It clarified it. It taught me that ambition is not about cramming the greatest number of accomplishments into a life. It is about deciding what is worth giving that life to.
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