Doing more than momming

Is it possible to have a side hustle and still be a the wife and mother you want to be?

How do you pursue your desire to pursue any calling or work outside of the office of mother and wife even when you have small kids?

We mamas want to savor and be fully present in every moment while our kids are small because we know it's fleeting. Furthermore, our children's needs are so intensely immediate and hands-on, so as sometimes our days seem to be one continual series of putting out small fires and barely escaping drowning. When do we have time in the midst of that to elevate our gaze to a higher plane or to give attention to other parts of what we were made to do in this world?

Motherhood keeps our feet firmly on the ground, which has been a saving grace for me, but has also sometimes felt like shackles. Especially in the baby through preschool season — and even longer if you don’t send your children to school even when they’ve come of age to go, it's hard to image how there could be space and time -- without guilt!! -- to pursue our interests, education, and work outside our homes (or even from our homes).

I thought it might help for me to just really transparently share what that journey has looked like for ME.

As you may know, I'm a mother of 6 children ages 2 to 13 years old. And I've been doing some form of birth work or another for 13 years. (To help you do the math, that means I've been a birth worker since my firstborn was a baby 😉). I’ve also maintained a humble but successful photography business since before becoming a mother.

So clearly it is POSSIBLE to pursue this sort of calling or a “job” even when mothering little ones. Does it have trade-offs? Of course! Will it sometimes feel costly? Yes, it will. Does the fact that I have done it mean that you're wrong if you choose not to? No way.

But here's how it's worked out for me, for whatever it's worth. These are the things I believe contributed to my being able to do this with a pretty high degree of health and balance.

1. My husband and I have a vision of and theology of marriage that allows for me to work outside the home and allows my husband to work within it. So he blesses me in following my passions of photography and birth work and has always done shifts as the "home parent" for x number of hours per week to enable that to happen. If you believe that the Bible teaches you are only supposed to be home with your kids and be a homemaker while your husband is the sole breadwinner, or that its inappropriate for you to earn money because you’re a wife and mother, it naturally follows that you won't feel free to pursue pursuits that take you out of those roles. What do you and your husband believe about men's and women's roles and how does that impact your "yes" (or lack thereof) to stepping into work (or a calling) outside the home?

2. We have a "creative family economy." Long ago, we ditched the 9-5 life. My husband is a ministry leader (and beginning a couple of years ago also a self-employed handyman) and I was a self-employed photographer. As such, we weren't tied down to time clocks, vacation time, and managers. This has afforded us a lot of freedom to build our schedules and follow what we felt the Lord leading our family to in each season without needing clearance from employers. We have pieced together our income from various (and often scant and unpredictable!!!) sources so that we can be flexible. If you haven't already, can you lay a foundation for a creative family economy?

3. I accepted that it is good for my children to be nurtured and cared for by loving adults other than myself. This takes releasing some control because no one loves a child like their mother, right? It can even be hard to "let" our own husbands take over because the don't do things the same way we do! But when I go off to work, my husband, a friend, a community member, or a family member gets to step in and care for my kids and I’ve come to understand that that's a true gift to my kids!! They benefit from a diversity of safe grown-ups pouring into their lives! So yes, I can go do a prenatal appointment, run off to photograph or support a birth, or put in hours building childbirth education courses because I allow other people to take a caregiving role in my children's lives from some hours each week. Are you willing to do this?

4. I used the margins of my time to study/learn in season-fitting ways. For example, my primary source of birth/midwifery education in the early years was reading midwife memoirs! Or Midwifery Today magazine, or blog posts. I didn't enroll in an accredited college or tackle the big textbooks. I just followed my passion and fascination toward self-directed learning of easily digestible stuff during nap times, after kids were in bed, or when they were playing independently. Something is better than nothing, and so I did something.

5. I started out doing the forms of birth work that you might not think "count" as birth work. Like simply photographing births (no hands-on skills with the mamas at all), hosting women's gatherings to talk about our birth stories, bringing meals to postpartum mamas, hosting/facilitating mother blessings, and just being a good friend to the pregnant/postpartum women in my life. This stuff counts!! It's vitally important to the process of becoming a birth attendant later on! So don't discount it. Start where you are.

6. I acclimated my kids and secured their buy-in. They've not really known a life in which I was not living on call for chunks of the year. In an age-appropriate way, I've tried to explain to them what I do and why it matters, and to reassure them that I'll always come back. I sometimes ask them to pray for the babies and couples whose births I run off to. They're proud of their mama and what she does, and they like to see photos after and hear the birth stories. The passionate pursuit of my work doesn't take something from them; it gives them something. If nothing else, it gives them an example of what it looks like to find and pursue your purpose and go after it whole-heartedly while still loving and prioritizing your family!

7. I refused to believe that doing birth work (or photography work or any kind of work) would cause me to miss my children's childhoods. There was, admittedly, a 9-month stint of midwifery apprenticeship in which I went too hard and too fast, and then had to dial it back a bit. But for the most part, birth work doesn't need to consume all that many hours of your life! Birth service -- especially when you do the sorts that aren't on call -- doesn't remove you from your children's lives to such an extent that you'll somehow look back and find you regretfully missed it all and lost an irretrievable connection or set or memories as a result. A little photography biz can be capped at whatever number of sessions per month the family can “afford” to spare us at home. We do not need to carry GUILT for stepping out to do that which is a demonstration of our "yes" to that which God has called us to.

8. I just kept swimming. The metaphorical river of my birth service has been winding and unpredictable, varying in speed, depth, texture, and visibility as it moves sometimes smooth and slow across plains and sometimes rocky and rapid-ridden through canyons... and through it all, I've just kept trusting and kept on swimming.

I have a feeling some of you needed to read this because you're grappling right now with whether a “side hustle” might be able to healthfully become part of your life right now, even though your kids are small.

What is your heart beckoning you to put your hands to in addition to the primary task of raising small humans? What keeps you from saying yes?