Last week, I had two coaching conversations in which both women mentioned the words “motherhood” and “stew” in the same breath. What were the chances?!

By many measures, these women felt that they had good jobs. They’ve been thinking about moving on to something different, and an earlier version of themselves knew how to move onto the next thing. But when they think about having a baby, they get the sense that maybe what they want of their jobs will be different, but they’re also not sure exactly how it’ll be different. The result is that they’ve been stuck, neither doubling down nor moving on, in a stew of uncertainty. The impact of staying in the stew is that, as huge changes take place in their personal lives, they’re not proactively building a professional container that will support them as a mother.

These two conversations got me thinking about the various stews that I swam in over the past two years as I became a mother. One poignant period involved a lot of denial stew. In early pregnancy, I was delighted and happy just to stay pregnant, after a short-lived bout of pregnancy and miscarriage that shook my faith in my reproductive capabilities. A few months in, my career coach asked me, so how are your sabbatical and career goals changing now that there’s a baby on the way? I distinctly remember sitting in my Airbnb in Lima, Peru, looking out the window at the ocean waves that I wasn’t going to be surfing after all, and giving her some blah blah blah. She then asked, no really, how will your plans change? She pointed out that my plans to get a number of professional mountain guide certifications during my sabbatical were quite impossible while pregnant. That’s when I realized that the reason I was pregnant and hormonal and crying in an Airbnb in Peru is the same reason that I hadn’t updated my career parameters. I had made the Peru plans before I got pregnant, had wanted to still be as hard charging in pregnancy and motherhood, and so I just kept going, hard-headedly refusing to take reality into account.

That conversation with my coach was a come-to-Jesus moment for me. I saw the cost of denial and decided it wasn’t ok. But taking reality into account was harder than I anticipated. First of all, reality kept changing. What I wanted, desired, accepted, and had capacity for changed constantly throughout pregnancy and post-partum. A year after my child’s birth, things are still changing, although the rate of change has slowed.

In my conversation with one of the lovely stewy women, we brainstormed what it would look like to use extrapolation as a planning strategy. Extrapolate how we’d likely feel and want based on what we knew about ourselves and learning from friends ahead of us on the motherhood journey. And then make career decisions based on those likelihoods. But as the philosopher LA Paul describes, matrescence is an epistemological transformative experience:

“…since having one’s own child is unlike any other human experience, before she has had the experience of seeing and touching her newborn child, not only does she not know what it is like to have her child, she cannot know. Like the experience of seeing color for the first time, the experience of having a child is not projectable.”

Instead, through hard lessons learned, I created a system of support that gave me the tools to gain awareness, reflect, and update my personal values and priorities in real time. I developed a love of subreddits where women got real about their changing identities and in the process validated my raw feelings, shared more openly with friends about my private struggles, looked for one couples therapist and ended up with two and kept both, and leaned hard on my coach who I first hired to make the most of a post-PhD sabbatical but who ended up supporting me in motherhood, moving continents, and starting a business all at the same time.

So, what can you do if you’re in the stew?

First, give yourself permission to be in it. Uncertainty is uncomfortable, but it’s also where clarity begins. The key is to create space for reflection and action, even when things feel messy. Here are three steps to get started:

  1. Extrapolate, but Stay Flexible: Use what you know about yourself and what you’ve learned from others to make educated guesses about what you’ll need as a mother. Then, treat those guesses as hypotheses, not hard rules. Your priorities will evolve, and that’s okay.

  2. Build Your Support System: Don’t try to figure it all out alone. Whether it’s a coach, a therapist, or a community of friends who’ve been through it, surround yourself with people who can help you navigate the shifts in your identity and career.

  3. Take One Small Step: Start by identifying one thing you can do this week to move forward—whether it’s updating your resume, having a conversation with your partner, or simply journaling about what you want. You don’t need to have the perfect plan. Action creates momentum.

If this resonates with you, and you’re ready to stop spinning your wheels and start building a career that supports the life you want, consistently, and with more ease and grace than doing it on your own, apply for a strategy session.