Last week, I had two back-to-back coaching conversations in which the clients, both women, mentioned the words “motherhood” and “stew” in the same breath. If I were Monica and Dax, I’d yell, “Sim!”

The context was something like, their current job is pretty good in many ways. It doesn’t light them up, which could be ok. They’ve also thought about moving on to something different, but they aren’t sure what. They’re also thinking about having their first child, which complicates the situation. The result is that they’ve been stuck, neither doubling down nor moving on, stewing in uncertainty.

What is it about the idea of planning one’s ambitious career with a baby on the way that makes it feel like swimming in goulash? BTW, this is the stew that I think of. What about you?

It made me think back to the various stews that I swam in over the past two years, as I became a mother. One poignant stew era was flavored strongly with denial. 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 abilities. I remember being on a call with my own career coach while sitting in an Airbnb in Lima, Peru, and her asking, so how are your sabbatical and career goals changing now that there’s a baby on the way? I gave her some blah blah blah, along the lines of maybe it won’t change. And then she was like, no really, how will they change? 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 longer term 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.

Taking reality into account was harder than I anticipated. First of all, reality kept changing. In my conversation with one of the lovely stewy women, we brainstormed what it would look like to use extrapolation as a planning strategy. Game out how we’d likely feel and want as pregnant people and later as parents, and then make career decisions based on those likelihoods. For example, maybe we’ll want to stay close to home, so we look for a job that doesn’t require so much travel. But as the philosopher LA Paul describes, matrescence is an epistemological transformative experience:

“At least in the normal case, one has a uniquely new experience when one has one’s first child. Before someone becomes a parent, she has never experienced the unique state of seeing and touching her newborn child. She has never experienced the full compendium of the extremely intense series of beliefs, emotions, physical exhaustion and emotional intensity that attends the carrying, birth, presentation, and care of her very own child, and hence she does not know what it is like to have these experiences. Moreover, 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.”

My advice to both women was to sit down with their partner and come up with a mission statement for their family unit as a first step. Start out naming the values and priorities that are important to the family. If they aren’t sure what their priorities are, then it makes a lot of sense to be stuck in uncertainty about how to make decisions.

And when those priorities change as they themselves change? My overachieving, planning mind wanted to get it figured all out in advance. That was impossible. I had to create a system of support that gave me the tools to gain awareness, reflect, and update the shared and personal values and priorities in real time. I developed a love of subreddits where women got raw and real about their changing identities, shared more openly with friends about my private struggles, looked for one couples therapist and ended up with two and kept both, and had my own coach who called me out on my blind spots and BS.