Am I Doing This Right?
Sessions with Sara Cate + Ashley Season Four is HERE!
Episode One coming in hot with some big changes!
New Baby, New Business: Two Different Chapters, the Same Beautiful Mess
There's a moment that happens in almost every conversation between the two of us lately. One of us is talking about a business decision, a hiring choice, a launch, a number that isn't adding up the way we hoped, and the other is talking about sleep schedules, nursing, or the strange new identity of being someone's mother. And somewhere in the middle of it, we stop and look at each other and say: wait, this is the same feeling.
We are in completely different chapters. One of us is building something from the ground up: a business, a brand, a vision that used to live only in her head and now has to survive contact with the real world. The other is building a human being, and then raising that tiny human through the fog of the fourth trimester, trying to remember what a full night of sleep even felt like. On paper, these look like two unrelated stories. In practice, they rhyme in almost every way that matters.
The Weight of "Is This Working?"
Starting a business means living, for a long stretch of time, without proof that you're doing it right. You make a decision. You wait. You don't get a report card, you get ambiguity, and you have to keep moving anyway.
Having a baby is strangely the same. There's no scoreboard telling you the swaddle is right, the feeding schedule is right, the way you're soothing her at 3 a.m. is right. You are making decision after decision in the dark, sometimes literally, with no one confirming you're on track.
Both of us have said some version of the same sentence out loud this year: I have no idea if I'm doing this correctly, and I have to keep going anyway. That's not a coincidence. That's what it feels like to build something that matters to you before it's finished proving itself.
Pressure From Every Direction
Here's the part we don't always say out loud: some of the heaviest pressure doesn't come from the business or the baby at all. It comes from everyone watching.
Society has a lot of opinions about what a woman starting a business should look like: confident, unbothered, scaling fast, never asking for help. Society has just as many opinions about what a new mother should look like: glowing, instinctively capable, effortlessly bonded, back to "normal" in record time. Neither of those pictures is real. Both of them are exhausting to live up to.
And then there's the quieter pressure, the one that comes from other women. The comparison that creeps in when someone else's business seems to be growing faster, or someone else's baby seems to be sleeping through the night sooner. We want to be honest about this because we think most women feel it and few say it: watching another woman's chapter can stir up things that have nothing to do with her and everything to do with our own fear that we're behind, or not enough, or doing it wrong. That fear is worth naming instead of carrying silently.
Different Chapters, Same Questions
What's brought the two of us closer through all of this isn't that our situations match, it's that our questions do:
• Am I allowed to want this and still struggle with it?
• Can I be proud of what I'm building and still feel completely undone by it some days?
• Why does everyone else seem to be handling this better than I am?
• What happens if I need help, does that mean I'm failing?
A business and a baby are both, in their own way, a leap of faith you make before you have the evidence it will work out. Both ask you to keep showing up on the hard days, the boring days, the days nobody sees. Both change you into someone you don't fully recognize yet, and that transformation is uncomfortable long before it's rewarding.
Why We Wanted to Say This Out Loud
We didn't plan to become each other's sounding board for two seemingly unrelated life chapters. It just happened, the way honest friendships tend to happen: in the unfiltered check-ins, the voice memos sent at odd hours, the "can I just vent for a second" conversations. And what we kept noticing was how much relief there was in realizing neither of us was uniquely behind or uniquely struggling. We were just both in it differently, but together.
If you're in a chapter right now that feels like it's asking everything of you, whether that's a business, a baby, a career pivot, or something else entirely, we hope this is a reminder that the pressure you're feeling isn't a sign you're doing it wrong. It might just be a sign you're doing something that actually matters.
Want more of these conversations?
This is exactly the kind of thing we get into on our podcast, Sessions with Sara Cate and Ashley: real, unfiltered talks about business, motherhood, identity, and everything in between. You can find new episodes on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts (iTunes). Come sit with us for a while.
Sessions with Sara Cate and Ashley is a wellness and mental health podcast hosted by Sara Cate Moser and Dr. Ashley Zimmerman, exploring human emotions, healing, body-mind awareness, and the difficult or uncomfortable parts of the human experience. New episodes drop bi-weekly on Mondays.
