The Anxiety of Maternity Leave

The Anxiety of Maternity Leave

Welcome to episode 2 of The Determined Mom Show. The only marketing podcast dedicated to guiding mom CEOs into tranquility, and wealth and multiplying those precious moments. I am your host, Amanda Tento and in this episode, we will be talking about that anxiety-ridden period, when you have to decide whether you’re going back to work or are you going to be staying at home.

So the first thing I want to do is kind of share with you my story. I have three children and they are all girls. They are all gorgeous, beautiful, intelligent, hilarious, all of those things which are great. I’m going to start with how I ended up where I am.

So when I went to college, I ended up getting a degree in interior design, which led to working at a furniture store. After that, we moved to central Pennsylvania, where I ended up starting in business management. I ended up managing a pottery studio, one of those little paint-yourself pottery studios and I loved it.

So that is where my business management career kind of started and that was about 13 years ago and It was a lot of fun. I learned so much. I learned a lot about accounting. I learned a lot about facility management, things that I pretty much never thought that I would ever have to learn. So, I am what you would call a lifelong learner. 

After that, we had our second daughter and I still had to travel to work and then we moved to Washington State. So I ended up finding a job at a credit union and I worked there for almost three years and basically, I became pregnant with our third daughter and I just knew I didn’t want to have to go back to work. I wanted to be able actually to focus and concentrate and spend time with this baby.

So I just wanted to make sure that I talked about everything that goes into it, letting you know where I’m coming from as a mom and as a business owner and my background. I also wanted to let you know that it’s okay not to be prepared yet. 

I started a blog called The Determined Mom, and that’s kind of, the show has kind of evolved out of that and a lot of things have evolved out of that, which we’ll go into in a minute but it started as a blog because I thought maybe I can monetize a blog and get it all up and running by the time she comes and I can just blog every month. Just to earn money off affiliate sales and there are just so many things that I had in my mind.

To be honest, after she was born, we had family and friends in the whole first month that she was born and it just ended up being difficult to spend the time blogging and not being able to dedicate that time. I still have notebooks full of blogging ideas and I just have never written them. So I ended up coming up against that wall where I had to decide when my maternity leave is up, What am I going to do? it was so frustrating and nerve-wracking and I needed an answer.

I started my own virtual assistant business since I have been in business management for about 12 years and I knew that I needed to use the skills to provide business owners with excellent service. So I had all of the skills already and I’ve been doing marketing for businesses and I loved it.

I love everything about marketing, I love email, I love Facebook, and all of the different tools that you can use. What kind of blows my mind now is that 90% of this stuff is free. 90% of the tools that we use are free today. So this means we can market our businesses almost immediately. Compared to what commercial costs on television still to this day per minute and knowing that we can have a bigger exposure marketing online is incredible.

Great marketing tactics are what I want to share with you all and I want to spark that passion for marketing and that excitement, as soon as you start seeing results from the things that you do. So that’s how I ended up creating a marketing agency but my point is that you may not know exactly what you want to be doing at any given moment but you will. 

There’s no wrong answer to the; Should I go back to work? Or should I stay at home or should I work from home? question. There is no wrong answer to that. The answer to that is going to be what you feel comfortable with, what works for your family, and what works for you financially. 

Am I comfortable with that? Am I going to have any leftovers after I pay someone to care for my child? Is it worth it? And also it’s going to give you a stay-at-home, mom valuation and It’s also going to give you a work-at-home, mama evaluation, giving you some basic numbers of different professions and averages and things like that.

I hope it will help you to kind of get through this decision-making process. If you’ve already been through this decision-making process, please definitely join our, determined mom show community on Facebook and let us know what you want to hear more of, but also joined to support your fellow moms, your fellow mompreneurs, moms, CEOs, mom, business owners, join.

Please feel free to subscribe to the podcast and feel free to leave a review as well. I would love to hear from you. So this is Amanda Tento signing off from The Determined Mom Show with much gratitude, have a great week.