Building Babies and Businesses: Can You Really Do Both Well?

The messy, honest truth about trying to show up for your kids and your dreams at the same time...without breaking yourself in half.

Is it possible to be a good parent and a good entrepreneur at the same time? That question haunts me, echoes in the in-between spaces of my days, those moments when the kids are asleep, the emails still unchecked, the deadlines unmet and I sit with the uncomfortable, sprawling tension of wanting both. Wanting to build something that lasts beyond me - an idea, a business, a mark - and also wanting to be fully present for the little people I brought into this world.

Who, let’s be honest, don’t give a damn about my “brand” or my “mission.”

They care that I’m there.

That I’m not looking at my phone while they tell me some long, meandering story about their day that, frankly, makes no sense. They care that I show up. That I’m present.

Last week, I felt like I was failing as a Mother. I was on holiday with my children, but I wasn’t present. I wasn’t working. But I was agitated, distracted. For no reason. I didn’t have a deadline per se; rather a continuously loop of thoughts of what I could, should and would be doing on my business.

Entrepreneurship, for all its glamourised hustle and mythology, is an act of obsessive creation. It asks for everything. It’s greedy. It wants your mornings, your nights, your weekends, your thoughts while you’re pretending to listen to someone else talk. And parenting? Well, it’s not that different. Except it’s more primal, more necessary. You can walk away from a business if you have to. You can’t walk away from your children- not without something in you fracturing irreparably.

So here I am, caught between two things I love. And let’s be honest, love isn’t even the right word. It’s more raw than that. It's devotion. It’s an aching, burning desire to do both well, to not fail at either. But most days, it feels like I’m just failing at both. The entrepreneur in me is restless, resentful even, of the time spent away from the work. I’m looking at all the things I should be going to, the projects I need more momentum for, the compressed hours in my diary reducing opportunities. The parent in me is guilt-ridden, wondering if the hours stolen for “just one more meeting” are leaving scars I can’t see yet. If any of these “opportunities” are things I’ll look back on and say it was worth it?

Is it possible?

Maybe.

But not in the way we’re sold it. Not in the glossy, Instagram-filtered, Lean In, “you can have it all” nonsense. If it’s possible, it’s possible in the cracks. In the messy, imperfect, never-finished way. It’s possible in the moments you choose presence over productivity, or vice versa, and forgive yourself for the choice. It’s in the art of surrendering to the fact that balance is a myth, but alignment? Maybe that’s real. Maybe it’s about aligning the life you’re building with the values you want your kids to see, not just hear about.

I want them to see me try. To see me fail and try again. To know that their mother didn’t just exist to serve their needs, but had her own wild dreams too.

I want them to know that loving them doesn’t mean I stop loving the parts of me that crave creation beyond the home. But I also want them to remember that I was there. That I was there enough.

Being a good parent and a good entrepreneur might not be about doing both perfectly. It might be about doing both honestly. I often tell people during my Personal Branding sessions that I’m careful about how much I show my children; how much I reveal about my home life. I feel a sense of duty to them, but also to women (and men) who want to know that it is possible to do both. And some days I do feel it’s possible. And some days I feel like it’s the most incompatible thing in the world. And this tension - between wanting to be honest and wanting to believe I can transcend the setbacks and roadblocks and drop-offs and collections and late nights and early mornings - well it can be stifling. It means I can say everything without saying anything at all.

We want to be “here”, but we also want to be “there”; meanwhile we are expected “everywhere”.

The village is gone, the costs to “outsource what you need to” are spiralling, we are always on and never off. And perhaps a bit more honestly in both directions is the best we can do. Being honest. Dropping the veil. And let people in to see the whole tangled, beautiful mess of it. Letting the kids see me show up, not just for them, but for myself. Maybe that’s the only way it’s possible. Maybe that’s enough.