Intro: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Posers podcast, the place where we skip the fluff. Say the quiet parts out loud and dig into what really matters. This is where photography, psychology, and business collide. I'm Jody, your host, and I'm bringing you my raw takes, hard wins, and a whole lot of unfiltered honesty about what it takes to build a photography business that actually connects and makes money.
So ladies, grab your headphones and get your tits up and your ears open because we are going to build something really incredible together.
Hello, hello, hello my beautiful posers and welcome back for another episode of the Posers podcast. We are going to forewarning, I need you to settle in because we are going to do some deeper work today. And honestly, I'm going to get a little bit [00:01:00] deeper today than I usually do because there's this sentence that I wanna talk about, this one sentence that gets kinda like perpetuated through our space.
And if you've spent more than maybe five minutes in the photography world, especially in the corner of it where obviously so many of us live, which is like the family photographer space, the motherhood, maternity, like all of that. If you've been in the space where moms are building businesses around nap schedules and school pickups, then I know that you've heard this sentence probably more than once.
Because it gets said in Facebook groups, it gets said in workshops, and it gets said in that really soft, really sweet voice that really makes it feel like wisdom, and it really makes it feel like it's coming from this place of [00:02:00] empathy. And honestly, I've watched it land on women like a ton of bricks also.
And it's this idea that every time that you say yes to something in your business, you need to remember that you're saying no to your children. So if you're not a mom, you might wanna skip this episode because I'm going to talk about motherhood throughout this entire episode, obviously, and the balance and counterbalance that comes along with being a mom, but also having ambition.
So- Even though this statement gets said in a very soft, very empathetic, very advice-giving and sort of like this way that women would pass wisdom down to other women, I've also [00:03:00] watched it land on women like a ton of bricks or like there's just, it's just a heavy weight on some women's shoulders. I've watched talented, brilliant photographers turn down the opportunity to grow or, to keep their prices low or to keep their dreams really small because of that one sentence, because it's been drilled into them as a way that this is how they're supposed to think.
And if they don't think that way, then they're riddled with guilt for not being that kind of mother. So today, I wanna take that sentence and kinda pull it apart. And I don't wanna do it in a mean way. I don't wanna do it in like a woe is me kinda way. I just want to tell you how I think about it because I think about it in a very different way, [00:04:00] and some of you might be waiting for the permission to step away from this narrative as well.
So before anybody clutches their pearls, cause I know sometimes I can come at things with a very black and white, very abrasive, very aggressive, very like team A, team B kind of mentality. I wanna be like really clear up front that this is not an episode against any form of mothering, and it's not an episode in favor of any kind of mothering either.
, This is not an attack or an agenda or me pushing my views onto anyone, not even in the slightest. But I do want you to stick with me until the end because I think that the end of this episode is the part that matters to me more than almost anything else that I'm going to say today. Okay? let's look at what that sentence actually assumes.
And again, we're talking [00:05:00] about that one sentence that every time you say yes to something in your business, you have to remember that you're saying no to your children. It assumes that motherhood is subtraction, that there's this fixed pile of you, or there's only so many slices in the pie, and that every hour that you give to your business gets taken directly out of your kids' pile or directly out of your kids' pie.
By saying yes to a client, then that means you're having to say no to a bedtime story, or you say yes to a workshop, it means saying no to a school play. That fact is very clean and very simple and very lined with guilt. It assumes that there's only one right way to be a, good mom, and to be the good mom means that you have to be there.
So it's using guilt as this, like, teaching tool for women, which , [00:06:00] let's be honest, actually works incredibly well on women because we've all been trained since we were little girls to put everyone else first. So if you want a woman to stop doing something, you don't really have to argue with her. You just have to make her feel like a bad mother.
But here's my problem with all of this. For me, that math is wrong Your time is not a straight game of subtraction. A yes to your business is not automatically a no to your kids. Sometimes a yes to your business is the biggest yes you will ever give your kids. And I know that because I've lived all sides of this.
I'm going to tell you a little bit about how I grew up, and I want you to hear it really just for what it is. I'm not saying this as some kind of sympathy story. It's just the lens that I see life through. It's why I hear that [00:07:00] sentence so incredibly differently than others might, because I didn't grow up around money.
I grew up dirty and poor. I know I've said that before on the podcast, but that is not an exaggeration. My parents had four babies by the time they were 22. They had their first at 17, and then I'm actually the baby. I'm the fourth. They had all four of us before they ever even hit their mid-20s. And honestly, I can't even wrap my brain around that because I had my babies into my 30s and I still had a hard time with it, okay?
But when I was growing up, my mornings started off at like 3:00 in the morning because we were so poor that we had to do like newspaper routes in pitch black, in freezing cold a lot of the times. so I would wake up at 3:00 in the [00:08:00] morning, go out and do the, these newspaper routes, and then I would go to school just like every other kid who slept in a warm bed throughout the night.
We lived in a double wide trailer until I was about four years old, and then in a really like run down, basically shack of a house behind my grandpa's shop until I was about eight years old. And after that we had to, move in with my grandmother because we couldn't afford to live anywhere else.
But A lot of those years, especially like during the winters, the electricity didn't work all that well. I mean, it worked. We had lights, right? But it didn't work well enough to like heat the house. We had to open the oven just to like heat the kitchen. I grew up listening to my mom scream and cry with bill collectors on the phone.
I remember my bedroom window was [00:09:00] broken, and I would oftentimes wake up to like a drift of snow covering like my, some of my toys, some of my baby dolls. , I had these little like baby doll cribs that my dad had actually made us out of wood for Christmas, and I remember waking up and all of that just being covered in this, this like dusting of snow because the, the wind- it wasn't really a window, it was a sliding glass door, and it was broken so much that the snow would just like come in through the hole.
Like money in our house was very emotional. I remember one time leaving a bowl of cereal on the counter for days. A long, and again, I lived in this shack behind my grandpa's shop, and my parents were so young and so poor that they were always out working, right? So also imagine how like just unkept the [00:10:00] house was.
So I remember leaving a bowl of cereal on the counter, and it stayed there for days because we didn't have a dishwasher, obviously, and nobody was doing the dishes because like my parents were never home. It was just us four kids really kind of like taking care of ourselves there. But I'd left this bowl of cereal out on the counter, and the milk had obviously like turned, and it was curdled and it had like started to smell.
And it made my dad so mad one day whenever he came home from work about the waste of it all, that he made me eat it just to teach me the lesson about not wasting money. So that was what money felt like in our house, like completely out of reach, yet somehow also in control of everything. And whenever the adults around you are really consumed by survival, like my parents had to [00:11:00] work all the time.
They weren't home very much. So whenever they're consumed by that survival, a lot of things fall through the cracks. And my parents are incredible humans, and they did their very best with what they had. But that doesn't change the fact that the thing that fell through the cracks was often us. And At the same time too, like I can't completely knock this childhood either, because even though it was more than hard, I also saw my parents work really, like tooth and nail.
My mom often had three jobs. She drove a school bus in the morning, and then she would go to work, and she would take a late lunch from her day job to drive the afternoon route of the school bus, always skipping the meal. I have no idea when she ate during the day. Only to then go home at night, and she would make wedding cakes.
She w- she was incredible at decorating wedding cakes that, people would hire her, and that she would [00:12:00] like, obviously sell and that she would do. So I saw so much tenacity and so much grit in my childhood, which all, obviously formed a huge part of who I am. So whenever somebody tells me that a mom building a business is saying no to her kids, here's what I hear.
I hear a kid, myself, who didn't necessarily need her mom to be home more. She needed her mom to not be angry and stressed whenever she was home. She needed the heat to work in every room of the house. She needed the phone to stop ringing with bill collectors, because those phone calls sent my mom to hide in her room because she was too overwhelmed.
So I don't feel guilty whenever I'm building my business. I've never once felt mom guilt surrounding my business. And [00:13:00] yes, I missed baseball games because of photo shoots, and no, I was never the mommy helper in my boys' classrooms. What I would feel mom guilt about is if I was in debt. I would feel guilty if my boys grew up hearing the phone ring and watching me clench.
I would feel guilty if I couldn't take them on a vacation, or if I spent my time at home with them agonizing through stress and overwhelm with a pile of bills on the counter. That's the guilt that I would carry, because that would mean that I just simply handed my childhood back to them. My business is not me saying no to my boys.
It's saying yes to them in the biggest and most incredible way that I could. Now, here's the part that might surprise some of you I actually had the life that [00:14:00] that sentence is selling, you know, that every time you say yes in your business, that you're saying no to your children. Like, I actually had that life.
Whenever my boys were little, like really, really, really little, I stayed home with them. My ex-husband made plenty of money, so I didn't have to work. there was, like, a period of time whereas like whenever I just had one, I stayed home with him, and then I finished my internship for, , my master's in psychology.
Then I spent a couple of years as a school psychologist, and then I had my second baby, and I was working as a school psychologist then. And then I had my third baby, and then it was like, okay, me as a school psychologist, this doesn't make sense. I wasn't making enough money as it would take to send all three of them to preschool.
So then I stayed home with all three, right? My business was just getting started in those early days, but it was kind of really this, [00:15:00] like, side thing. So I had the house. I had the time. I had every single hour with them that anybody could ever tell me that I was supposed to want, and I wasn't happy. I spent all of that time with them very unfulfilled, very dulled, very, like...
I felt numb to the whole idea of, like, spending that kind of time at home with them. The idea of, like, they'll only be this little for a short period of time, like, that hung in the air. It hung heavy in the air, and That's actually where I felt a lot of guilt. I felt guilty that I didn't care. I actually remember wishing those years away because I was so wildly unhappy and unfulfilled, and I couldn't wait for the day that they all started preschool so that I could start to feel like myself [00:16:00] again.
I had all the time in the world with my boys, and I didn't love it, and I didn't appreciate it the way that everybody told me that I should. I was more unhappy during the years that I was only staying home with them than I have ever been since. And then I felt guilty for being unhappy because like, I had the dream, right? Wasn't that supposed to be the dream? And the thing is, is whenever I did start leaning into my business more, then I noticed, like, I started to feel this happiness again. I started to feel this purpose. I started to really feel like, you know, the boys would go to bed, and finally at, like, 7:00 PM to midnight, 7:00 PM to 1:00 AM, 7:00 PM to 2:00 AM, like, I started to feel happy again.
I started to feel like myself again. And then that's right when their dad began to lay into me that [00:17:00] I wasn't doing all of it good enough. I wasn't a good enough wife. I wasn't a good enough mother. And I was told that I was running this joke of a business. I was told that I was wasting my time, and I was told that I was a bad mom for spending any time away from my boys to build something for myself.
I often wonder if I had just been allowed to build my business while my boys were that little, how much I would have thrived in those years, and I would have loved those little years with them because I would have felt like I was also getting to take care of myself. But I learned something else in those years that really shaped me too, and this might not be true for you.
It might not be true for everybody. This shows you what kind of trauma I have around money. But I really learned that the money that I didn't earn for [00:18:00] myself also felt as if it came with strings attached. So Then the divorce happened, and everything changed. And I had my boys. I had almost, like, 90% custody of them, and so I had them all the time.
But I also got to choose myself. I also got to really lean in and really build my business for real, and I got to let them watch me becoming this really strong woman, and then be this really strong woman, and then build an incredible business with my own two hands. And that is when I actually fell in love with my time that I got to spend with them, not whenever I had the most hours with them, but whenever I had the most of me to give to them in those hours.
So that sentence, "You'll never get these [00:19:00] years back," I agree with that. I really do 100% agree. They are only little once, and you will never get those years back. But that doesn't mean that you have to spend these years saying no to yourself or saying no to what you want in order to say yes to them. You have to put your oxygen mask on first, because saying yes to every possible hour with your kids isn't a gift if you aren't enjoying those hours.
Time isn't the same thing as presence. You can be home all day and be somewhere else entirely in your head. I know because I did it, because I was that mom. I was there for every minute of it, but I was only present for a lot less of those minutes than I would really like to admit. The years are literally going to pass by no matter what.
The only question is who [00:20:00] they get to spend them with. Like, not who as in they're gonna be, like, spending it with you, but what form of you they get to spend those years with. A mom who's pouring from empty and a mom who's pouring from resent because somebody told her that that's what good mothers do, that's not necessarily the who that you want them to spend it with.
The mom who's lit up and fulfilled and actually loving the time that she has with them because she gets to choose a life that fits into not only who she really is, but also into the type of mother that she wants to be, that's the one. That's the one who should get to show up every day. Because your kids don't remember the hours, they remember how those hours felt.
We've really been sold this idea that you have to pick the good [00:21:00] mom or the ambitious woman. Choose one, and if you ... And if ... That's the message, is choose one, and if you try to be both, then you'll fail at both. But every ounce of my being, every bone in my body down to the marrow of my bones rejects that sentiment.
For me, motherhood and ambition aren't two sides of a scale. They are a blend, and they feed each other. My business makes me a happier mom, and being their mom makes me a better and braver business owner. I'm not choosing between them, and I never have to ever again. For me, the biggest thing I've always wanted to do is really model the kind of partner that I want my boys to see value in.
I want them to understand all the way down to their bones that the work of the home lands on [00:22:00] both parents. The work of raising kids lands on both parents. And the work of bringing money into the family sits on the shoulders of both parents also. I, this does not surprise anybody, I have a very, very open household.
There is nothing that is ever off the table for discussion, and it leads to some very interesting topics around the dinner table most nights. , But that openness is how I've always mothered And it spilled right over into my business too. Whenever I downsized into, like, my divorce house, there was a loft upstairs, and I turned it into a third bedroom, technically a fourth bedroom, but three for the boys.
I turned it into that third bedroom for Brody. It was one of the ways that I actually convinced the boys that this tiny house was better because they all got their own bedroom. The [00:23:00] house that we had moved from actually had six bedrooms, but I had taken what was like Kind of a smaller primary bedroom because it w- not, not a smaller bedroom obviously, but it was a smaller primary.
And I had built custom bunk beds so that they all grew up in those younger years in the same room together. You know what? Interestingly enough, I shared a room with my two sisters growing up, but because there wasn't enough room, and yet my boys grew up with too much room, and I still crammed them in all together.
I've literally never thought of it that way. But it's interesting how much you see your childhood kinda play out in your mothering decisions. But anyway, whenever I converted the loft into the bedroom for Brody, that left like one little slice of like square footage in between the wall of his room and the top of the stair railing.
And that's where I, I put a built-in desk for myself right there in that little space. And [00:24:00] all of the boys' bedrooms were upstairs. So every single night they literally watched me sit right outside of their bedroom doors and build a business. they'd come home from school, we'd do the afternoon together, we'd have dinner together, we'd do homework together, and then they'd all head to their rooms to, you know, do whatever boys do.
They would talk to their friends or play video games or chill, hang out in their rooms, like look at baseball cards, whatever. And I'd be sitting right there in that hallway building the business. And that little desk really turned into this like open forum. And they would come out, and they would ... It was, it was
God, those years were so good. It was so cute because one of them would like sort of like peek out of their room, and they'd come out and they'd like ask me what I was building. And then the more that I spoke to one of them, then like another one would like sort of like trickle in behind him, and then the third one would kinda trickle in behind him.
And they would all ask like why I was working so [00:25:00] hard. They would ask how much money I was making. They would ask what the bigger picture was. They would ask like what the goal of the business was. They were all so little, too. Like, you've got to imagine that they're all these little boys in like most of the time matching pajamas with like the cutest little voices.
And God, I just loved those years. , But like they were asking these really big questions for little boys because they would ask me what my goals were. They knew that I was building the posing method. They knew I was wanting to make this big transition. They knew like what I would make on a photo shoot.
They knew why I wanted to quit weddings. They knew why I wanted to open a studio. it was like I was invested in their day, but yet they actually became really invested in mine. And our relationship grew into something that I could have never planned, and it stopped being like, "I'm the mom and you're the kids," and it really started to feel more like, no, like we're like this pack of wolves, and like we all [00:26:00] move together instead.
So I don't know, like this image that I have, like you tell me, was that me saying no to my children just because I wasn't reading a bedtime story or doing laundry? No. Building my own business is what let me be there in the way that I actually wanted to be. And now I decide when I work. I decide when we're taking a big vacation.
I decide if I wanna kick off and go grab them from school to take them out to lunch. The ambition never took me away from my kids. The ambition is how I got to actually have more with them. So if I had to like rewrite that sentence, the one that we like originally started with, I would say like a yes to your business is not a no to your kids.
It's a yes to the woman that they get to watch become her, right? [00:27:00] So this is the part that I told you to stay for If you're a mom who loves being home with your kids, who never wants to miss a second, who feels completely whole spending her days doing exactly that, I love that for you so much. I really, genuinely, truly do.
I mean that with my whole entire chest. I think it is actually beautiful when a woman is that clear on how she wants to spend her time. No matter if it's in her business, no matter if it's at home, no matter if it's, I don't know, climbing Kilimanjaro, I don't care. I just think it is so beautiful when a woman is able to make the decision that she wants to make for herself, for her own happiness first.
And obviously, you don't owe anybody anything. And you definitely don't owe anybody a six-figure business. My problem has never been [00:28:00] with, like, the mom who stays home, or the mom who works, or the mom who does both, or the mom that does whatever. My problem is with the messaging of it all.
Any messaging from either side of the camp that gets drilled into women that there's only one right way to do this, that's what's wrong. That's where I have the problem. If someone tells the ambitious mom that she's saying no to her kids, that's wrong, and if someone tells the stay-at-home mom that she's wasting her potential, that's wrong, too.
Guilt is a terrible teacher, no matter which direction it's pointed, and every mother deserves permission to choose what kind of mother that she wants to be. That's it, period. That's literally the whole... I could have just said that, and you guys would have gotten the point of today's episode. Motherhood plus ambition is simply what works for [00:29:00] me.
It's what makes me happy, and it's what makes me the mom that I want my boys to have. And if you're listening and your whole entire body is like, "Oh my God, yes," like, "That's me," then I want you to know that you are not a bad mom. And also, you're not the only one. There are so many of us, and we think exactly like you do.
And if you're in that other camp, I hope you walk away loving how sure you are that this side is not where you wanna be either, because both ways are correct. That's the whole entire point. Now- I am not going to pretend that old voices just disappear just because you listen to one podcast episode, because obviously they don't.
I myself have this reoccurring nightmare. It is drenched in shame and all of my old childhood [00:30:00] stuff, and it shows up every single time that I try to step into something new. Every, like, new level or bigger stretch, every single time, like literally right on schedule, there's that reoccurring nightmare, okay?
But here's what I've learned. Even if that guilt still does show up for you, it doesn't have to get a vote, right? Whenever that sentence pops into your head that you're saying no to your kids, I want you to ask, like, this kind of this one question or a few questions back. Like, is it actually true, or is it just there because it's been put there?
And how loud is it because it's something that has been drilled into you? I want you to ask, how do I really feel? How do you really feel? What kind of mother do you actually wanna be, and what do you want your kids to watch you become? Then write down that answer for yourself, [00:31:00] that real answer, not the one that you think that you're supposed to give.
Then if you resonate with all of this and you want the same kind of life that I've built with motherhood and ambition, then you know that the alignment is there for you to book a call with me. And if everything in your bones is like, "No. Not only no, but hell no, I'm not on that same page," then I truly love that you have that clarity to know that I'm not your person, and that's really incredible, too.
So if you're ready to build the pricing structure, the systems, the marketing around this kind of life that allows you to have both on your own terms, then I will put the link in the show notes and you can book a call with me there, okay? Deep work today, you guys. I am proud of us. And until next time, bye for now, posers.
Outro: Okay, so that is a wrap on this episode of the Posers Podcast. If [00:32:00] you loved it, please subscribe, rate, and review because honestly, algorithms are needier than all of our ex-boyfriends combined. And ladies, I need all the help I can get. If you've got thoughts, questions, love letters, even hate mail, please send them my way.
I actually read every single one of them. So until next time, stapled, stay messy and don't let the bullshit win. Tits up. Ears open and go build something. Incredible. Bye for now, friends.
