A few weeks ago Florian went to Hong Kong for a week. Our older daughter struggled with him leaving because—as she said to me—“next you'll leave us.” (I had a trip to America booked for when he got back.)

I reminded her that Papi is usually home all the time so we should let him have his trip.

“But you're not,” she said, “so I don't want you to go.”

Talk about mommy guilt. This is one of those moments where you can either crumble under the weight of it or rise above it.

So I told her again about the reason I was going to the States. I'd been asked to show one of my products on QVC. I talked to her about how this was one of my goals that I'd been working toward and how excited I was to go.

She saw how excited I was and how important it was to me and she said, “Well, can I come?” I thought about it and realized it wasn't so complicated, since my sister lives over there. I called my sister to check and she said sure, she could take my daughter to school with her to help with her first-grade class.

So while Florian was on his flight to Hong Kong I booked a flight for me and our daughter to go to the United States. When Florian landed he saw the booking and texted me: What a great idea to take her! So happy for you. It will be a lovely experience.

Having separate overseas trips with our kids once a year was on our bucket list. Seems like I kicked this goal!

GUILT, MYTHS, AND EXPECTATIONS

As mothers, we're always self-guilting. Just the other day I was getting on a plane and my little one was screaming, “Mommy, don't leave me!” (Of course, 10 minutes later my husband sent me a video of the kids laughing their heads off.)

A whole lot of our stress around parenthood comes from making assumptions and worrying that we're not enough. We believe cultural myths about motherhood and feel the pressure to measure up to certain expectations—whose expectations? Half the time it's shit we've made up in our head. We tell ourselves all kinds of stories, like:

• I can't be a good mother if I don't spend all day with my children.
• My kids will have abandonment issues if I travel without them.
• If I want to have kids and keep working, I'll have to compromise.
• It's not fair to my family if I pursue my own goals.
• I have to stay at home because I'm the mom.
• My husband doesn't want to help with the kids.

And we make up assumptions about what we think the other moms on the playground think of us. Or how much we imagine our kids are suffering when we're at work. Or something our mother-in-law said.

Don't let anybody else tell you what a mother “should” look like, especially other mothers. They get uncomfortable if our version of mothering looks different, because it challenges what they believe about their own lives.

My favorite is when I'm out somewhere without the girls and another woman says to me, “Where are your children?” It's not a genuine question. It's not like they're saying, “You know, I really admire you and I aspire to be a businesswoman and a mother like you. Can I ask you who helps look after the kids? How do you make it work?”

No, that question—“Where are your children?”—assumes that I don't care. Like I need to be reminded; like I'm going to say, “Oh my God! Where are my children? I must have left them at home! They came out of my vagina but I forgot all about them.”

It assumes that they know what caring looks like, and I'm not doing it properly. As if being a mother is like being a Girl Scout and I haven't got all the right badges. They're going, “Here's my ‘I baked the cookies’ badge … do you have that one? No? What about the ‘I clean the toilet twice a week badge’? The ‘I had to stay up until 2 a.m. making cupcakes for the birthday party’ badge? Where's yours?”

Since I don't do chores, I'm going to have a pretty hard time getting any of those. Sorry to disappoint you.

Instead of trying to earn all those badges of honor myself, I throw away the assumption that I'm meant to be the source of everything my kids need. They've got a father, relatives, friends, teachers, and other parents around them. I want my kids to be a bit like me, but there's so much that I love in so many other people. Florian is so good at so many things. He's amazing. He learned his life skills from his dad. I want my kids to have a bit of that. And my kids can speak German—that's a sacrifice for me, because I don't understand them, but they got that from their father and I want them to have it.

There are different things, good and bad, that I want my kids to be exposed to. It's not all me. That attitude is so egotistical. It's like saying to your staff, “Right, you're only going to get training from one person for the rest of your life, and that's me.” That's not how we train our teams. We tell them to go and get other mentors, listen to TED talks, read this book or do that program. Why wouldn't we want the same for our kids? Which is more important, doing everything for them to assuage our own guilt? Or letting their lives be enriched by all different people?

Making peace with your parenting choices comes back to knowing your value and knowing your values. If you're confident about what you can (and can't) contribute in different areas of your life, you'll know where you should be putting your energy and what you should delegate to coworkers, the nanny, or your partner. If you know what you need to do to stay sane and happy, you won't feel so guilty doing it. And if you live according to your values and your family's needs, you'll know how to answer people who criticize your choices, or at least you won't care so much what they think.

So don't be a slave to expectations. Don't assume you can predict what motherhood will be like for you or how it will change your priorities. And if you have a partner, absolutely don't assume anything about each of your roles until you've had the conversation! A lot of men would love to be invited to have more involvement with their kids, but they don't know how to bring up the idea.

WHY YOU NEED TO STOP SAYING THE WORD “COMPROMISE”

The idea of “compromise” is a big one when people are talking about parenting. For working mothers, their whole lifestyle is supposedly one giant compromise. Going back to work means a compromise for your children. Or if you decide to stay home full-time with your babies, eventually your ambition whispers to you that you're compromising on what you're capable to achieve.

There are a few inherent problems with the language of compromise. First, it automatically assumes that you have to choose between family and business. It makes it sound like you either have to love your business more or your family more. And if a woman is playing a big game in business, she obviously must love her business more than her children.

That's pretty insulting. Of course all mothers love their children. Just because I run multiple businesses doesn't mean I love my work more than I love my kids.

The second problem is that assuming that we'll compromise forces a choice on us that we don't necessarily have to make. It might actually be possible to choose both: to love your business and your kids. You don't have to make the same choices as other people.

The reality is, you have no idea what's going to work for you until you have children. When Mia Freedman (who was the editor of Australian Cosmopolitan at the time) found out she was pregnant, she told her boss she'd hardly want any maternity leave. She couldn't imagine not wanting to stay in the loop and come back to work a few weeks after giving birth. But when her son arrived, work suddenly didn't seem to matter. She ended up staying at home for four full months, and it was a year before she came back to work full time.¹

On the other hand, some women can't wait to be full-time mothers, but after a few weeks at home with the baby they're ready to throw that idea out the window and go back to work.

Of course having children changes you. When I say you might not have to compromise, I'm not saying you won't have to give anything up for your children; that's not living in reality. What I'm saying is that if you organize your priorities in accordance with your values, you won't be compromising anything. If your values tell you that being home with your babies 24/7 is the most important thing in the world right now, taking a step back from work isn't really a compromise. If you know that you're making great contributions at work and you've got a trusted support network at home, delegating some of the mom duties shouldn't break your heart.

You might be surprised by your own capacity to handle both. Believe it or not, having a family has actually improved me as a business operator. It's made me a lot more ruthless with my time—if I'm leaving the building at 2 p.m. because I want to pick up my girls from school, I don't have time to waste at work. I make sure I get to critical conversations quickly. Having children motivates me to be a more efficient leader because I don't want to compromise time with my family or attention to my business. I want to do both.

Mothers are highly valuable to businesses because they tend to be highly organized. I quite often hear business owners say that they've hired a mother part-time and found her so efficient that she's almost offering the value of a full-time employee. Being a mother, you have to be that way.

So don't let anybody tell you that having a family and having a business will mean that you have to compromise. You won't know how family is going to change you until it does. But when it does, you might find that you can adapt without choosing one over the other.

I'm not saying that all women have to play a big game in business and raise a family without breaking their stride. Every woman's life is different, and some women don't want to do both at the same time. That's fine.

If you do feel you want to have a break from business to be with your family, be really honest about why that is. Put your hand on your heart and say, “I just want to take some time, selfishly, to exist in the family space and not the work space. I don't want to grow my business right now. I want to be a homebody.” Or, “I've worked really hard my whole life, and now I want to take some time to just be with my family.” Or whatever the reason is that's true for you.

But don't use your family as an excuse for not going after your career goals. Be honest about your choices. At different points in your life you might choose to focus on your business over family, or choose to put work on hold to spend time with your babies. That's great—it's your choice. Nobody is forcing you to do anything. Find a new way to talk about your choices, without using words like “have to” or “compromise.” Make decisions that are right for you and your family, then own them.

You can't control what the moms on the playground think of you. But you can talk about expectations with the people who really matter—your co-parent and your kids. If you're feeling guilty because of a bunch of made-up expectations and lies you're telling yourself, you have the power to change the way you think and talk about work and motherhood.

We can check in with our partners about what their expectations actually are, and make commitments to each other that work for our family. We can reframe the way our kids see work and teach them to value it as part of who mom is. We can challenge our own expectations of what we have to achieve as a mother and what it means to love our kids.

REDEFINING SUCCESS AS A MOTHER

Women executives who responded to a Harvard Business Review survey on work-life balance³ reported that the most difficult aspect of managing work and family was managing cultural expectations about mothering. Not necessarily their own expectations. But the cultural pressure they felt to “mother” in a certain way.

Modern parents—especially mothers—spend almost double the contact time with children that baby boomers did. But we also typically feel more guilty for not doing enough or not being present enough.

The only way to know if you're doing “enough” is to decide what enough is, for you and your family. Not for anybody else's family. Not compared to some undefined benchmark that you think you should be reaching. That's a great way to torture yourself, by not really knowing what the standard is, so you can never know whether you're actually winning or not.

I'm not downplaying the importance of spending time with your kids. I'm just saying that you don't have to bow to everybody else's idea of how it's supposed to look. You'll come up with your own ground rules for making sure that you're giving quality, consistent attention to your children. For example, Elizabeth Cronise McLaughlin (former Wall Street lawyer and now a corporate coach to high-level female executives) has a personal rule that she never misses bedtime two nights in a row.⁴ I don't have that rule because I travel a lot. For me, I blend work travel with family time.

If I travel for two weeks or more for work, the family usually comes with me. When I do go away by myself, I extend my time away from the office for half a day per every day that I'm away, and spend some time with the family at the beach or somewhere away from home once I return. I go back to work with my batteries recharged. My executive assistant knows that that is nonnegotiable: if I'm traveling for business, she automatically schedules in a number of days afterwards for me to spend with the family before I come back to work. I think of it as working on my family, not in it, the same as I do with my business. I come back to work with my batteries recharged.

I get that not every mother understands this. Some women couldn't handle it if they couldn't see their kids every single day. Sometimes at school pick-up times, the other moms come up to me and pat me on the arm. “Oh, you poor thing, you had to go away again. Don't you miss them?” Well, I didn't have to go away, I chose to go away. The reality is that when I am with them I don't cook or clean and I spend every minute with them, taking them to the beach or doing other fun things. I'd rather have several days of uninterrupted quality time, with no chores, than be doing the school run every single day. But that's me.

REDEFINING WORK IN THE EYES OF YOUR KIDS

We've all experienced the heartbreak of our kids saying “Mommy, don't go to work.”

If my girls say that to me, this is what I say:

“You know how you go to school, and jiu jitsu, and see your friends and all those fun things? Well, this is my fun. Let mommy have her fun.”

Don't be afraid to let your kids see you as a whole person. If work is a huge part of who you are, it's good to teach your kids to appreciate that about you. And you don't have to frame it as though work is in direct competition with family time. Of course if you come home stressed out, with no energy left for your family, your kids are going to resent your work. Instead, let them see that Mommy goes off to work because she wants to and comes home happy and satisfied, excited to see them.

It's all about framing work to your kids as an empowering thing, not a drag. Help your kids see that work is a good thing that contributes to the health of your family. Teach it to them as fun for grownups. In the same way you can teach them that their own hard work can be fun, starting with chores and homework and working up to entrepreneurial projects of their own.

I show them life design firsthand. Recently when I quit as CEO at one of my companies, the girls were devastated. I had to say, “No, it's a fantastic thing! Mommy's reinventing. Mommy didn't like being the boss.” We had a big conversation and they got really excited, because they understood what I was doing.

I love saying to them, “I'm not sure what my future businesses will be but I know it will be really exciting. I have a list of the things that I enjoy doing like travel, wellness, and working with women in business, plus there are a few things on my bucket list I'm working on, like a book. I'm not sure what will come of it but I know it will be a great journey with a lot to learn.”

REDEFINING GENDER ROLES

When I talk about having a stay-at-home husband, the reaction I've had from a lot of men is that they would love the opportunity to do it. The thing is, they've never been asked. Why aren't we having that conversation? We just assume we'll take on the roles that we've been taught. Instead we could each be playing to our core strengths and assigning our roles according to who happens to be better at what, or what we each prefer to spend our time doing.

If you have a conversation and get to choose your roles—instead of just getting landed with them—you're less likely to resent them. If you're a woman who earns more money than your male partner, that's a beautiful conversation starter. “Hey, there's been a shift in who the breadwinner is, so we need to have a conversation around the shift that needs to happen in our lives as a result of that.”

If you've got a more demanding career than he does and you're contributing more money, you're going to have less capacity to give in other areas. The mistake most women make is assuming that we can keep up all of our traditional contributions at home as well as giving a lot to our career and providing for the family.

When I get home from work my kids are really excited to see Mommy, which is great, but Florian can't just put his feet up then because he's had a big day. That's not how it works, because I've had a big day, too. I don't have to pick up 100% from there on in. We both decided where we wanted to be during the day and gave that 100% of our attention. Now that we're back together it becomes 50/50.

Sure, sometimes I get home and he goes, “Babe, I've had the shittiest day and the kids are driving me insane. I need to go and read a book and be alone.” And I say cool, I'll cover 100% tonight. You have a night off. It's not tit for tat, but he'll be happy to do the same for me in return the next time I come home and say “I've had a shitty day, I want to go and lie in the bath.” Or like the other night when I came home and said, “I've had such a win today, I just want to celebrate, I'm not interested in doing school lunches or anything tonight!” He was cool with that. When you value each other, and you only ask each other to cover when it's really important to you, it all comes out in the wash. We don't keep a tally, but I reckon if we did it'd be pretty even.

Some roles you can't get out of, like being the one who has to be pregnant (if you're a woman), but you can choose to accept and celebrate those things instead of complaining. You most likely wanted to get pregnant—you didn't have to—and you were blessed to be able to do it. You chose to have children together and you knew what that would mean for you.

So don't make him feel guilty about it forever, and don't make your kids feel guilty about it. Just because you went through a lot of pain for them doesn't mean they owe you anything. The same applies to your relationship. Just because I work a lot and I'm the breadwinner doesn't mean that my husband owes me anything, or that the rules don't apply to me. He works hard all day at home. Outside of the nine-to-five, everything else we have to get done is a shared responsibility and is up for negotiation.

Men often struggle with the idea of giving up work, because of that drive to “provide” (even if they're providing in a different way, by doing all the hands-on work with the kids!). If you've never thought about the possibility of doing your roles differently, a dramatic shift might seem overwhelming. But remember, you've always got options and you're only one decision away from changing your life.

If the male in the partnership is driven to keep contributing financially, even while he's at home more with the kids, get creative! How can you maximize your resources to come up with a solution that works for your family?

If you have assets and need to leverage them to reward yourself this time off, then do it! Or downscale for a period. Or renegotiate your hours at work—you should have established your value by now, enough to demand some flexibility.

You might not have the same resources as Aaron, but I hope you're inspired to get creative about how each partner can contribute. Think outside the box, and do what's realistic for your family.

A good place to start the conversation is by talking about your personal pie. How much of your day is consumed by work? What are the things that fill your soul, that you need to do to be fulfilled? (For me, the main one is quality time with my kids.) Those two things need to be met and then everything else needs to find a way to sort itself out. That's how I negotiate with Florian: this is how much time I'm spending at work, this is how much time I need with you and the kids, therefore this is how much time we have left. Here's a list of things we'd like to do as responsible parents, property owners, and people. Right—what's on the table, what's off the table, what's nonnegotiable, and what can we live without?

Florian sees this time at home with the kids as a period in his life that won't last forever. In a few years our roles could change, and he knows that, so he doesn't feel like he's missing out just because he's not working right now. When it gets too much with the kids, he never takes it out on me. If I'm home late a few times in a row he might go “actually, I'd love to take a turn going out to dinner” and take himself out. But he never gives me the guilt treatment.

THE PROBLEM WITH PUSH DIAMONDS

Speaking of guilt: what is with a “push diamond”?

Giving a “push present” (often in the form of diamond jewelry!) is a growing trend, whereby the father is expected to give the mother a gift in return for her going through pregnancy and the birth of their baby.

Firstly, it's a new-age marketing fraud (like Valentine's Day). Secondly, it's designed to make us believe that our partners owe us something.

Yes, I get that the last weeks and labor are hard work, I get that some people vomit from day one, and I also get (firsthand) thinking that you're going to die in those last few minutes. But does that make our men owe us something? Didn't we both agree to this kid thing? Haven't we been dreaming of it since we were playing with Cabbage Patch dolls?

This concept of them owing us for something that is a downright privilege of being female, is absurd to me. Much like the men in the school playground who say “I would love to have spent time being a stay-at-home dad,” I also think there are some men who (believe it or not) would love to experience making magic.

That's what it is—pure magic! We get to feel all the kicks, the movements, the birthing (which is, as they say, euphoric), and the bond that men don't get to experience that comes from giving birth.

So tell me again, why do we also deserve a diamond? I wouldn't trade giving birth, growing a child, and feeding them for anything, even if I could give up the tough moments in exchange. It's like anything worth doing: Does the good outweigh the bad? In this case it's the most magical (though sleep-depriving) time of your life.

The reward for me wasn't a diamond, and I would never expect one. My diamond was when the father of my child looked at me with such respect, admiration, and sheer love at what we had created—what I just delivered. There's something amazing about seeing a man turn into a dad in that second, and at the same time both having the same feeling of knowing that nothing will ever be the same again.

A shiny rock ain't got nothing on that.

But I guess it's what women think they deserve. That's a question of how you embrace the experience (good and bad). Would you really trade places with him if you could? Do you really want to be paid for your part?

I say we got the better deal … so I think they're owed a consolation prize!