Becoming Both: A Love Letter to Working Motherhood
Building the Life I Chose—One Baby, One Business at a Time
I was born to be a working mother. At three years old, I grabbed my baby(doll) and my briefcase and declared I was “goin’ to work.”
Fast-forward 30+ years later, and this manifestation has become my reality.
My daughter was born via scheduled c-section on February 26, 2024. While I would agree that that moment — at 9:59am — is the moment I became a mother, I would also argue that I truly became a mother on July 6, 2023, when I got confirmation that I was, in fact, pregnant.
Let’s be clear — I am pro-choice and have always been pro-choice, but choosing this little girl was something I did long before I met my husband-to-be, who we’ll call B, and well before that day last summer when my life changed forever.
Get a Life You Love
If you’re new here, welcome.
I’m a 36-year-old native New Yorker who everyone calls Vix. I have nearly two decades of marketing consulting experience under my belt, a four-month-old daughter named C, a fiancé named B, and an award-winning marketing and advertising consulting firm (Agency 6B) that I launched in 2015.
Until two weeks ago, I was also a dog mom for eight wonderful years to a sassy French Bulldog named Fiona, who came into my life one year into this thing we call entrepreneurship and was with me through all the ups, downs, and sideways I’ll share in upcoming newsletters.
What to expect in this Substack
I’ve started and stopped a newsletter dozens of times over the last two decades and with this, now, I am coming back to my roots and recommitting to myself through connecting with all of you.
The topics will range from marketing tutorials to manifestation practices and my musings on motherhood as a first-time mother (or FTM, as the cool kids say).
You don’t have to be in marketing, into manifestation or be a mother to get something from this — at least, that’s what my friends and colleagues say.
My original craft is my gift—distilling information into bite-sized pieces of content anyone can understand. This is what I learned to do as a Journalism major at Quinnipiac University all those years ago.
Hit that subscribe button to get all the news that’s fit to print and maybe, finally, get a life you love, too.
Ain’t No Hood Like Motherhood…
In 2008, I had my first “real” job at This Old House magazine in the digital department. It was exciting and wonderful — and showed me that if I wanted flexibility as woman, I would have to create it myself.
In 2015, after working at ABC’s Live with Kelly Ripa, Telepictures’ Bethenny Frankel Show and NBC’s Meredith Vieira Show and doing a small stint at a PR agency straight out of the Mad Men era, I took the leap and turned my consulting side hustle into my full-time gig.
The summer of 2015 was a W I L D one — it took me six weeks to match my six-figure salary (and I wrote a book about the process, available on Amazon here) and in those six weeks, I learned a lot about myself, my working style and my (at the time, lack of) work-life balance.
Each year of my entrepreneurship journey led me to learn something different about how I work, how I wanted to work and how I helped other people use their time more efficiently.
The pandemic gave me a lot of opportunities to help small and medium-sized businesses navigate a very challenging time, and it helped me help solopreneurs and micro businesses stay in business through something no one could have ever predicted.
Throughout my consulting career, I have worked with a lot of moms (and parents) who needed to be more efficient with the time they had and needed to learn new ways to support themselves in this new stage of life. As the daughter of a working mother, I understood the struggle from a unique perspective and have often been told that my perspective as a child who thrived while her mother worked helped the women I worked with see that there was hope at the end of a very long tunnel.
So you see, I’ve always had a tribe of moms. Long before I met B and wayyyy before I became pregnant, I was working with moms in an intimate way to help guide them to creating new time management strategies, finding work-life balance in a way that made sense for them and to redefine what a “life they love” actually is as they continued to grow and change as an individual, a professional, a partner, a parent and a person.
How This Can Help You, Too
One common thread since 2020 has been that people want more time to do the things they love. As a collective, we realized that too much time was spent doing things we felt obligated to do vs things that brought us joy. Now, we live in a capitalist society and most of us need to work in order to afford to do more of the things that bring us joy so this isn’t a newsletter about going off the grid and living in some remote area.
This is a newsletter about finding new ways to leverage technology — as it stands today and as it will be for all the tomorrows to come — and defining your goals in order to create the boundaries you need to put in place to achieve your goals without burnout.
What exactly does that look like?
Tips for branding yourself more efficiently — for example, did you know that you can create a professional headshot using AI? There’s a tool for that.
Tips for finding more professional opportunities that align with your desire for flexibility in your professional life — for example, Working Nomads has always been a great source for remote-work, even before that was “a thing.”
Tips for finding resources to learn about boundaries from an expert point of view — my go-to for this? Terri Cole, the Boundary Boss herself.
Tips for “finding” more time in your day — for example, try blocking your days for calls and your days for deep work starting this month. Set aside one or two dedicated days for calls if you have the flexibility to do so. And if you don’t? Find a block or two a week for uninterrupted deep work. Even if you aren’t self-employed, there’s a way to get the extreme clarity and sense of fulfillment this practice can bring.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you. I hope you’ll keep coming back as I continue to redefine my own life in this new phase and stage… and bring you along for the ride.
Yours in Evolution,
Vix