By Elizabeth Baker-Weiss

I kept my head down and worked hard.

That’s the phrase I find myself reaching for when people ask about my twenties. A doctorate by 25. My own chiropractic practice in Brentwood by 30. Employees. Clients. A waiting room with my name on the door. I was, as they say, the “Boss Babe.” I was living the dream. And it wasn’t just on paper.

I had a radio show. I traveled often and did photoshoots. I spoke in Las Vegas to more than 500 people and had other speaking opportunities across the country. I was named Tennessee Chiropractor of the Year and voted Best Chiropractor in Brentwood 5 years in a row. I was in magazines. I was on the news. I would speak to our State Representatives annually.

People knew my name. I had built exactly what I set out to build.

And I was proud of it. I still am. I worked really hard for everything I built. But here is what I didn’t understand until much later. I wasn’t just building a career. I was following a script. A very specific script my generation was handed without ever being asked if we wanted it.

If you grew up in the 80s or 90s, it was just the air you breathed. Go to college. Get a good job. Make good money. The idea that you might want something different or something more wasn’t really part of the conversation. Your grandmother’s generation had fought for those doors to open. And ours walked through them without stopping to ask where they led.

You put your head down and did the work.

But nobody talked much about the other question. The one that shows up when everything finally gets quiet. At 6 pm, when the practice is closed and the clients have gone home, and you finally lift your head up. Is this it? Is this what I built all of this for?

I wasn’t even asking about motherhood specifically. I’m not sure I could have named what I was asking. I just knew that somewhere underneath the credentials and the clients and the name on the door, there was a question I hadn’t answered yet.

And the culture had an answer ready for that too.

You can just freeze your eggs. You can wait until you’re ready, in your late 30s or your early 40s. It’s fine. Technology has solved the biological clock. You have time. Keep grinding. Keep building. The rest will sort itself out.

I believed it. I’m not ashamed to admit that. I was one of the women who took that at face value. What nobody tells you, and what I wish someone had told me, is that having kids is a young person’s game. I know that’s not a popular thing to say. I know it pushes against everything we’ve been told.

But I’m 42, with a four-year-old and an 18-month-old, and I can tell you from the inside of this experience that, physically, 26 would have been very different.

My body at 38, carrying my first child, was not the same body it would have been fifteen years earlier. I was labeled a “geriatric pregnancy,” which, for the record, is not cool. But by the time I understood what I had been missing, it was the path in front of me, and I took it.

There’s another message we’re given, too.

That motherhood will cost you yourself. That you’ll lose the woman you worked so hard to become. That the degrees and the career and the identity you built will disappear into the exhaustion and the diapers and the constant needs of small children.

That one I believed too.

And that one, I was also wrong about. What actually happened was this. I met my husband. We fell in love quickly. The kind of love that quickly that surprises you when you’ve both been independent for so long. By the next summer, we were already talking about marriage, and we hadn’t even been together a full year. Not long after, we welcomed our first child, and everything, and I mean everything, shifted.

I had to make a sacrifice. I want to say that plainly, because I think we do women a disservice when we gloss over it. I let my business go. I sold it and retired.

All those years of school. The practice I had built. The clients I loved. The connections and opportunities I made. The employees I had hired and trained and trusted. I walked away from all of it. If you had told me at 25 that I would make that choice, willingly and even eagerly, I would have thought you were completely out of your mind.

But here is what I understand now that I didn’t then. I can go back to work. I cannot come back to this.

This chapter of my life, these years while my children are small and need me, is time-sensitive. They are becoming who they’re going to be forever. I am raising another human to be an adult in a few years. Once I was living inside this reality, the decision became surprisingly clear. Easier than I ever imagined it would be.

The degrees? They were easier to release than I thought. I know how that sounds. I remember hearing other women say things like that and thinking there’s no way. But it’s not because the career didn’t matter, because it did. And there was a bittersweet moment in it. The quiet realization of, I can’t believe I’m letting all of this go.

It’s because what replaced it matters more. In a way I genuinely could not have understood until I was inside it. You don’t lose yourself in motherhood; you meet parts of yourself you never had access to before.

Being a mom is hard. I want to be honest about that too, because I think we sometimes swing too far the other way and make it sound like a fairy tale. It’s not. You don’t get a lunch break. You don’t check out at 5:00. If you’re breastfeeding, co-sleeping, or homeschooling, you are on all the time. There are no weekends. I was more tired in my first year of motherhood than I ever was running my business.

And yet.

The love is not something I can fully explain. I know that sounds like a cliché, but it’s a cliché because it’s true. It reorganizes everything. Your priorities. Your fears. Your understanding of what actually matters. You would do anything to protect them. Anything.

My patience, at nearly 40, with a fully formed identity, very used to my independence and a very clear way of doing things, has had to grow. A two-year-old does not operate on your timeline. A two-year-old does not care about your timeline. A two-year-old will take twenty minutes to do something you could do in thirty seconds.

And somewhere in those twenty minutes, you learn something about yourself that no boardroom or client relationship ever taught you. You learn that it’s not about you anymore.

It’s about them. Their future.

And this is what I want to say to the woman who is where I was. The woman who built something. Who did everything she was told to do. Who quietly wonders if she got it right, if she waited too long, if the thing she keeps putting off might actually be the thing that matters most.

You don’t ever stop being afraid. That part doesn’t go away. The fear just changes. It shifts from the fear of losing yourself to the fear of failing them.

And somehow, that second fear is easier to carry. It comes with a love you didn’t know you were even capable of. You don’t lose your identity in motherhood; you just refine it.

I believe God had a plan in all of this. Even in the years I spent following a different script. Even in the detours and the delays and the label I rolled my eyes at. He knew what He was doing. He was preparing me in ways I couldn’t see and wouldn’t have chosen – for the thing He knew I needed most.

Motherhood is not the end of who you are. It’s the beginning of who you were always meant to be.

It’s not easy. But it’s not bad. It’s not always fun. But it’s always good.

To the woman who feels like they have to keep proving something. If you’re still weighing it, if you’re still holding that script you were handed and wondering if it’s the right one, I just want you to know. I was there. I believed it. I built it.

And then I found something better.

Liz Baker is a former chiropractor and business owner who left her practice to raise her two children at home in Nashville. She is a participant in the ReThink Pregnancy campaign, a joint initiative from EveryLife and AAPLOG exploring the beauty and design of pregnancy.