It’s my son’s first birthday so in true millennial fashion I’m going to talk about me:

A few days after my son was born, I started writing “Can Zoom Save the American Family?” It turned out to be the roadmap for our lives, where we’re working on Zoom, socializing in the metaverse and physically living near family in a corporate family model. boyle.substack.com/p/can-zoom-save-the-american-family

After publishing it, one of the comments I heard most often was “How did you find the time to write with a newborn?” The truth is I wrote on my phone while I was rocking him in the middle of the night. I wrote faster and with less self-consciousness than ever before.

That experience taught me the most surprising lesson of my first year of motherhood: that it has made me more productive, not less.

It made me more creative, better with time management. It gave me the superpower of saying “no” to the priorities of others.

It made me speak up for the things I believed in when I would have been more polite before.

It made me less self-conscious. Less concerned about small things.

And it grounded me in living my values every day. I made decisions for my family instead of myself.

There’s a meme in much of popular culture that your life ends when you have children. That you can’t learn new things. That you will lose productivity, your dreams and ultimately, yourself. That you won’t be able to build a business or grow in your career.

It’s a fear that’s so pervasive that it’s almost accepted as a universal part of the experience. But it’s an unproductive narrative for families and even worse for women.

Becoming a mother gave me a level of focus that I’d only experienced in bursts before. Decisiveness and clarity of thought—two skills really needed for my career— became sharper.

This is not to say that building a family isn’t hard. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done and I’m blessed to have the support of my whole family, something many mothers don’t have.

But I’m convinced motherhood has made me better at the things I care about, not worse—and that’s a message women almost never hear.

This might not be a popular sentiment and I expect the dunks, but if this fear keeps you up at night, as it once did me, know that motherhood can be a mysterious catalyst in so many ways.