Maternity Leave When You Own the Business

“Mary set out and traveled to the hill country in haste to a town of Judah, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth” - (Luke 1:39-40).

I am due with our newest baby (#6!) in early-to-mid October. (Tip: don’t tell people your exact due date; give them a range so when your date comes and goes you’re not getting well-meaning, but stressed out texts asking if baby is here.) In the three weeks surrounding my due date, one of my businesses has three weddings scheduled in our event space. One of them is my sister's, and I am the matron of honor.

I'll give you a moment to do the math on that. Yes, there is a real possibility I will be standing at the altar holding a bouquet while nine months pregnant, or holding a days-old newborn (hopefully not - I am all for that 5-5-5 rule).

Here's the part that should surprise you but won't surprise me: this is not new. Every single baby I've had has arrived alongside a wedding or a major event, some immovable thing on the calendar that absolutely could not be rescheduled and absolutely could not be missed. Being a business owner and booking weddings and events 2.5 years in advance doesn’t always line up with God’s plan for our family. 

But, every single time, God has made it work. Not "work" in the sense that it was smooth or that I felt in control, but work in the sense that the baby came, the event happened, the important things held together. I look back now and cannot fully explain the logistics of how it all worked. That's usually the fingerprint of Providence: it doesn't look like a plan, it looks like a story that in hindsight makes perfect sense, but in the moment feels entirely too chaotic.

So, as I sit here planning maternity leave for my two businesses, I want to tell you what I've learned, because I've noticed that when women business owners talk about maternity leave, we talk about the wrong problem.

Before we dive too deep into this, let me preface by saying that I own two successful businesses and have navigated multiple maternity leaves for both of them. You should also know that while 一 I do not practice because God has called me to be home with my children for this season 一 I am trained as a Traditional Birth Companion. So I GET the side of you that wants to log into your computer to answer emails when your baby is only three days old and also the side of you who wants those “first 40 days.”

The Problem Is Not Logistics

Search "maternity leave for entrepreneurs" and you'll get the same checklist everywhere: batch your content, hire a virtual assistant, set up your autoresponder, pre-schedule your invoices. All fine and useful tips, but all completely beside the point.

We do those things because stepping away from the business forces a question most of us have never answered honestly:

Is my business fruitful because I produce, or because God provides?

That's the real question and pregnancy asks it of your business whether you’re ready or not. You can delegate your inbox, but you cannot delegate the question.

Pregnancy is the one season of a woman's life where her most significant work is entirely invisible (aside from the rapidly growing belly), completely unhurried, and cannot be optimized by any productivity system on the market. It’s something I find almost funny about God's design. Right now, while I sit in a chair doing what the modern economy would call "nothing," my body is knitting together a human soul's home, eyelashes and kneecaps, and a nervous system, on a timeline I do not control and cannot negotiate.

No hustle can speed it up. No discipline can improve it. My only real job is to receive, to rest, to eat well, and to not get in the way.

St. John Paul II called this the feminine genius: the woman's particular gift for receiving and nurturing life, for knowing in her bones that persons matter more than production. I've come to believe pregnancy and motherhood (biological, adoptive, spiritual) is God's built-in retraining program for entrepreneurial women.  It dismantles, cell by cell, the lie that our fruitfulness depends on our output. For nine months 一 and really the next 18+ years 一 the most fruitful thing about you is the thing you cannot hustle. That is a beautiful homily and your body is the one preaching it.

The question is whether we'll let the lesson transfer to the business, or whether we'll spend the whole pregnancy trying to out-produce it.

Mary Did Not Treat Her Pregnancy Like an Interruption

Of course anytime I struggle with my feminine genius, I go to Mother Mary. 

Consider the Visitation. Mary has just received the single most important assignment in human history. If anyone ever had a reason to hunker down, protect her schedule, and focus on her mission, it was her.

Instead, she goes "in haste" to spend three months with Elizabeth (Luke 1:39-56). Three months! In entrepreneurial terms, that's an entire quarter – gone! 一 with seemingly “nothing” to show for it! What does she do there? She serves her cousin, she sings the Magnificat, and two pregnant women recognize God's work in each other's bodies. Mary did not treat the pregnancy as an interruption to her calling. The pregnancy was the calling, and everything else arranged itself around it.

Now, fast forward and notice how Jesus Himself chose to arrive. It was in a way that interrupted everything: a betrothal, a census, a carpentry business, a temple’s “marketplace,” an entire empire's paperwork. The Lord of history has never once apologized for inconveniencing a calendar. If He's sending you a baby in the middle of your busiest season, He has not lost track of your launch schedule.  He’s probably making a point about which one is load-bearing.

Maternity Leave Is a Business Audit You Didn't Order

So, if your business genuinely cannot survive eight, ten, 12, 24 weeks without you, that is critical information about your business.

A business that collapses the moment you stop producing is a business running on your nervous system. It's powered by your adrenaline, your late nights, your fear of being forgotten, your need to prove something. A woman whose company runs on her cortisol will eventually pay for it, in her health, her marriage, her mothering, or all three. The body always sounds the alarm eventually.

A business built on Christ’s foundation looks different. It has margins. It can breathe. It trusts that the God who called you into this work is not going to let it evaporate because you spent six weeks doing the most important work of your life. Maternity leave, it turns out, is simply Sabbath with higher stakes, and Sabbath was always a test of trust (even though we usually think of it as a “day off”) . 

So how can you honor this beautiful time and still run your business?  Here's my plan, offered with one giant caveat: none of this works if the theology underneath it is unsettled. A perfectly batched content calendar cannot compensate for a heart that believes God's provision stops when your output does. Settle that first, in prayer, honestly. Then:

I'm taking real leave, from birth through at least mid-November. Not "checking in occasionally" leave. The American two-week fiction is not a maternity leave, it's a rumor of one, and it ignores everything we know about the postpartum body. The traditional wisdom of nearly every culture, and frankly the crunchy wisdom your great-grandmother knew, holds that a mother needs roughly a minimum of six weeks of genuine rest, warm food, and being cared for while she cares for the baby. I built the business calendar around the biology instead of asking the biology to accommodate the calendar.

I front-loaded, but with a limit. Yes, I batched and pre-scheduled, but I gave myself a hard stop, because there's a version of "preparing for leave" that is really just cramming three months of hustle into the third trimester. You arrive at birth already depleted, and call it planning. Your baby needs you rested more than your audience needs you prolific.

I told my clients the truth, early. I had someone sign as a six-month one-on-one client in August. I told her that I would be taking at least a month and a half off and wouldn’t be available for my usual deliverables, but we could put those on the end of her six months. She was totally fine with it. The right clients will be. 

Nothing you do should ever be an apology - it should be an announcement. "I'm welcoming a baby in October and will be fully away until mid-November" communicates something to your clients about what you believe regarding work, life, and what deserves reverence. Some of my most meaningful client relationships deepened after announcements like this, because people trust a woman who visibly practices what she claims to value.

I decided in advance what "the business surviving" means. For me, this season, it means existing clients are cared for, the essentials run, and growth waits. A fallow season is not a failed season. Farmers have known this forever, and so has the Church, which literally builds fasting into the calendar because feasting means nothing without it.

I'm preparing my body and nervous system for birth like it's part of the business plan. Because it is!! The same woman runs both. Sleep, nourishment, prayer, and processing any fear or past birth experiences before labor 一 not after 一 since a regulated mother is the single best asset both the baby and the business have.

The Baby Is Not the Interruption

By the time you read this, I may already be holding this baby. There's a decent chance I'll have danced (waddled) at my sister's wedding first. I genuinely do not know how the logistics will shake out, I have no idea if the dress I have will fit me, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to stand up on the altar and support her on her wedding day. For maybe the first time in my entrepreneurial life, I mean it when I say that's not my department to worry about.

What I know is this: every other time, God has made it work 一not because I planned well, but because He provides. The events happened, the babies came, and somehow there was room for all of it, the way there was room in a stable despite the town being overcrowded.

Your business is not the fragile thing you think it is, and your baby is not the interruption you fear she is. The interruption might be the point!! It might be the exact tool God is using to move your company off the foundation of your own exhausted striving and onto the only foundation that was ever going to hold it anyway.