Hey, beautiful boss mom. Pull up a chair.

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Hey, beautiful boss mom. Pull up a chair.

Maybe you’ve seen the term “messy middle” going around lately. Maybe you haven’t. Either way you know the feeling. It’s what happens when you don’t want to be in corporate America, 9:00 to 5:00, away from your kids, but you also want something of your own. Something that makes you money. Something that makes you feel fulfilled and impactful and smart and awesome and not only a mother, while still caring enormously about being a mother.

And in between those two things is a lot of stuff. A lot of in-between moments you don’t quite know what to do with. A lot of time management that never quite works. That’s the middle. That’s what they’re naming.

So they gave it a name. And I have some things to say about that name.

But here’s what I actually want to get to, and it’s the reason I sat down to record this one alone. I was at my son’s middle school orientation recently and they said something so boring I nearly missed it, and I have not stopped thinking about it since. Because it turns out our kids get walked through this exact thing. There are stages. There’s an entire institution built around them. Everybody agrees they’re supposed to happen.

We go through the same stages. Nobody names ours. And instead of support, we get shame.

You told me a while back that you’d rather have stories and discussion than tactics and how-tos, so I’m going to skip the strategy list. We have enough stuff. What I want to do instead is give you a different word for where you actually are.

Beliefs Shape Thoughts. Thoughts Shape Results.

I did not invent this, and it’s pretty well established, though it took me an embarrassingly long time to actually feel it: your beliefs shape your thoughts, your thoughts shape your actions, and your actions shape your results.

So if we can change what we believe is possible, or true, or the way things work, that shifts what we think. Shift what we think and we shift how we act. Shift how we act and we shift what we get.

Which means the very first thing we have to go after is not a system. It’s a belief. And the belief I want to go after is this one: that the middle is something to be ashamed of.

The Word Itself Is Doing Damage

Let’s start with the name, because the name is terrible.

“Messy middle.” A mess is something people clean up. But that’s not a mess, that’s our life. You walk in and it’s, well, what is all that on the floor? It wasn’t there ten minutes ago, but my child decided that everything she owns should be on the living room floor because she was going to sort it, and then got distracted and left.

What’s that? The clean laundry nobody put away. And that? The dirty laundry nobody washed. And that? The dishes from today that my children took out of the clean dishwasher and put back on the sink dirty.

And that’s just the visible part. We haven’t even gotten to the messy middle of our thoughts. The overthinking. The things we start and stop because there are eleven other things happening.

We are named, over and over, with these shame-laden words. And my first instinct was to say let’s change the names. But I don’t actually think we will, because there’s a resonance to it that doesn’t feel untrue. It does feel messy. It does feel like chaos. It does feel like being constantly pulled and tugged and needed and distracted.

So the name stays. What changes is what we decide it means.

“Let’s start talking about these words in an excited way. Not a badge of honor because it’s hard. In an awesome way.” — Dana

Because who is most capable of managing that? Of handling it, of actually experiencing joy in the middle of it? It’s us. For all the 80% of the time when the chaos feels heavy, there’s a 20% of immense love and connection that outshines the whole thing. We are already doing the hardest version of this. We just refuse to call it a skill.

Ten Tabs, Four Operations

Ten tabs open? Sure. Three of those tabs are making me money. Three are making my family healthier. Three are me figuring myself out. And three I genuinely need to close, and I need a nap. But look at that list. That is not a woman who is failing. That is a woman running four operations at once.

(Those last three tabs are usually the ones somebody else could be holding, by the way. That’s a whole conversation on its own, and I’ve walked through how to start delegating one step at a time if that’s where you’re stuck.)

Here’s why that reframe matters more than a vocabulary argument.

If you look at the middle, at the chaos, at the ridiculous volume of logistics and stuff, and your immediate feeling is shame, then how on earth are you supposed to leverage it? How are you supposed to capitalize on it, make money inside it, build fulfillment inside it, reach a goal inside it?

You’re not. Shame is not a launching position. You cannot build from a place you’re apologizing for.

And the reflex most of us reach for instead is effort. Just work harder, get up earlier, out-hustle the mess. That doesn’t fix a belief problem, it just quietly wrecks you while looking productive.

And I want to be clear that this cannot be an individual fix. It can’t just be each of us privately deciding, well, this one’s for me. It has to be a movement. It has to be a bunch of us saying out loud: yeah, this is sort of how it is right now, and do you know how many of us have done brilliant things in the middle of exactly this?

A lot. If anybody is going to be good at building something inside chaos, it’s the multi-passionate, multi-tasking, eighteen-things-at-once mom.

So here’s your actual assignment this week, and it’s two steps. First, the next time that feeling rises up, catch it and ask: how do I reframe this for myself right now? Second, and this is the part people skip, tell a friend. Send her this episode. Have the conversation out loud.

Because you think it’s just you. It is never just you. And when we start doing this collectively, we change generations. (Moms already have some of the best time management skills on the planet. We just keep filing it under “coping.”)

Mothers Are the Neck

There’s that line in My Big Fat Greek Wedding: the man is the head, but the woman is the neck, and she can turn the head whichever way she wants.

I always thought that was a fun, playful thing. Now I think it’s a strategy document.

This isn’t about men and women. It’s about the fact that mothers are the neck. Mothers move generations. Mothers move belief systems. We are, quite literally, the buying power for most families. That is not a small thing. That’s leverage most people would pay for.

Which brings me to the second half of the messy middle, and the harder half.

We don’t own the power we have.

You Were Supposed to Lose Yourself for a While

I have not met a single mom who has skipped this phase. Not one. So if you’re in it, you are extremely not alone.

When we become mothers, we lose our identity for a bit. And I think that’s intentional. Something in us shuts off to anything we personally want, because the assignment for that window is keeping a baby alive and figuring out how any of it works.

That part is not the problem. The problem is that we never come out of it.

The theory I keep coming back to is that we don’t have multiple generations living together anymore. We’re not in the same static, growing communities we used to be in. The family unit has shifted, we’re far more isolated, and so the phase that was supposed to be temporary just quietly becomes permanent.

And on top of that we’ve built shame around all of it. Shame that we don’t know who we are. Shame that we don’t know what we want. Shame that spending time figuring it out is selfish. So we keep it in. We isolate. We don’t say it out loud.

Which is wild, because moms are meant to be in community. That’s not a nice-to-have. The BossMom group blew up in the first place for exactly this reason. There used to be a running joke that you can never have too many moms on Facebook, and there was a truth under the joke.

“You are supposed to lose your identity for a while when you have a baby. What comes next isn’t getting the old you back. It’s the old you, the new you, and the future you merging into something you actually choose.” — Dana

That reintegration is not a crisis. It’s the next stage. It’s supposed to happen. And if it means you scrap what you built before and begin again from a different place, that is not a setback. Starting over is one of the most powerful moves a mom makes, and almost nobody tells you that while you’re in it.

The Three Stages Nobody Names for Moms

I was at my son’s middle school orientation recently. It was, I’ll be honest, deeply boring. But they said one thing that I have not stopped thinking about.

They said kids spend the first twelve years of life understanding the family dynamic. Then two years in middle school understanding their community: their friend circle, where they fit, who they are in a group. Then in high school they start working out independence, and which version of themselves they actually want to be.

And I sat there thinking, that’s us. That’s the exact arc moms go through, and nobody names it.

Stage one is the family dynamic. Roughly baby to five, though it moves around depending on how many kids you have and how close together. You are learning how this unit works. Keeping everyone alive. Building the systems that hold a household together. This is the stage where losing your own identity is not a malfunction, it’s the job description. You are supposed to be here for a while. (Your business has a toddler stage too, and it looks almost exactly like this one.)

Stage two is community. Something shifts. Maybe kindergarten hits, maybe the youngest suddenly needs you a little less, and you get this flicker of wait, who am I? And here’s the part everybody gets wrong, including me for years: the answer to that question does not start with a business plan. It starts with people.

You need moms you can be honest around. You need to say the ugly version out loud and have somebody go “oh thank God, me too.” That’s not a break from the work of figuring yourself out. That is the work. Kids do it in middle school with the whole school built around it, and we treat the exact same need in ourselves like a luxury we have to earn.

This is where most of the moms I talk to actually are. And almost every one of them thinks she’s behind, because she’s comparing herself to stage three.

Stage three is independence. Now you can ask the bigger questions. What are my boundaries? What am I committing to? Who is the next version of me and how do I become her? This is where the offer gets built, the boundaries get held, the money gets made. This is also the stage where the people around you have to be brought in on it, which is its own skill. If your partner still doesn’t fully get what you’re building, start there.

Now here’s the thing I want you to actually take away.

You cannot skip stage two. You can try. Most of us do. We come out of the fog of the baby years, feel the pull to become something, and go straight for strategy. Buy the course, build the funnel, pick the niche. And it doesn’t stick, and we decide the problem is us.

The problem is that you tried to do stage three work in stage two isolation. There’s no version of figuring out who you are that you do by yourself in a room.

So if you are sitting there feeling behind: you’re probably not behind. You’re probably in stage two, doing it alone, and grading yourself against stage three.

Kids get walked through this arc with an entire institution supporting it. Moms get shamed for even starting it. And the culture is finally beginning to unravel that, partly because we can’t be contained anymore and partly because women keep discovering that if they do this, they can actually build something real and make money doing it. (The business mindset every mom needs starts right here, not with a funnel.)

How to Actually Leverage the Messy Middle

So what do you do with all of this on a Tuesday?

1. Name your stage. Family dynamic, community, or independence. Say it out loud. Most of the weight you’re carrying is the gap between the stage you’re in and the stage you think you should be in.
2. Stop grading yourself against stage three. If you’re in stage two, stage three metrics are not your metrics yet. That’s not a delay, it’s a sequence.
3. Catch the shame in the moment. Not the mess. The shame about the mess. That’s the thing costing you.
4. Rename it in your own head, out loud, badly. “Ten tabs, four operations.” Whatever version of that is true for you.
5. Say it to one other mom this week. This is the step that turns a private reframe into a cultural one, and it’s also how you do stage two properly.

Because at the end of that path, milady, there is genuinely immense power. Power to sway a community. Power to shift culture. Power to change the trajectory of generations.

That’s what moms have. It’s epic. And it starts with refusing to be embarrassed about the season you’re standing in.

This is, in fact, the whole subject of the Becoming Boss Mom book I’m shopping around to traditional publishers right now, so you’re going to hear me talk about it more. But I don’t want you to wait for a book.

Your Next Step

Come into the free BossMom Community. If stage two is where you are, this is the stage two room. It is not just a place to network. It’s where we strip the shame off all of it and get honest about what you actually want, what you’re actually focusing on, and how to do business and life differently when your time and space are genuinely limited. You get free networking events, mindset workshops, our daily mindset audios, real connection with other members, and it lives on its own dedicated app, completely off social media. It’s free. Search BossMom in the App Store or go to bossmom.com/community.

When you’re ready to level up, BossMom+ is next. That’s the stage three room. We build the right marketing plan for your business and give you the ongoing implementation support to actually hit your financial goals, in rhythms of micro action that create momentum without requiring a life you don’t have.

And then do the assignment. Have this discussion with one other mom. Send her this episode. Email me at dana@bossmom.com and tell me what came up, or come find me in the community and tell me there. I read them.

Let’s be the change, ladies. One tiny step at a time.

I heart your faces always.

xo, Dana