Diwang Malaya

There is something rather surreal about entering completely new territory at a point in life when you thought you had become fairly familiar with the terrain.

People around you begin talking about the things that tend to occupy this particular season of adulthood. Long-postponed trips. Businesses they finally have time to build. Financial plans. Retirement. Perhaps a little more freedom after years of work and family responsibilities. There is a sense that the next chapter should come with fewer demands and a little more room to breathe.

And here I am thinking about diapers, milk, wet wipes and baby sleep.

This is my first child, which means that for all the things I have learned about life, work and myself over the years, I have arrived at motherhood as a complete beginner. There is no previous experience to draw from, no older child whose milestones I can compare, no familiar rhythm to fall back on. Every stage brings something I have never encountered before.

It is a peculiar experience to be fairly experienced in life and completely inexperienced at something as fundamental as raising another human being.

For years, much of my identity was tied to things I knew how to do. I could work, solve problems, earn money, manage a household, make decisions and generally figure things out. Freelancing suited that part of me particularly well. Give me a problem with enough moving parts and I am usually quite happy sitting down to work out how everything fits together.

Then you have a baby, and suddenly there is an entire category of life that refuses to behave like a problem you can solve.

You can read about sleep. You can prepare the bottles. You can buy the things everyone tells you that you will need. You can make a schedule and feel quite pleased with yourself.

The baby has other plans.

There is something humbling about that. You spend years becoming competent, and then life gives you something where competence is replaced by observation, patience and a willingness to admit that you have no idea what you are doing.

Okay. So we’re doing this now.

The experience has also changed the way I think about work.

Recently, a potential client asked me a question that made me pause: why was I looking for another project when I already had an existing client?

It is a reasonable question, particularly if you are accustomed to thinking about work in terms of employment. If someone already has a job, the assumption is that the job provides a certain number of hours and a reasonably predictable income each month.

Freelancing operates on a different rhythm.

Having a client does not necessarily mean having a full-time income. A client may need a certain number of hours one month and considerably fewer the next. A project can finish. A contract can change. A retainer can be reduced. There can be busy periods followed by quieter ones.

So yes, I can have an existing client and still be looking for another project.

That is part of the economics of freelancing.

It is also part of the reason flexibility has become much more valuable to me.

People often talk about freelance work as though flexibility automatically translates into freedom, and there is some truth in that. I can arrange my working hours around the needs of my family. I can work from home. I can sometimes move things around when the baby needs me. I have considerably more control over my day than I would in a conventional workplace.

The other side of that arrangement is uncertainty. The number of hours available to me is not guaranteed every month, and neither is the income that comes with those hours. I have to keep looking for work, manage the gaps between projects and think about what comes next.

That trade-off has become much clearer to me since becoming a mother.

There was a time when I might have looked at variable income and immediately thought about the security of employment. These days, I find myself looking at the equation differently. My circumstances have changed, and so have the things I value.

I need flexibility.

A conventional job might give me a more predictable structure, but that structure would also come with expectations about when I need to be available, where I need to be and how much of my time belongs to the employer. At this particular point in my life, those things carry a cost.

Freelancing gives me a different kind of responsibility. I have to create my own income rather than simply receive a salary. I have to keep an eye on the pipeline. I have to be comfortable with some uncertainty.

In exchange, I have a degree of control over my time that matters enormously right now.

That has made me reconsider what I mean by financial security, too.

Perhaps security is not always about having the most predictable monthly number. Sometimes it is about having enough income, enough skills and enough control over your circumstances to adapt when life changes. Perhaps flexibility itself has an economic value, even though it never appears as a line item on an invoice.

Motherhood has also changed my relationship with energy.

There are days when I can sit down and work for several uninterrupted hours. There are other days when the carefully planned schedule disappears because the baby needs something, or because a night of broken sleep catches up with me. A task that might once have taken an hour can take an afternoon when it has to be done in pieces.

Freelancing makes that possible in ways that a more rigid working arrangement might not.

It also means that work can follow you everywhere. The laptop is sitting there. The phone is sitting there. The message from the client arrives. There is always the temptation to squeeze one more thing into the day.

So part of this new territory has been learning that flexibility is not simply about finding more time for work. It is also about deciding when work has had enough of my time.

That is a lesson I am still learning.

There is a strange freedom that comes with having lived long enough to become less interested in proving yourself. Perhaps that is one of the unexpected advantages of entering motherhood with more life experience behind you. You have had enough time to discover which things matter to you and which things were simply expectations you inherited from somewhere else.

I still want to work. I still want to earn. I still want to build things and learn things and have projects that belong entirely to me.

I also want to be present for my child.

Those two things have to find a way to coexist.

I am beginning to think that this is what makes this particular chapter so interesting. It is not simply about becoming a mother. It is about discovering what happens to your ideas about identity, ambition, money, time and freedom when your life acquires an entirely new dimension.

I am still the same person. I still have opinions. I still have work I want to do. I still have places I want to see someday. I still have ideas that have absolutely nothing to do with baby bottles.

There is simply another person in the picture now.

And she has changed the landscape considerably.

I don’t have a five-year plan for this part of my life. I am learning as I go, figuring out how much work makes sense, which clients fit this season, how much uncertainty I am comfortable carrying and how to protect the time that matters.

It is new territory.

Perhaps that is the thing I find most interesting about getting older. We tend to imagine that experience will eventually make everything familiar, that by a certain point we will have accumulated enough knowledge to know how the next chapter should go.

Life doesn’t seem particularly interested in that arrangement.

Sometimes, even after all those years of learning how to navigate the world, you arrive somewhere completely new.

And you learn the landscape as you go.