Wild, Relentless Love

The parallel power of motherhood and entrepreneurship to stretch, shape, and transform us.

Dear Fabulous Female Founders,

My oldest son Skyler was born breech at home when I was 31 and more terrified of hospitals than pain. By the time the midwife arrived and realized she was feeling a butt not a head, it was too late to do anything but deal.

Skyler’s right leg dangled out of me for nine solid minutes, and I screamed so wildly the entire county winced.

He was absolutely beautiful, with olive skin, dark hair, deep blue eyes, and somewhat Asian facial features. I held him on my knees for hours at a time, marveling, completely utterly madly smitten.

Then-husband Eric and I were outdoorsy types, so we packed Skyler up for a cross country ski on Mt. Hood when he was six months old. He cried the entire way up, then all night, in a small cabin, torturing not just us but our kid-free friends. He wailed throughout the attempted ski, which we cut short, heading home to the relief of our friends who never invited us again.

At around nine months, his eardrums burst at a baby-mom coffee shop meet-up. Throughout his entire childhood, he would suffer the aftermath: infections, tubes, dizziness, and vertigo, plus asthma and mysterious waves of leg pain. To settle him down, I’d walk him around the block, often in the middle of the night, nodding at the drunks ejected from the Reel ‘Em In Tavern a few blocks away.

Through trial and error, I came up with an effective soothing routine: giving him a swig of calcium magnesium; singing the song A you’re adorable, B you’re so beautiful, C you’re a cutie filled with charm…; and rubbing his back until he fell back asleep.

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Daughter Sasha was also born at home, in a birthing tub the midwife set up in the sunroom alcove. No big drama this time, just nine steady hours of labor on a stormy Cinco de Mayo, windows wide open, the ferocious wind and pelting rain a delicious, soothing balm.

My sweet girl brought her own unique stuff: itchy from head to toe with eczema, impetigo around her mouth, and weeping hot yeast in her creases. She slept no more than 20 minutes at a time for the first nine months, when she shifted out of the worst of it and became the most delightfully joyful creature whose mere presence in any room caused spirits to lift. Still does!

Those eyes!

Skyler was an up and down fellow, gifted with an obsessive nature and deep intellect, stubbornness, and need for routines. Trips of all sort—camping, visiting family, even just running errands—were a massive challenge, sure to be sleepless and/or battle-charged. Sasha, on the other hand, embraced newness, went with the flow, and attracted butterflies, kittens, and friends like a honey stick at a backyard picnic.

Through them (and Levi a decade later, born in the hospital, no way was I doing any more home births), I learned how our children shape us as we shape them.

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When Skyler was two, Michael Jones and I incorporated Alta Planning + Design. Far beyond a job and platform to spread the gospel of bicycle transportation, our little firm grew into a dynamic studio of innovation and ambition, where mission met money, where creativity met efficiency, and where people powered possibility.

I felt proud not just to be earning a living, but to be creating great jobs while making the world a better place. It was, in so many ways, another child I was raising.

Just as our children shape us, so too our businesses, for business is not a destination but a journey. (I know, I know, the word ‘journey’ is overused and perhaps meaningless. Tell me a better one, please.) Just as we create new life with our bodies, we shape ideas into businesses and organizations with our energy and determination, and they shape us as they grow and evolve.

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Like the vast majority of the founders I meet, I did not go into business thinking, I want to run a business. Yet I built, alongside my partners (also not “businesspeople”), two firms with more than $80 million in annual revenue.

I became a businessperson by virtue of running a business, like so many of the founders I coach, advise, and write about who identified a problem and didn’t wait for permission or perfect conditions. They got to work, while leaning into both their children and careers.

Through our businesses, we learn the joys and challenges of partners, financing, risk, employees, growth, and more. We gain resilience. We discover within ourselves deep wells of focus, courage, grit, and faith—qualities that motherhood cultivates daily and that business demands in equal measure. And in showing up fully for both, we model something powerful for our children: that creativity and care can coexist, that strength has many forms, and that building something from scratch is one of the most radical acts of love there is.

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Skyler, Sasha, and Levi taught me about pure, unconditional, ferocious love. They stretched my heart, rewired my nervous system, and forced me to surrender control in favor of presence, patience, and grace. Through the sick nights, messy emotions, and unexpected twists and turns, I learned to show up, again and again, imperfectly but fully, spreading my love like a sprawling expanding living breathing blanket.

And isn’t that what entrepreneurship demands of us too? To love something so deeply that we stick with it when it’s not going according to plan? To nurture a vision that keeps us up at night, that reshapes who we are, that forces us to confront both our limits and our potential? Our businesses, like our children, are part of us but not ours to control. We bring them into the world with everything we have, then hold them lightly as they grow, stumble, and transform.

So to all of you building something from the ground up—whether it's a business, a baby, or a bold new version of yourself—I see you. I honor the tenderness and tenacity it takes. And I hope you give yourself credit not just for what you're building, but for who you're becoming along the way.

~ Mia