Vanessa, 40, Owner of YaYa Yoga and children’s author | Paso Robles, CA

"I have created my company so that I'm able to be a part of my kids lives, and they can be a part of my life. I've figured out this balance of having a professional life and a professional world, and being able to be home. It's been really tricky. Because my husband is a fire captain in San Jose, and he's gone quite often, I try to work around his rotating schedule as much as possible, and have created sessions for my kids’ classes to make that happen. Every mom does it differently. So for me, this is what works. Being able to teach classes, be with other kids, but also have my kids joining the classes if I don't have a sitter, or I don't have somewhere for them to be. So they get to be a part of that, too. My kids are learning how to be a teacher. And my kids are learning how to care for others.

I think there are moms out there that have a lot of judgment on other moms. I have felt judged. I think we've judged others, too. I try to be mindful of that. And tell myself, you know, we're all just kind of doing what we can. We're all just doing the best that we can.

I think if people have taken my classes, or their kids have taken my classes, they see me as this person that is really patient and really calm and, yes, I have that part of me. But I wasn't [always] that person. I feel that I've kind of come into more of who I want to be within the past 10 years or so. Previous to that I was a mess. I was anxious, stressed, overwhelmed all the time, making decisions based on pleasing other people as opposed to what was true to my soul and myself. And now I'm in a space where I make decisions based on what's best for me and what's best for our kids.

Yes, [motherhood] is narrowly represented. Motherhood looks so different on everybody. I grew up as a Chicana, as a Mexican-American, in this country. And we lost a lot of our culture, we lost our language- specifically, my family, we lost our language, we lost a lot of our culture, we weren't allowed to speak Spanish, we weren't allowed to celebrate who we were. And that was hard on the mothers in the past generation, so that's a trauma that's kind of been embedded into me. So now that I'm in this space, parenting children that are half Mexican and half Caucasian, it's like re-parenting, like learning how to parent as an American, I guess, but also finding truth and beauty in the culture that I came from. And that is still there and embedded in my soul. I want my kids to be mindful and aware that they are from this blood.

My mother was assimilated into the American culture. She is one of nine. She actually was raised speaking English, because her older siblings were so bullied and ridiculed in the schooling system for not speaking English. By the time she came along, they all knew English and would speak to her in English, and would be expected to speak English back. When she married my dad, my dad's mom didn't speak any English at all. And so my mom, pretty much from just being around it, picked up [Spanish.] She said, ‘I watched the novellas on TV. And that's how my Spanish got stronger. And I was able to converse with my mother in law.’

When my mom raised me and my two sisters, she was scared to raise us in Spanish, learning Spanish, because she had past trauma. Now she'll speak to my kids in Spanish. Now Emanuel, my son, is at a Spanish dual immersion program. And he's reading and writing and conversing in Spanish, and it's just fills my soul- it’s amazing. Full circle trying to like bring it.

From when you're pregnant to when you have the baby, it's like a shock, man. No one really prepares you for the sleep deprivation that is about to happen. I would have just shown myself more grace: that I was in this period, this hard part of life, with a little human that changed our whole world. Crying more and letting myself cry and be okay with it. And knowing that this is what it is, this too shall pass, as everyone says, and move on. And with each stage in parenting, it's hard. I don't like it when people say it gets easier because it does not get easier. What happens is that it shifts. So yes, we're out of naps. Or we're out of maybe some tantrums for the most part. But now we're shifting into more elementary age. And so then the tantrums are different. So yeah, it doesn't get easier."