Are we really *allowed* to be Money Matriarchs? 💰🤰💰

To trust in a different way?

For the first few months of my pregnancy, I was laid out sick, practically immobilized… and angry.

Angry that my mother, my grandmothers, and their mothers and grandmothers, weren’t compensated royally for the completely encompassing task of growing a child in their own bodies. Birthing those children. Feeding them from their breasts. Responding to their cries for years and years.

But I chowed down on ginger chews, and showed up to my beloved clients, anyway.

I wasn’t angry at my clients.

I wasn’t angry at my work.

I love my clients and my work.

I was angry that we live in a culture that devalues the fundamental blessing and burden of child bearing and child rearing.

I was angry that it seemed like my options were either 1) be totally financially dependent on Seann – relying on his goodwill and generosity (all the while, being separated from him during our precious postpartum time so that he could keep on earning), or 2) work from a place of depletion, against my desire or capacity.

Fast forward to month 8 of pregnancy, and I’m still angry at the insanity of our collective economic systems.

But I’m also entertaining a new, exciting question.

What if I could be a Money Matriarch?

Here’s the thing: for the first time in modern history, there’s an industry where women and nonbinary folks can be paid with the respect they deserve for their spiritual, relational, creative and emotional work.

No one’s putting a glass ceiling on us. No one’s determining our pay for us. No one’s saying, you can’t have that job, you can’t earn that income, or you can’t be financially sovereign and hold economic power.

(You know, except the embodied legacy of centuries of programming, epigenetic wiring & oppression… no small feat to overcome.😅)

Seann’s got a master’s degree in environmental science. He works with BANKS in environmental tech and finance (for the sake of reducing fuckery). He’s the kind of dude with a lot of room for high earning.

And even still, when we did the math of his earning potential versus mine, there was almost no comparison.

I can earn more money working 10-15 hours a week for only 6 months, than he can working 40-50 for 12 months.

That’s historic, people.

It’s not commonplace in our culture. There’s still a severe pay gap between men and women, and the gap across race is even more despicable.

But it IS my reality… if I’m daring enough to step into it.

And maybe it could be your reality, too.

I say daring because it’s not comfortable to swim upstream against cultural norms, against collective histories, against mainstream comfort.

Throughout my entire career as a coach and author, I have been continuously met with side-eyes, judgement, criticism and doubt around my earning, my prices, the value of what I offer, and ultimately, my power.

Whether I offered my work via the gift economy, via a sliding scale, or more traditionally methods – there have been endless opinions, specifically put on me as a woman, for how I decide to take responsibility for my financial life.

Maybe you can relate?

But there’s something about becoming a mother that has me giving way less fucks about what others think about my decisions.

I know in my bones where my morals stand, especially when it comes to money.

I believe in abundance for all.

I believe in overflowing and circulating resources from a nourished well.

I believe in ease, generosity, sweat and equity.

I believe in the unquestionable value of historically “women’s” work.

I believe I am one tiny human, both capable of contributing so much to the healing of our human family, and also not responsible for fixing or solving the systemic fuckery of capitalism on my own, with every move I make.

I believe in nuance, complexity, hypocrisy, and striving towards evermore coherence season after season.

I believe in fluidity – that some seasons are for one thing, and other seasons are for another.

And for sure, I believe you can never ever make everyone happy. So pleasing others really can’t be the goal, or the motivation, behind your choices.

You’ve gotta know what’s true for you, and stick to it, even if people disagree with, critique or hate it.

Which brings me back to the new questions I’m entertaining.

Am I really allowed to be a money matriarch?

Here’s what that looks like for me:

Providing for our family with joy and spaciousness, soul-alignment and creative, intuitive, magical prowess.

Seann and I having so much time together to nourish and nurture our growing family during its most precious beginning.

Doing postpartum in partnership, rather than in isolation.

Flowing all our finances together into one single pot. Holding the possibilities and stresses of money together, in full.

Collaboration. Putting two energies together towards one shared goal: My work joyfully providing more than enough for our family.

Seann showing up to radically support that reality. With bone broth and well-balanced meals. With brainstorming and a celebratory eye on my creative projects. With unending trust and support in my prowess.

I don’t feel scared. I don’t feel pressure. (Most days! lol)

If anything, I feel awe and wonder, gratitude and relief, that Seann gets to put down the burden of the all-providing, over-working, disconnected patriarch.

And that I’m not picking it up just because he’s putting it down.

That together, we’re saying, we trust in a different way.

The way of togetherness. The way of bone deep coherence. The way of passion. The way of collaboration. The way of taking our turns. The way of honoring and amplifying my creative, intuitive and spiritual gifts for the true abundance that they hold. They way of centering the mother and children. The way of 24-hour support in postpartum. The way of gender bending. The way of upending the patriarchal capitalist laws of how hard and divided it all has to be in order to feel some illusion of “wealthy and free”. The way of the Money Matriarch.

We will have the realest wealth and freedom there is: time.

Time with each other. Time with our baby. Time with the true desires of our hearts.

I wish this for us ALL.

Big love… brazen trust.
xoxo,
Rachael