You Don't Need Permission. You Just Keep Waiting for It Anyway.
- Kelsea Koenreich
- Jul 2
- 7 min read
I had a conversation this week that I keep coming back to.
Kim Richards is the founder of Caring for Mama, a San Diego-based business that builds and ships care boxes made entirely from women-owned products, for moms of every age and stage, not just postpartum, any Tuesday when someone needs to feel seen. She started it two years ago after struggling through her own postpartum experience and gifting a box to a neighbor who texted her that night to say she felt cared for in a way she hadn't in a long time. That text became a business. She has since connected with over 100 women-owned businesses, sourced from about 50 of them, and ships boxes all over the country.
What I want to talk about from our conversation has nothing to do with the boxes, though.
It is about the thing Kim said near the end of the episode, and the thing I find myself saying to my clients over and over again, and the thing that might be the most overlooked, least glamorous, hardest to receive piece of building something while also raising kids and keeping yourself intact.
Most of the pressure you are under right now is coming from you.
We Assume Responsibility the Way We Assume Oxygen
When I peeled back the layers with Kim on what protecting her time actually looks like now versus two years ago, she described something I hear constantly in my client work: she learned that her own energy had to come first. Before the business. Before the commitments. Before other people's needs showed up in her inbox and on her calendar and in her home. That reordering felt wrong before it felt right. It still takes practice.
Here is what I know after years of working with women who are building real things: we naturally assume responsibility. We do it the way we breathe. A business starts, there are kids, there is a house, there is a team, and somewhere in the accumulation of all of it we just start leading everything because nobody else stepped up and because that is who we are.
And then we wonder why we're exhausted.
I told a client this week, not for the first time, that she has a choice. She had been on a call with me where we talked through a series of things she had been dreading. By the end of the week she emailed to say she had said no to a commitment, left a meeting early, and delegated something she had been holding for months. She framed it as a thank you.
I want you to hear what was in that email: she already knew she had those options. She had just been waiting for someone to tell her it was okay.
That is not a time management problem. That is a permission problem.
The Difference Between Getting Your Needs Met and Actually Being Nourished
I made a distinction in this conversation that I want to expand on here, because I think it matters more than most people realize.
There is getting your needs met. And then there is nourishment.
Getting your needs met looks like: you slept enough nights this week, you ate something, you got through the workout, you didn't completely fall apart. It is the baseline. It is functional. It is, for a lot of the women I work with, what they are quietly calling self-care while running at about sixty percent capacity and pretending they're fine.
I had a client who hadn't had an unscheduled hour on her calendar in four months. When I pointed it out she laughed and then went quiet. She wasn't ignoring herself. She was getting her needs met. She just hadn't been nourished in so long she had stopped noticing the difference.
Nourishment is different. It is the thing that actually refills the cup instead of just preventing it from emptying. It is the thing that, when you look at your calendar, is yours. Not a commitment dressed up as rest. Not a meeting that got moved to a coffee walk. Yours. Space that belongs to you before it belongs to the business.
Kim talks about this as the whole point of what she builds. The boxes say "You're doing a great job" on the card because that is often the only thing in the room that is explicitly, unambiguously for the mom and not for the baby, the household, the logistics, the next thing on the list.
And what strikes me about that is how rare it is. How extraordinary it is that a note saying "I see you, you're doing great, this is yours" can feel like the most surprising thing a mom receives, because the bar for being seen is that low.
I sat with that for a while after we got off the call.
Overcommitting Is a Pattern, Not a Season
Here is where I want to push back a little on something we say to ourselves constantly: this is just a season.
Sometimes it is a season. Launches are seasons. Newborns are seasons. Building something new takes a concentrated burst that no one can sustain forever. Both things can be true.
But a lot of the time, "this is just a season" is the thing we say when we don't want to look at the behavioral pattern underneath it. I see this in my client work all the time. The schedule that has been unsustainable for eighteen months. The networking events that keep getting added even though the body is already done. The yes that comes out before the person has even finished the sentence.
Kim described going through her calendar and ruthlessly deleting. Not pausing, not rescheduling, deleting. She said she used to be triple-booked every night before kids, and that she loves people and loves networking, and that she is now selective in a way she didn't used to be, because she knows she has less to give and she wants what she gives to count.
That is not withdrawal. That is clarity about what the yeses are actually costing.
I say this with all the love in my heart, but if you have been in "a season" for more than six months, I want you to sit with whether it is a season or whether it is a pattern you haven't been willing to name yet. Because the woman who is always in a season never gets to the place where she can make a different choice. She is always one thing away from having the space to breathe.
That space doesn't appear. You carve it.
What Putting Yourself First Actually Does to Everyone Around You
I grew up being told that putting myself first meant I was selfish. That message was so loud and so repeated that I carried it into my business for years, and it cost me.
Here is what I have learned, and what I have watched happen in the women I work with when they finally make the shift: everybody around you is better when you are full. The clients get a sharper version of you. The team gets a calmer version of you. Your kids get a present version of you instead of the one who is physically in the room but mentally somewhere else, running the list, monitoring the inbox, holding everything together at a cost that only you can feel.
Kim put it simply near the end of our conversation. She said she reminds herself that she is building a business called Caring for Mama, and if she is not okay, something has gone wrong at the core.
That is the check. That is the one question worth asking regularly: am I actually receiving what I am building for other people? Because if the answer is no for months at a time, that is information.
It doesn't mean you are failing. It means the structure around you hasn't been built to include you in it. And that is fixable.
The Permission Is Yours to Give
The reason I keep having this conversation, in my client work and on this podcast and everywhere else women who are building something gather, is that the permission piece does not go away on its own.
Most women I work with know, intellectually, that they are allowed to say no, to carve out the time, to stop being the last one cared for in a house full of people they are caring for. They know it. And they keep waiting for it to feel okay before they do it.
It doesn't feel okay at first. You do it, and then it feels okay. And then it starts to feel necessary. And then one day you are the woman who goes through her calendar and ruthlessly deletes, who leaves meetings early when she said she would, who takes the afternoon because that was always on the table and she just hadn't been taking it.
That is not a personality change. That is a decision, made over and over, until it becomes the way you operate.
And when it does, you'll wonder what took you so long.
The Mom Founders Table Is Where This Gets Built
If the three stories in this post felt familiar, the Mom Founders Table is where you come next.
We look at your people, your pricing, and your processes, and we also look at the patterns underneath them: the overcommitment, the pressure you are carrying that belongs to no one, the schedule that has been running you instead of the other way around. We redesign the infrastructure so the business runs without requiring everything you have left at the end of the day.
You get my accountability, a curated room of women building at your level, and twelve months of work that goes into the structure AND the patterns that have been holding it in place.
Applications are open now for the September 1st cohort, with 30 seats. Full details on structure, calls, the retreat, and the guarantee are on the application page.
If you've been waiting for permission to apply, this is it. Apply for The Mom Founders Table or message me on Instagram if you want to talk through where you are first.
You can find Kim Richards and Caring for Mama at caringformama.co and on Instagram at @caringformama.co. If you are a mom who has been last on her own list for a while, go look at what she is building. It is exactly what it sounds like.
