As an entrepreneur, a mother and a member of the oft-discussed millennial generation, I feel I’m being positively pummeled with expectations, joys, demands, judgments and revelations. With too little time and more goals than I can count, I often feel overwhelmed. Yet, despite the dizzying whir of business and life, I feel absolutely certain about a few things.

Owning my age

According to recent research by the Kauffman Foundation, the average age of an American entrepreneur is 40 years old. For high-growth industries, the average age skews significantly older.

I’m 30 years old, and I co-founded Pink Lily alongside my husband, Chris, four years ago at age 26. Since then, we’ve grown the business to $50 million in revenue and have set a revenue goal of $100 million for the year 2020. From one perspective, this makes me a tremendous success story, on the very early end of the typical entrepreneurial arc. From another perspective, I am a young leader who some may believe is getting in over her head.

It’s true that leading and managing a fast-growing team of dozens of employees would be a challenge for any business owner. But our cultural perceptions about age, relative to status and success, sometimes weigh heavily on me. Flickered expressions, cutting remarks, ill-timed jokes, whispered conversations — these perceptions and judgments are not easy to call out, but always easy to sense.

Unfortunately, our society is only just coming to terms with the damaging effects of workplace ageism as it affects older people battling to obtain equal opportunities and young people entering the workforce. The conversation has not yet evolved to include the struggles of young entrepreneurs, executives and leaders seeking respect despite their perceived youthfulness. And this means that it’s up to me to own my age, along with the opportunities and challenges afforded by it. Before I gear up for a tough conversation with an older employee, walk into a high-stakes meeting, announce a revenue growth strategy or take any other decisive action befitting my role as co-founder and CEO, I take a minute to reset my thinking. Yes, I am 30 years old, but I am also much more than that. I am a natural leader. And I am fully capable of steering a company and its workforce into the future.

Fearless focus

Even as the mother of two young children, I’m not afraid to say that I love work. In this country — especially in the South — these words don’t exactly roll off the tongue. Sure, work may be necessary. It may be a chore and a duty. But, if it takes you from the responsibilities and joys of home and family, how could a woman possibly love it? How could she possibly want more of it? Why would she seek to grow and rise if she doesn’t absolutely have to do so?

In ways direct and indirect, I encounter this attitude on a regular basis. The often-implied subtext is that mothers who are ambitious and passionate about their full-time careers are somehow less invested in their family’s well-being. It may be 2018, but this sentiment is a seemingly unshakable vestige of decades past. We see glimpses of this thinking in the questions we ask of successful, business-minded women who also happen to be mothers. One of the most common is “How do you manage it all?”

This question is meant to determine how in the world these powerful women are managing to juggle their work, marriage, home and family responsibilities simultaneously. Trouble is, we rarely ask our male leaders and fathers the same question. How different would this conversation be if we stopped quietly judging our ambitious young women and successful female business leaders, but instead started asking them what they love about work? What gets you excited about work each day? Which of your professional accomplishments most shifted the trajectory of your career? Why do you do what you do? Perhaps before we can reach the point where we embrace our ambitious working mothers, we need to better understand their points of view.