For us, some mornings arrive already finished, but lately ours start on the couch, her legs slung over mine under the blanket I made for her, the yogurt lid peeling back slow under her thumb, like it’s a new experience again every time. Some mornings she listens to her Yoto, a small speaker I half-resent for how easily it chills her out, while I read one of my own books from the library because why not? For an hour some mornings (wild, I know), she wants nothing else but the two of us, still and together, our books, close enough that our legs get sticky. Stayyyyyyyy mamaaaa, she says when I say I try to get up for a second to refill our water, but lately I stay put for that entire hour.

I used to think stillness like this would make me restless by nine with that old itch to get on the treadmill the second I opened my eyes, to optimize the quiet early morning hours working on some random project I set invisible deadlines for. But waking up at the same time as my daughter and her also asking for slow afternoons now too, not just slow mornings, I’m learning my body doesn’t actually need to be doing something productive to count or to earn rest.

Maybe you’ve noticed this too: some moments feel strangely “expensive”, even though they don’t cost anything. Why is that?

Why does a slow morning like this feels so rich and like I wish I could pause time, when so many others don’t? My conclusion thus far is that I don’t think it’s about our presence in the moment, but more so staying still enough to notice the richness in the ordinary moment you’re already standing in.

If you typed "rich life" into Pinterest today, you probably already know what would appear. No shock: a very aesthetic beige private jet with a Chanel purse came up first. Then an insane shopping haul, then a hard-shell suitcase with someone's initials stitched into the leather. Not one image of a quiet mind at the end of the day, or a marriage you love being inside of. Nothing about an almost-three-year-old daughter swinging in your backyard for two hours on an ordinary Tuesday with nowhere else you have to be. For most of my adult life, I would have scrolled past those first results and agreed with them without noticing (or with adding them to a vision board because let’s be real, at one point I wanted all of the above). Rich meant something with a high price tag on it, something you could point a camera at to add to your highlight reel titled "Martha's Vineyard 2026." I think about how many of us spend years chasing a version of "rich" that was handed to us before we ever stopped to think about what we would choose ourselves.

You don't have to go camping to notice it as I do, but being somewhere without cell service reveals something almost immediately. First comes the twitch to check, to scroll, to be somewhere else. Then, if you stay long enough, relief. The new clothesline we hung in our backyard holds the same instinct as my daughter passes me pins one at a time. I care faintly that it looks unpolished against the yard, but no one is really watching, and I want our sheets to smell like fresh air, not like a dryer sheet trying to imitate it. So we'll keep it up. Somewhere between this looks ugly and who cares was a small decision about what I actually value and what feels rich.

Another moment that stayed with me this month would never have made a highlight reel or a Pinterest search. I almost didn’t take my daughter to her great-grandmother’s that Tuesday morning because my relationship with my Oma is complicated, to say the least, and has been for years, but there was nowhere else we needed to be, so we went. She’s ninety-five, still in her own condo, making her own decisions, with care nearby. So there we were fulfilling my daughter’s wish: to have a bath — in a tub that was new to her — at 10 a.m., pouring water from an ice cube tray into a ladle and back again, while my Oma watched from the doorway, grieving the recent loss of her partner, my Opa, and watching. Everyone I knew was somewhere else that morning, at work most likely, and I remember thinking: most people never get to do this. Three generations in one small bathroom on an ordinary Tuesday morning. I think that's the strange thing about rich every day moments — they're ordinary enough that you could have skipped them entirely.

I felt it again at my husband’s birthday, July fifteenth. It fell on a Wednesday, and he wanted to call the whole thing off because a birthday in the middle of the week can feel like a tease when you love your birthday the way he does. I talked him into it anyway, because I want to keep romanticizing every day (cliché, I know). Twelve cousins ran loose through the yard, ice cream cake melting faster than anyone could eat it and dripping down wrists onto the grass. Nobody planned this two weeks out, nobody needed to. Twelve kids well enough and free enough to show up for a quick, impromptu gathering on a random Wednesday. Most of the family won’t remember it was a Wednesday, or even whose birthday it was, but the feeling of watching those twelve kids run through that grass with sticky hands until the sun went down — that was another rich moment.

My own body is running on a particular kind of debt these days. My daughter only started sleeping through most nights about two weeks ago (she’ll be three in oct), and I still nurse her when she wakes, which after this long surprises even me. We sleep in a family bed I’ve turned into something like a nest: my husband on one side, her on the other, me in the middle. I used to think rich meant getting back to a 6a.m. pilates or spin class by now but its become very clear to me that it’s not that. It’s this… three bodies snuggled in one room and waking up together when the sun comes up to the birds chirping. That’s another rich moment I wouldn’t have foreseen on a list before.

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Now, most evenings, we eat outside as a little trio. Last month I pulled two old lounge chairs out of the shed and turned them into something like an outdoor bed. That’s where my husband and I now end up most nights once she’s asleep, our feet up, a few candles lit debreifing on the day. We had been trying for a second baby longer than I had planned (2.5+ years now), and some days that reality sinks back in, realizing things didn’t unfold the way I thought they would. But then I return to us on those two chairs, and it doesn’t feel like something we’re missing. It feels like the version of full and rich we actually have right now.

Do you ever wonder if we’ve begun to mistake visible wealth for a rich life simply because it’s easier to photograph and we see it online in such a casual way? Because it seems that the richest moments I’ve collected this year wouldn’t survive a Pinterest search. They’re far too ordinary and boring and boring to not overlook. Our sheets smell like summer air, and no one else will ever know that but us. And most mornings, if you came looking, you’d find us exactly where you left us: on the couch, her legs slung over mine, in absolutely no hurry to be anywhere else.

I would love to hear from you.

What’s one ordinary moment from this week that felt truly rich to you?

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I remember thinking it was such a Grandpa joke to make, but that was exactly like him.. setting a target and fully expecting to meet it, as if turning 100 were simply the next item on a list he intended to finish.

He almost made it. Grandpa died on August 1st, three months shy of 98. Seven weeks earlier, in June, my other grandfather — the one I called Opa — died too. And in the time since, I keep circling back to something that surfaces most often around 2am, when I’m walking my toddler back to bed: a long life and a fully lived one are not the same thing.

In that den, Grandpa would ask me question after question, and then answer anything I asked in return. If I mentioned something that I knew he wouldn’t have thought of before, like maybe homeschooling my daughter someday, there was never a comment about right or wrong. He’d tell me how things used to work, and then he’d say, genuinely, how much better it was that things were different now. He read a mix of fiction and nonfiction, constantly, and his den proved it. He watched golf for hours and played it too. And even at 95, he could talk to me about AI — not just tolerate the conversation, but actually understand it, ask good questions about it, want to know more. He wasn’t interested in it because he was trying to stay relevant. He was interested because something new existed in the world, and he wanted to know what it was. He never once, in all my life, told me something I believed was wrong.

Long before the den, before decades of reading and refusing to let his mind go still, he dropped out of high school. He started small — buying fridges from people who were replacing them, fixing what could be fixed, reselling the rest. It wasn't a plan so much as a habit: he kept noticing what people actually needed, and he kept building toward it. Fridges turned into stoves, then bedroom sets, then living rooms, until what he'd built, without ever finishing high school, was the largest independent furniture store in Canada. I don't think he set out to build an empire. He just never stopped being curious about the next thing people needed.

I don’t want to make it simpler than it was. Running that kind of business meant he was gone constantly, and my mom grew up with a stay-at-home mother raising five kids born thirteen months apart, and a father who was rarely there. They lived very well for their times. They also grew up with something missing, and my mom and her siblings are still working through what that absence cost them now as adults. Her parents eventually divorced, and both remarried. My grandpa and my Grandma KK had both shared and separate interests, and also had their own individual curiosity about the world, which was different from my Opa and Oma, who spent nearly all of their time together within five feet of each other. Once Grandpa and Grandma KK retired, they traveled everywhere — safaris, Japan, wherever caught their interest. They ate well. They spent money on the people they loved and being part of clubs. It’s the same idea a few writers have put a name to — dying with zero — but he was living it before I ever had language for it.

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My Opa, on the other hand, seemed to lose his sense of what came next once work ended. He didn’t read books. He didn’t have many interests outside of the job that had structured his whole life. And once that was gone, I struggled to see what he was reaching toward. I don’t want to reduce his life to unhappiness, because none of us can really know what someone else carried — but from where I stood, there was a kind of surrender in him long before his body gave out, and he’d wanted to be done, I think, for close to ten years.

The two deaths mirrored the two lives, somehow. Grandpa’s was fast, old age of course and then cancer at 97, one month of chemo he chose because he wanted to reach 100+, and then it took him so quickly he didn’t make it back to his hospice bed set up in his den. He wanted more time and didn’t get it. Opa had been asking for the opposite for what felt like a decade, and for a long time, he didn’t get that either.

I’ve also noticed, only in looking back, how differently I experienced being known by each of them. My mother’s mother, on the other coast in California, was someone I could tell anything — boys, sex, drugs, mistakes, all of it — and she’d just talk to me like a real person. My Opa and Oma were not that. I’ve written elsewhere about the fight that made this clear to me: how they were unsettled by the woman I’d become after motherhood specifically, how it felt like they only ever knew about 5% of who I actually was. That’s its own grief, and its own essay. I mention it here because it’s tangled into the same lesson — both of them showed me, in different ways, what I don’t want to become: someone incurious about the people she loves, unwilling to be surprised by who they turn out to be.

Because here’s the part I didn’t expect this essay to be about when I sat down to write it. My grandfather’s curiosity was never really just about books, or fridges, or AI. It was about staying open to the people in front of him, even as they changed into people he hadn’t planned for. My Opa, in my experience, stopped doing that long before he stopped living. And I have a daughter who will spend her entire life becoming someone I can’t currently predict. I don’t want to be the kind of mother who decides who her kids are early and then spends the next fifty years relating to the version she decided on. I want to keep discovering them and not deciding too soon what they’ll value, who they’ll become, or which of their choices I think are right, but staying genuinely interested in whoever they turn out to be.

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Money sat differently in each of their hands, too, and this is where I think the real inheritance shows up most clearly. My Opa and Oma held onto money so tightly that buying a coffee from a local shop was treated like a small betrayal — every penny saved is a penny you didn’t need to make, they both used to say. He’d crossed the ocean as a teenager with sixteen dollars in his pocket and built a real life in construction in Toronto, and by any measure, he did well. But money never stopped being about scarcity for them, even decades later, even more than comfortable there was never quite enough, and the way I spent mine was something to be commented on, corrected, and disapproved of over and over often leaving me in tears and a panic attack. The fear of there never being enough has been one of the quiet anxieties of my life, something I carry most days without fully noticing it. In my mind, Grandpa was the opposite. He talked about money openly, and his belief was simple: if you earn it, use it. Not debt, not recklessness but for God's sake, just take the trip, because you might not get another chance. Try the restaurant if it looks good. Live the life the money is supposedly for. Otherwise, he’d ask, what was the point of any of it. I did not inherit a business from either of them, but instead I inherited two completely different definitions of enough, and I’m only now starting to decide which one I want to raise my own kids inside of.

My husband and I have been asking our own version of that question lately, and it keeps changing shape. For a while, “enough” felt like a number in our bank account. An income we thought would finally make us feel perfectly secure. The more we talked about it, the less it held up, because what if the number meant I had to go back to full-time work, which after choosing to walk away from my career to be with my daughter was no longer the goal. So we stopped asking what number, and started asking what feeling we were going for. A hundred thousand dollars and four days a week might mean far more to us than three hundred thousand and a seventy-hour one. Those are just numbers I’m using to make the point, but the shift underneath them is real, and it’s gotten more concrete in the weeks I’ve been watching what a lifetime of either scarcity or expansiveness with money actually does to a person by the end of it.

Here’s what I keep landing on. I don’t think I fully inherited my grandpa’s business instincts, or his tolerance for risk, or even his generation’s version of ambition. I think what he actually gave me was smaller than that and more of a way of moving through the world that stays interested: asking another question, picking up the next book, sitting with an opinion you don’t share without needing to correct it, trying the thing you’re not qualified for just because it caught your attention. He did that until he was almost 98, which is probably the only reason a man that age could talk to his granddaughter about artificial intelligence like it was the most natural thing in the world.

I don’t think the opposite of death is really life. I think it might be curiosity. Because the moment we stop asking, stop noticing, stop letting the people we love surprise us, some part of us starts living as though the story is already finished. Grandpa kept his story open until he was almost 98. That’s what I think I’m really mourning, and what I think I’m really inheriting.

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I have a toddler and keep noticing how easy it is to file things under later. I’ll write more when they’re older and I have a bigger chunk of time to myself. I’ll learn about art once I can actually afford to buy a piece. I’ll travel, read, rest, build the thing I actually want to build — later, once this season is easier. And then I watched a man reach almost 100 years old, still saying tell me more right up until the end, and a hundred years suddenly felt like a shockingly short amount of time to spend waiting for your life to start.

I don’t want a long life so much as I want one I’m not spending waiting to escape — the version where I stay interested now, in the middle of it, instead of promising myself I’ll get curious again once the hard part is over.

Some mornings, that just looks like this: coming downstairs at the same time as my daughter, reading my own book on the couch beside her while she listens to her audiobook. We share one blanket, and our feet always end up tangled together. I follow whatever I’m curious about, and she follows whatever she’s curious about. I used to think enough would be a number. I’m realizing now it’s actually this — a slow morning I didn’t have to earn first.

And maybe that’s what I want most for her, too — not a blueprint for what a good life is supposed to look like, but the same permission: to stay interested in her own, to keep changing her mind, to grow into someone I didn’t predict and still want to know.

So maybe that’s the whole inheritance. Not a hundred years, not a furniture business. Just permission to stay interested in the life that’s actually in front of me, instead of the one I keep telling myself is coming later. Because later might not come and my grandpa knew that better than almost anyone I’ve known, right up until the very end.

Just the asking. Just: tell me more.

I would love to hear from you.

What's on your 'later' list right now? Something you keep telling yourself you'll get to eventually….

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For a while I kept waiting to feel like myself again. I thought if I could just get back to some of the things I did before motherhood, I’d find myself again — my 6am spin class, maybe a girls’ trip like I kept seeing other moms take online. What actually happened was a lot smaller and slower than that. It looked like journaling beside my daughter on scrap craft paper, in whatever ten minutes she’d give me.

None of it looked like transformation. It looked like permission. Tiny repeatable permission slips to still be someone underneath the mothering.

If you’re in the thick of it — loving your children fiercely and still quietly wondering where you went — these are a few of the small ways I started finding my way back.

1. I stopped waiting for a whole free day, or even a few free hours. Ten quiet minutes still count, and most days it’s all I have. For a long time I was stuck trying to have clear hours of “me time” the way everyone around me seemed to: dinners with girlfriends, 6am gym classes. But that isn’t my reality right now. My reality is reading a book beside my daughter while she listens to her Yoto, writing essays into a voice memo while I push her on the swing, or thirty minutes on the treadmill while I edit. What works for someone else likely won’t fit your puzzle — figure out the shape of it without waiting for the massive blocks of time you don’t have.
Journal prompt: Where in your day are you waiting for a bigger window that may never come? What’s one ten-minute version of the thing you actually want to be doing?

2. I started reading books and listening to podcasts that had nothing to do with parenting. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that the year before becoming a mother, and the year and a half after, almost everything I read or consumed was about parenting. I’d completely forgotten about me. Now I read constantly, but just for me — fiction, nonfiction, nothing about motherhood at all. A few favorites from this year: Strangers by Belle Burden, Our Perfect Storm by Carley Fortune, Party of Liars by Kelsey Cox, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown, and All That Life Can Afford by Emily Everett.
Journal prompt: What’s the last thing you read, watched, or listened to purely because it interested you — not because it made you a better parent?

3. I wore clothes that made me feel comfortable and figured out my five-minute get-ready routine. I kept trying to wear my pre-motherhood clothes even though they didn’t fit right, or fit my life, anymore. I’ve been purging for what feels like a year and still have a ways to go, but the truth is, I’m not returning to a boardroom in New York — so the clothes that have been hanging untouched for three years probably don’t have a place in my life anymore, and that’s okay. They can find a new home. Right now I’m home for the foreseeable future with my daughter, and I actually feel most comfortable in a dress or leggings and a tee. I’ve settled into a very simple makeup routine too: BB cream, blush, mascara, lipstick.
Journal prompt: What’s one thing hanging in your closet that belongs to a life you’re not living anymore? What would it feel like to let it go?

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4. I began protecting one small ritual every day. A solo walk, even if it’s just 15 minutes, during nap time or the second my husband gets home. My daughter still has one nap a day, and it will be going away soon, but I don’t book lunches with friends over it, and I don’t skip bedtime either. Those are mine. Lately, our new ritual is listening to Yoto together while I journal or read beside her. These rituals change with time, and with whatever season I’m in — right now we’re back to a season where I simply cannot wake up before my daughter, so my rituals have to fit around her, or come after she’s asleep.
Journal prompt: What’s one small ritual you could protect this week, even if it has to move around your child’s schedule instead of your own?

5. I stopped apologizing for needing time alone. I need it, and we all know it — even if it’s just 15 minutes to walk around the block or sit upstairs by myself and gather my thoughts. Anytime I try to push through instead, once I start feeling feisty or overstimulated, it’s never worth it. It throws off our entire house’s energy.
Journal prompt: What does it look like in your body, or your home, when you’ve pushed past your limit instead of stepping away?

6. I let myself become a beginner again. I’ve always loved to write, but I wanted to learn the actual foundations of what makes a good story, so I built myself a little syllabus for the fall. I’m no longer afraid to learn the basics the same way my daughter does. The more I learn, the more I realize how little I actually knew about things I thought I understood — and I’m finding that so fun.
Journal prompt: What’s something you’d love to learn from the very beginning, if you let yourself be bad at it for a while?

7. I remembered that I am someone’s mother — but I’m also my own person. This one is hard, especially as a stay-at-home mom, and especially for someone used to putting everyone else first. It took me almost 2.25 years at home to carve out real time for myself instead of pouring it all into everyone but me.
Journal prompt: If you set aside being someone’s mother for a moment, who else are you? What would that person want today?

8. I spent less time online and more time paying attention. Deleting Instagram helped, a lot. I still spend time here on Substack, both writing and reading, but my consumption here is intentional, and often genuinely valuable, because I learn so much from the writers I follow. I wrote about the first trip we took as a family without me having Instagram here, and about the quiet luxury of a private life — what it’s meant to be off social media.
Journal prompt: What would change about your day if you spent an hour less online and an hour more paying attention to what’s actually in front of you?

9. I stopped trying to “bounce back.” I fully believed I’d be back to myself within four to six months, at the absolute latest — back at my 9-to-5, doing the same things as before, just with a child in tow. No part of me thought I wouldn’t simply return. I wrote about that here, because bouncing back was never just about the body.
Journal prompt: What are you still waiting to “bounce back” to — and what if that version of you isn’t who you’re becoming?

10. I made my home reflect the life I wanted to live. Fresh flowers always, curated playlists that fit the time & mood of day, and books everywhere — for my daughter and for me. I spent a good chunk of the winter purging and decluttering. I’ve kept working on systems for our household too: baskets in hot spots to catch stray clothes, everyone’s socks kept on the main floor, water and cups in places my daughter can reach on her own.
Journal prompt: What’s one corner of your home that could better reflect the person you’re becoming, not just the family you’re raising?

11. I invested in friendships that let me be more than “Mom.” It’s so hard to make time to see people, especially old friends who are in their own busy season of life, but it matters. Every time I meet up with my childless girlfriends, I leave feeling more alive than before, because we talk about things outside motherhood. I love writing and talking about motherhood, obviously, but it’s also so nice to exist outside that bubble for an hour — even though motherhood has a way of weaving its way into everything anyway, since it’s a life-changing event.
Journal prompt: Who in your life lets you talk about something other than motherhood? When did you last make time for them?

12. I chose progress over perfection. Honestly, I think I had to hit rock bottom before this one actually stuck. My house isn’t put back perfectly each night, my list is never fully complete by day’s end, and there’s always more I want to do on building my own business — but at this stage of life, it’s simply about progress.
Journal prompt: Where are you still holding yourself to a standard of perfect instead of a standard of moving forward?

13. I stopped rushing every ordinary moment. For almost two years at home, I tried to check off a list of ten-plus things a day, and so many of them didn’t need to be done. Now I let myself sit with my daughter. I tackle the two or three things that actually matter and let the rest go. Cooking, laundry, and cleaning still have to happen, obviously, but the random little things that aren’t actually a priority can wait. Just take a breath.
Journal prompt: What’s on your list today that could actually wait until tomorrow, or not get done at all?

14. I let myself dream about the woman I’m becoming, not the woman I used to be. I spent a lot of the first 18 months frustrated, trying to figure out how to bounce back in every form. Now my energy goes toward who I’m becoming, not who I was. I’m working on a guided journal right now to help other women through this same process because it’s the kind of thing I love building. Let yourself dream too. These days go fast. Keep dreaming, and dream big.
Journal prompt: If you let yourself dream without worrying about how, what would you want to be building a year from now?

15. I realized I hadn’t disappeared. I’m changing, and I’ll keep changing. There are different seasons of motherhood, just like there are different seasons of me. Right now I’m in a restorative, growth season — more time at home, reading, resting, writing. It’s not a big-output season for me, and that’s allowed. Listen to what season you’re in, and follow that. I wrote a whole essay about waiting to feel like myself again — you can read it here.
Journal prompt: What season of motherhood, and of yourself, are you actually in right now — and are you fighting it, or following it?

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None of these moments would have made a headline in my life. No one clapped when I read a novel for me instead of a parenting book, but that’s the truth about rebuilding yourself in motherhood — it rarely announces itself. It accumulates, one small permission at a time, until one day you catch your own reflection and think: there she is.

So if you want to take one thing away from this, remember that you’re not behind and you’re not lost. You’re just becoming — slowly, and on purpose.

xx

Emma

If this piece gave you something, you can support it (and me) with a coffee — mothering slowly gets written via voicenote, during naps, in the cracks of the day. A coffee helps me keep showing up here. And if it’s easier, a free subscribe is support enough too.

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Also, if you liked this essay, you may like a few more of my secrets below

I remembered him instantly because he played with my younger brother, and without even reaching for it, I remembered his mom’s name too, even though we may have only said hi in passing a few times 15+ years ago.

I sat there a little stunned, yapping away in front of my in-laws and husband. Not because it was some remarkable feat of memory, but because I don’t think I would have caught it six months ago. I don’t think I would have been present enough, in that exact second, to let a stranger’s simple question land all the way before my brain moved on to the next thing.

That’s the part that’s sticking with me a few weeks later. Five months ago, I deleted Instagram after dabbling in the idea of taking a little break. There was no dramatic goodbye or plan behind it, just curiosity about what would happen if I stopped cold turkey and deleted both Instagram and TikTok. I braced for the FOMO, and I waited for the itch to check some random IG story. The fear that if I wasn’t posting, I’d slowly disappear into the abyss. But guess what, none of that came…. What came instead was almost an instant relief, and apparently, my memory is back.

I’ve noticed it everywhere since that campsite conversation. In conversations, I feel like I’m catching every word instead of half-listening while some other tab in my brain stays open. When I’m reading, I notice I’m actually seeing each word, learning new ones, instead of skimming the way you do when you’re used to scrolling. Even eating….I can taste more because I’m not eating with a screen in the other hand. I can smell things again, flowers I walk past in the garden, candles I hold in both hands to sniff, someone’s new perfume that lingers. I think I’d lost some of my senses to multitasking, and I didn’t know it was happening until they came back.

My scrolling/screentime was never that heavy; it was a casual lil check here and a lil check there (maybe 4h total across apps on a really bad day). However, that little hit may have amounted to twenty times a day sneaking to the closet to grab my phone and therefore adding up to thirty minutes ++. But those tiny breaks, the ones that felt like nothing, were enough to derail whatever thought or moment I was actually in. So, it wasn’t the thirty minutes each day that cost me… it was the moment I was checking an email when my daughter poured us both a cup of water and added ice and a mint sprig on her own and was beaming with excitement to show me.

The privacy itself is its own kind of luxury. In June, some of our family spent two weeks together in Italy. Before, I would have experienced the entire trip alongside them through multiple Instagram stories a day. This time, I only saw what made it into the group chat—maybe ten photos over the fifteen days. Part of me wanted Instagram back just to follow along, but a bigger part of me didn’t. I even caught myself considering a fake account before recognizing it for what it was: a slippery slope back into the same noise, dressed up as a compromise. The stories I did hear were the ones that mattered anyway—that they ate endless gelato, explored by boat, got caught in a wild rainstorm. Those are the memories worth sharing.

I’ve changed the wall that faces our family bed, the first thing we see when we open our eyes. There’s a cherry tree outside that window, and when the light comes through the blinds it flickers across the room. That wall used to hold one photo from our wedding day. Now it holds ten — a beautiful little gallery of memories we actually look at every morning instead of zooming past. I probably still would have posted a before-and-after of that wall if I had IG. But it’s made me ask myself a real question more than once: how much of what I used to share was performance and how much was just genuine love for making something beautiful and sharing it with others? And I think my answer to this is complex and waffled between one or the other almost 50% of the time.

I went for a walk with a girlfriend recently and told her all of this. She interrupted me before I could finish, reminding me that I'm a creative person and that I've always loved taking photos and making things to share with others, and that maybe it doesn't have to be that deep or complicated. Fair point, I'll admit. Maybe there is truth in what we are both saying. And, I think I am finding it a genuinely fun practice again, without an audience attached to it.

I’ve also noticed I think before I reach for my phone now when it used to be pure reflex. Now there’s a half-second pause: do I actually need this, or do I just need to update someone on something that isn’t urgent? Almost nothing turns out to be urgent. But that pause has surfaced something harder to sit with for me. As a stay-at-home mom, my phone was one of my only ways to stay connected — the version of a water cooler at my old millennial startup I don’t have. Being off social media and being home alone with my daughter most days means I’ve pigeonholed myself into a smaller world in two directions at once, not one. I think about how fast these years are moving, how I’m nearly three years into being home now, and how there are still small things I haven’t done. For ex, I’ve only taken her to the beach by myself one time… It feels silly to admit. But I think about the accumulation of all those five-minutes-here, ten-minutes-there scrolls, and I heard once that if you added up every episode of game of thrones (I think), it came out to sixty-seven days. Sixty-seven days is a lot of beach trips!!

I won’t pretend there isn’t a real loneliness in this. I can’t quickly reply to a friend’s cute video of her daughter splashing at the community pool or fire off a quick congrats to an old colleague on a baby announcement. I miss those tiny, fast catch-ups, but not enough to go back. My daughter who I spend each day with, my husband and family, and closest girlfriends I’m keeping up with on purpose, not by an accidental scroll or tap.

I do feel a little like an alien some days as I don’t have a close friend who’s left Instagram too, someone to compare notes with along the way in my bubble. My husband still technically has it although he hasn’t posted in years and mostly checks a recipe or a reel now and then but even he isn’t fully in this with me.

Maybe that’s what privacy now really gives us. Not secrecy, but attention to what is here right now. The chance to experience our own lives before turning them into content and to remember people because we were actually listening. Or to decorate a wall in our bedroom because we’ll be the ones see it every morning, not because someone else might be updating their gallery wall right now. To let a beautiful moment stay just ours.

I deleted Instagram mostly because I was curious what I’d lose and five months later, I’m more interested in what I got back: my attention, my memory, my senses, and a quieter way of moving through the world that I didn’t even realize I’d been missing.

It turns out the greatest luxury of a private life wasn’t getting away from social media but getting my own attention back to enjoy what is right in front of me, here and now in the magic of everyday moments.

I would love to hear from you.

If you’ve stepped away from social media—or have been quietly thinking about it—I would genuinely love to hear what changed for you.

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Different women, all different circumstances, but somehow every version of this conversation landed in the same place — talking about the other women/moms we used to work with or know from work and what they are doing now. The ones who had their babies close together, went back to work fairly quickly, and how their careers took a “hit”. How some are now back to traveling the globe, doing the fancy schmancy fun corporate girlie things aka the kind of life I used to live too, before I traded it in.

By the fourth time, I’d stopped being surprised by my own reaction because I realized then that it’s not my story anymore. I’m not on a career break, and I didn’t take a hit… I said a full goodbye and closed that door in August 2023. I will not be returning to corporate software sales after climbing that ladder for 10 years.

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I do think about this more than people may realize (even though I am aware I have basically fallen off the face of the earth at this point). But I am aware that every day that passes is a day further from the job/career I used to have as a senior director in enterprise sales, the kind of role you don’t just step back into after a few years away. I knew it the day I didn’t go back at 12 months, and I knew it more at 15. By the time I was approaching a full 1.5 years at home, I understood I wasn’t simply taking a short career break, I was completely closing one door and stepping into the unknown with very few people doing the same thing at my stage or in my immediate circle.

That would have been easier to sit with if I hadn’t spent the two years before getting pregnant convinced I would do the opposite when my time came. Even after my miscarriage and early on in my second pregnancy I told myself I’d go back to work for my hip 30 under 30, female founded software company by six months max. Partway through my maternity leave, around eight months, I came up with a whole new plan where my husband would be the one to quit his job and I’d take a brand new job in Europe that required flying to Paris every month, and I was allowed to bring my husband and daughter (according to an old boss who wanted to bring me along to her new company). I have no idea what I was thinking, and I realize now that I was completely delusional. But underneath that realization, I was trying to protect the version of me that needed a leaderboard, or at least a paycheck, to prove I hadn’t lost myself.

So when my gfs and I began talking about the moms whose careers only took “a hit,” I didn’t feel envy so much as I felt the size of the gap between me and my old gfs/colleagues. And it made me ask a question I’ve been circling for a while now: if my ambition didn’t shrink, where did it go?

A few weeks ago I asked something similar to my fellow moms here on Substack. I wrote a note asking other stay-at-home moms who used to have careers how they felt about not being in one now and what they felt about their future in relation to their careers. I expected two obvious sides: the ones who grieved what they left behind and the ones who didn’t. What I got instead was a chorus of women who were all, in their own way, mid-negotiation with the same question I was asking on that Wednesday morning.

A few commented that at times they still miss the coworkers and the sense of solving something and I could relate to this for sure. Some women said they found peace they weren’t expecting and kept waiting for the grief that never came. But most of them, like me, missed tiny pieces instead of the whole thing: the paycheck but not the actual work beneath it, the identity but not the pace of being always on. One woman wrote that she left an engineering career to stay home for years, then came back as a specialist doing something she loved more (which I thought was soo fricken cool!!). She shared that you can change in motherhood, become something more true, and still have it all, but just not all at the same time.

One of the comments that stayed with me longest wasn’t about missing anything though. It was a woman admitting that the hardest part hasn’t been grief for her and that it’s been learning to separate her ambition from monetary gain. I recognized it instantly because I’d felt the exact same words myself before I’d even finished reading hers (hi , my og substack inspo!)

That's the part I don't think gets said enough: my ambition didn't get smaller when I left my career or became a mother. If anything, I believe it got more specific. It's no longer the always-climbing and always-comparing kind of ambition that came from closing a big deal or seeing my name at the top of a sales leaderboard. I loved that version of it and especially loved the validation of knowing publicly that I was doing a good job. But that ambition doesn't fit in this chapter of my life. What fits now is my ambition in smaller windows that happen before my daughter wakes up, during her one remaining nap or in the little bit of time after she's asleep at night if I manage to keep my own eyes open to jot down one last note.

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It shows up in my writing here. It shows up in the two women I coach, when I do (not right now!) — which is the most I've been able to hold since becoming a stay-at-home mother. It's not paid the way my old job was, bi-weekly, to help us from going behind some months. It doesn't come with a title someone else gave me, or someone else to schedule my next performance review. Most of the people reading this don't actually know me, which is a strange kind of visibility and different from the version I used to have with people who knew my face and my name in a boardroom. But it's still building something; it still connects me to other people, and most days, it connects me more than anything I ever built over a lunch.

I don’t think I’ve fully unlearned the old belief because it came back to visit me this very week in the middle of the conversation with my gf — a flicker of a thought that maybe I should put my daughter in a forest school one day a week so I could go do something that pays. I noticed it, thought about it a few times over the course of the week, and I let it sit there for a second before I recognized what it actually was. Not a real need but just the old pull, the one that still equates a real life with a paycheck and a title.

Since I started writing, I’ve slowed down more than I ever thought I could. I think less now about what makes a life look successful and more about what makes it feel rich, outside of anything material. I think about what it means to be a woman who doesn’t rush through the day. I think about building something that doesn’t happen overnight, and it def doesn’t make money overnight either (even though I tried that more than once in the first year lol), and it’s trusting that it’s still worth building.

That’s the main thing I’d tell the version of me who panicked the other week, and the version who came up with her delusional plan to fly to Europe every month. Your ambition isn’t gone — it’s just been reshaped, and you’re still learning ambition does not need to be measured in a paycheck or a title.

If you've stepped away from a career or an old version of ambition, I'd genuinely love to hear from you.

Where does your ambition live for you now? What does it look like when it's not measured by a paycheck or a title?

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I’m just about three years into being home full-time with my daughter, and somewhere in that stretch of ordinary days I’ve started noticing things.

Last week she spent twenty minutes crouched in the play castle her dad built, making potions — pouring water and flower petals into five little bottles, completely absorbed in her version of flow state. My phone was on the deck, so I couldn’t get a photo for her dad or grandparents without messing up the moment. I just sat and watched her instead. Somewhere in those twenty minutes, I remembered a few things I’ve been slowly relearning since becoming a mother.

First one being: children don’t rush anything worth remembering. Here’s what my daughter has taught me instead.

01 The days I stop documenting are usually the ones I’ll wish I had more of.

The ones where I sit on the couch with a mess of stuffies, crumbs, and books around us. Her asking “just one more book” fifteen times.

02 You can tell a lot about your life by what you’re paying attention to.

They notice the little snail on the sidewalk, so crouch down with them and notice it too.

03 Sometimes the best part of the day is the one nobody photographs.

The first five minutes of the morning, when she starts chatting away — retelling something from the day before, or whatever her mind decided to hold onto — are some of the sweetest moments I look back on.

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04 Children don’t need perfect childhoods. They need parents who notice them.

This is hard with our devices so close by. It’s easy to see happening at the playground or in line at the grocery store — another parent scrolling while their kid glances over, taking note that their eyes are elsewhere. Next time you’re at the playground, glance around.

05 A slow morning is often more memorable than an expensive outing.

Every time I push for the outing, I typically do enjoy it, but my most memorable moments are actually at home in our own yard. We do travel a lot as a family, so our “expensive outings” tend to happen while we’re already traveling.

06 You’ll never regret sitting on the floor to play — or simply rest — for ten extra minutes.

Enough said. Just stay a few more minutes. Notice the discomfort if it’s there, and lean into it.

07 Toddlers measure wealth differently than adults do.

One puddle can be worth more than a new $100 toy.

08 Motherhood doesn’t make life smaller. It makes your world more detailed.

It’s easy to get caught up remembering the hard days, or — if you’re a stay-at-home mom — to feel like your world shrank because you’re within your own four walls more than someone commuting to an office. But the attention and detail I’m noticing now, the richness of it, has shown me lately just how special our little world at home really is.

09 The ordinary becomes extraordinary because it’s disappearing while you’re living it.

Being nostalgic for the present is something I wasn’t prepared for. You miss this version of your kid, knowing you won’t be with her again, but you’re also excited for what comes next.

10 Your child won’t remember your spotless kitchen, but they’ll remember how home felt.

I do need a clean countertop, at least once a day, for my brain to truly reset but I know they won't remember that. So if the stress of keeping it spotless is costing you more than it's worth, maybe that's not the feeling you want to leave behind. I used to push so hard to do the full night-shift close-down, and it was making me crazy and never letting me rest. Eventually, it wasn't worth it.

11 Sometimes what your child needs most is for you to stop trying to optimize the moment.

This one has been huge for me. It took until just past two years old to actually slow down enough to stop optimizing every day.

12 The seasons of motherhood change before you’re ready for them to.

This happens every time for me. I’ll be in a hard phase for about ten days to two weeks, then — poof — it’s done, and we’re in a new season.

13 Children remind you that wonder is a skill, not a personality trait.

If only I could hold onto curiosity and wonder the way a toddler does. I’m trying hard to bring that childlike wonder into my adult life.

14 You don’t realize you’re making a core memory until years later.

Sometimes, right after something happens, I know immediately it’s a core memory, locked in for us. Other times, it’s seeing an ordinary day play back on our Aura frame that really stays with me.

15 Every stage feels impossibly long until it’s over.

I’ve thought I wouldn’t make it through the sleepless nights for years — because for us, they’re still sleepless at age 2.75 — but I make it through my breaking point every time.

16 Your child is learning how to live by watching how you live.

You are their lighthouse, and they are always watching and listening. I’m realizing this even more now, with an almost-three-year-old who repeats things I’ve said or done. It’s a reminder to talk kindly to myself, and to remember there are eyes on me.

17 The stories you tell about your family eventually become your family’s identity.

This one’s up to you. What do you value? What do you want to be remembered for? What legacy do you want to leave behind?

18 One day, the little rituals will matter more than the big milestones.

Crepes on Saturdays. Library on Tuesday mornings. Picking blueberries with grandparents.

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19 Love often looks like paying close attention.

That’s all they need. We’ve all seen the quote: presence > presents. All they want is your attention — taking an extra few minutes to crouch down and notice what they’re noticing is more than you could ever buy them.

20 Slowing down isn’t losing time. It’s how you remember it.

They say the days are slow but the years are fast, and it couldn’t be more true. It’s so easy to want to rush past the tricky sleep phase or the tantrums that keep coming up — but then it’s gone before you know it.

I would love to hear from you. Which number on this list hit closest to home for you? Or what am I missing from my list?

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Apparently there’s a name for people like me now: Thought Daughter. The woman who reads too much into things. Who journals through every ordinary Tuesday. Who can spend an hour deconstructing why a stranger looked at her a certain way.

My girlfriends tease me for it in a loving little it doesn’t have to be so deep Emma, kind of way. That reminder is offered whenever I’ve turned a simple conversation into a small philosophical one, such as should I take a photo of this beautiful peony on our walk or not. My husband, early on in our relationship, pointed out that I was always trying to fix something in myself, even when nothing was “broken” (in his eyes). He wasn’t wrong. I’ve just never experienced it as fixing because I’ve experienced it as fascination. Learning, improving, turning something over until I understood it.

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It runs in the family, too. My mother, my father, my brother (6 years younger)— we are all, unmistakably, very deep thinkers. People have called the four of us intense, quirky, passionate about certain subjects to a fault. So this is not a personality quirk I picked up, but a deep lineage.

Before my daughter, all of that thinking pointed inward and towards who I wanted to become. What did I want to do with my life, and how did people perceive me. I spent my twenties building toward being known for something — a big title, a growing career, a version of myself that was always, I repeat, always becoming better. I wanted to be a better employee, a better friend, a better daughter. I read about 30 Under 30 founders and what their mornings looked like. I got hired, before my current career pause, by a company run by two of them and worked there for a year before my daughter. I thought about ambition as something you built toward mostly alone, on your own timeline.

Then I became a mother, and my mind stopped focusing only about me. The same mind that had spent thirty years trying to understand itself suddenly had someone else to spend its curiosity on, and it found a new orbit without meaning to.

Now I lie beside her while she naps and find myself looking up her birth chart, trying to understand why she’s almost three and still nurses to sleep, why she needs to have our bodies melting together all hours of the night. I fold her tiny dresses while reconsidering what I actually believe about success and what type of influence I want to have while following my own dreams. I watch her struggle with the foil lid on a yogurt cup and catch myself wondering whether I step in too quickly to help, whether she needs more room to be slow. I’m doing the dishes and thinking about which of my beliefs are actually mine, and which ones I inherited without ever agreeing to them and whether I’m about to hand them to her the same way, without meaning to.

Who is she becoming. What stories am I passing down without realizing it. What kind of home are we building, and what will she learn just from watching me move through it. And lately, the big one: which patterns end with me.

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I think about my own parents and how much I love them, and how some of what I carry, I never actually chose. I don’t want to raise my daughter inside my unexamined inheritance. Being the Thought Daughter that I now know I am, I want to sit with that sentence a while longer, because I think it’s the real one.

I think about some of the phrases I heard growing up about work and about success, the ones about our female bodies. About what makes a person good, or lovable, or enough. Some of them I want to hand to her exactly as they were given to me. Others stop here, with me, and go no further.

My mother was a French teacher, and then she became a stay-at-home mom when I was born until the year my brother started grade one, about twelve years of her life reorganized around us. Once we were in school, she went back to teaching and started working on things that were entirely her own — her own writing (wrote a memoir!) and acting projects. I’ve never actually asked her directly how much of herself she set down during those years at home, or what it took to pick it back up. My dad went the opposite direction as he spent our early years grinding in corporate business so she could stay home with us, then did a full 180 into holistic health, an entirely different field. They divorced when I was thirteen, and for a while it got really messy in a way neither of them saw coming. What I notice now is that both of them, even in their sixties, still chase things they’re curious about every single day, so I don’t think either of them regrets who they became. But I still wonder about the parts of my mother that got set down during those home years, and whether she’d tell me they all made it back.

During my deep thoughts, sometimes they wander and envy the women whose minds seem quieter than mine. The ones who can just enjoy the swing without wondering what memory is being made underneath it, who can read a bedtime story without thinking about which ones their mom read. But then I remember this same mind, the one that helps me see how astonishing and magical motherhood is.

I’ll be honest about the harder side, too, because motherhood didn’t just redirect my thinking, it revealed its shape more clearly. A peach can just be a peach, it doesn’t have to become a meditation on impermanence. But sometimes I find that hard, very hard because my curiosity has a way of spiraling if I let it and a simple moment becomes a search for the deeper meaning, and the deeper meaning becomes a quiet anxiety over whether I found the right one. Underneath a lot of my depth is a perfectionism I’m not proud of: a fear that I don’t know enough, because there’s always more to learn, so I’d better keep going until I’ve earned the right to stop.

So far, motherhood has taken away some of my time to indulge in that type of thinking. As a SAHM, my ambition now has to fit into 1-2h/day. My thinking can't just be about myself anymore, and I don't have time to craft the perfect answer — all of it has to fit into the margins of her nap schedule and the ten minutes before she wakes up. I can't disappear into the analysis the way I used to, even though sometimes I still want to. I have to move faster than my own perfectionism, and strangely, having less time to think has made my thinking more honest, because more of it now comes from my heart or my gut instead of a spreadsheet.

Now that I know the term Thought Daughter, I don't think it stops applying to me. I think it just means I'm turning into a Thought Mother, too.

I started to believe that if I raised a daughter who thought as deeply as I do, I’d be doing something right. Now I think it’s more specific than that because I don’t just want her to inherit my curiosity, my love of learning, my depth, my quirkiness — though I hope she does. I believe there is more good in a thoughtful life than not, and that depth lets you love bigger, not just think bigger. I want her to inherit the parts of my inner world that were always a gift, and hopefully she can be spared at least some of the parts that became a burden: the perfectionism, the analysis paralysis, the impulse to please everyone before I trust what I already know is true. I want her to feel free to wonder about beauty and people without needing every wondering to become a deep lesson.

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If she remembers one thing about me as her mother, I don’t need it to be that I was a deep thinker or asked good questions. I simply want her to know that I did my best and if she noticed the overthinking, it always had love underneath it all.

I don’t think the goal was ever to quiet my mind and motherhood proved so far that the thinking doesn’t stop. Every question I used to ask about myself now becomes a question about the kind of life I am shaping and the kind of woman she’s watching me become.

I went into motherhood so naively and had absolutely no idea I’d be changed the way I have been, or that I would be writing this on a Sunday night. Or wirting at all! But here’s what I know on an ordinary Tuesday morning: I will continue to think deeply, ask too many questions, and lay awake with my daughter’s finger hooked in my bra strap, wondering deeply. I’m just no longer wondering only about myself. I’m wondering about who we’re both becoming, together, one day at a time.

I would love to hear from you.

Would you consider yourself a 'thought daughter' before you became a mother? What did you spend your time thinking about before becoming a mother and what do you think about now?

I'd love to hear where your thinking has moved.

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Then I would open Instagram (when I had it), watch 15+ reels, read 100+ comments, open TikTok, then search some more. After that I would maybe do a quick little google, end up on some weird unrelated reddit thread and then add the cherry on top: check in with my trusty pal chatgpt. Because surely if I gathered enough info, the answer relating to my daughters sleep woes at 2.5 yo would finally be clear and I’d know exactly what to do. Mission accomplished….

But of course, the opposite happened.

The more voices I invited in, the harder it became to hear the one voice that had actually been there all day. My voice, for my child.

This is a particular kind of confusion that only modern mothers know: the confusion of knowing something and then talking yourself out of it before you gave it a chance.

We are raising children in an era where every instinct we have as a mom can be cross-examined, put into some calculator, then turned into a data point on yet another PDF you can BUY NOW FOR $4.99. The sleep schedule and the sleep training method that works for ALL FAMILIES WHO FOLLOWED THESE STEPS (can you tell this fires me up lol??)… How long to breastfeed or whether to breastfeed at all?? What they eat, how much, how it’s introduced, and on what plate with what fricken fork.. or should it be a spoon? How they play, who they play with, how you discipline, how you connect, when to push and when to protect. Every choice you have also has a counterargument, and with that, every expert will of courseeeeeee have a rebuttal on whatever choice you make at the end of the day or at the end of your lengthy research. Aka, we’re still graded, and you may get a C, or maybe a B+ for your effort, yay go us!!! Every mother you follow online seems either more informed, more relaxed, or more certain than you feel right now. Plain and simple.

For our mothers, motherhood was hard because so much was invisible. They were at home with their curly coiled landline, eventually a cordless phone, someday dial-up — but no scrolling, no online community, no resources at 2am. Now motherhood is hard because everything is visible, searchable, comparable, and debatable.

We have never had more access to information about how to raise children. We have also, I believe, never felt more uncertain.

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I’m not immune to this because I still reach for my phone when I’m unsure. I’ve searched things I already knew the answer to because I needed someone else to confirm it. I’ve walked into my doctor’s appointment already knowing what I’d conceal, because I’d spent the night before reading opposing opinions from people who have never been in the same room as my daughter. (My male family doctor once told me there are no benefits to breastfeeding past two months. I knew that wasn’t true.)

Sleep was my obsession for almost three years. My daughter turns three in October, and up until about two weeks ago, she was still nursing once, twice, sometimes three times during the night. I knew that she was at this point looking for comfort and I had come to accept that her timeline was her own. And yet I still Googled when breastfed toddlers choose on their own to sleep through the night and to self wean. I went down gentle sleep-training pages, and I bought a $22 PDF from an Aussie mom about introducing a stuffed animal over sixty days so she could “transition her attachment” away from me and my boodies (this is what we call them, this isnt a spelling mistake). My husband and I tried ten-plus different sleep setups. We never attempted sleep training because we both genuinely knew it wouldn’t work for her and still, I read the before-and-afters and watched the success stories of babies who were not my baby.

Three-ish serious times and seven-ish more lax times I tried “gentle nighttime weaning”, and she cried so hard she threw up. Another time she stayed awake for six hours, two nights in a row, waiting for the light to turn yellow aka time to drink. I lay there at 5am thinking: why am I doing this? I’m actually okay with still nursing, and she’s more than okay. Five months ago, we pushed a king and a queen bed together, called it a family bed, and I stopped searching for a different answer.

I still search sometimes, and I still ask others what they think. But I’m noticing what it costs me.

The problem isn’t only that mothers now have too much information. It’s that we’ve been taught to trust information and data points from others more than our own intuition, and more than the relationship with the child right in front of us. We know our children, and our bodies, more than anyone else in this universe. We have our own pattern recognition, and we know when something is off before there’s language for it. If we can quiet the noise just enough, we can see how much we already know our specific child — in a way no algorithm, no expert, no comment thread ever could.

I’m the one who’s been there for every nap, every fever, every odd mood, every shift in appetite. I know what her “I’m not feeling right” face looks like — her left eye getting watery — versus her “I want your attention” face, the one with the slumped over ball position that tells the whole story. No article can see what I see, and no expert can be updated on that in a fifteen-minute intro session.

I loveee gathering info, so info gathering can be part of the process and we absolutely should use it to get smarter!! But, my friends, it was never meant to replace the relationship already in front of us… aka the one with you…

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So, I’ve started thinking of intuition in three layers, because it’s helped me see the fuller picture of what deep knowing actually feels like.

In practice, this has looked like three things for me:

Ask before you search. Before I open Google, text a gf/my mom, or ask god forbid ask ChatGpt, I try to ask myself first: what do I think is true right now, for us and only us? Not because my first answer is always right, but because it tells me where I started before the noise came in.

Choose one trusted witness, not twelve. A family member who actually knows your child or a bestie who knows your life, not just the category the internet claims your child belongs to (we all know there are a lot)

Watch what happens after the choice. Self-trust isn’t only built in the deciding. It’s built in what comes after. Ask yourself did it bring you closer to your child, closer to yourself? Or did it feel like performing for an audience that wasn’t even watching?

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I want to be honest about something: following this practice takes time and sometimes it’s not possible at all… Not when you haven’t slept for weeks on end or you’re newly postpartum and your nervous system is still catching up. Not when the anxiety has made fear and intuition nearly indistinguishable, and you’re walking around feeling like a mummy. Not when the stakes of going against the status quo are medical, or financial, or relational, because that comes up far too often as well… when trusting yourself means a decision others (likely your very own family lol me/mine) will question, or you’ve been dismissed before and have good reason to want backup.

The mother who Googles everything at 2am isn’t failing at self-trust. Sometimes she’s just exhausted, and the scroll is the only thing that makes her feel less alone. We’ve all been there more times than we can count, and I think it’s almost impossible to not live there for a little while these days.

I'm not anti-expertise, I promise. This is simply a reminder that expertise can become another way we disappear from our own lives and bodies. Gathering info from a few trusted sources isn't the same as abandoning yourself to the noise, and staying curious isn't the same as outsourcing your knowing to whatever's loudest. There's informed info gathering. And there's untethered — so full of everyone else's answers that you can't hear your own, even standing right next to the baby who grew inside you for all those months.

Because so much of modern motherhood has become a performance for an invisible audience. Now, we make choices in anticipation of judgment that isn’t even coming!! Gahhhh. We search to defend ourselves against a critic who exists mostly in our heads.

So, today ask yourself one question plz. What would you choose if you weren’t being graded?

The question shifts when you ask it that way. Not what does everyone say I should do — but what do I know, because I’m the one actually living it. Whether I could prove it stops mattering as much and if someone disagrees? Well, they’re not the one who was up at 3am, so go away Sally, and take your opinion with you.

The phone is still there, and the information is still there. The noise isn’t going anywhere. So for now, I’m learning that the goal isn’t to find the right answer in the noise but that the goal is to stay close enough to myself that I can still hear my own voice once the searching stops.

I’d love to hear from you.

Is there something you already know the answer to, about your kid, your body, your life, that you keep searching anyway? Not because you don't know, but because knowing it means taking the harder path.

I read and reply to every comment.

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The scene was always the same when I would arrive at my grandparents condo to visit: two chairs facing inward, in a very small room with one exit out straight between them. My Opa and Oma turned toward me and my daughter, who is usually somewhere on the floor between us playing, while the questions and comments come in rapid fire… you’ve changed Emma, ohhh how you’ve changed(???), you look much younger and much “nicer” as a blonde, don’t furrow your brow like that!! those lines are staying!! For most of my life, I went quiet and pretended I didn’t hear them, or I nodded and waited for the convo to change directions.

The third-to-last time I saw my Opa, I didn’t…

I had already visited that morning and gone back because the first visit “wasn’t long enough” — we’d left too rushed, too flustered. I was tired and grouchy by the second visit, and when the comments started again, I finally said what I’d been swallowing for years. Of course I’ve changed. I had a child. I’m in my thirties. I am not fifteen anymore.

I could hear my own voice getting louder, though they both wear hearing aids and I always have to raise mine. Once you’re raising your voice, and the thing you’re saying has been true for years while you stayed quiet through most of them, crying becomes almost impossible to avoid. So does yelling. My daughter watched the whole thing unfold, and I am not proud of that part.

We left for a ten-day family vacation the next morning. When we came home, we had two good visits with my Opa in that first week back. He passed away on the sixth day.

What I’ve heard from my Oma since: he had been worried I was depressed, based on my appearance and my quietness over the past two years of visits. That he was deeply, genuinely concerned motherhood had changed me — that I would never again be his “good, nice, pretty, happy Emma.” That is close to a direct quote from my Oma, spoken three days after my Opa’s passing.

So I’ve been sitting with what it means to be grieved by someone who is still alive, and then to lose them before either of you found your way back to each other in this new version of yourself.

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I've grown more certain of this with each passing month. It isn't a place I arrived at so much as a new, more gentle and also sharper version of myself, still being built. The people who love me will find me here, in this version. And there will be some who can only look for the old one, and may or may not be able to make peace with that.

Now, back to bouncing back in the physical sense…

The body is the harder thing to write about, which probably means it’s the most important part to say out loud.

It was early one weekday morning, before my daughter was up, when I decided — for no good reason — to step on the bathroom scale. I got off the second the numbers started climbing and kicked the thing back under the vanity where it belonged. Three feelings arrived in quick succession: relief that it wasn’t higher, disappointment that it wasn’t lower, and underneath both, the quiet recognition that I was still playing a game I’d told myself to quit months ago.

I haven’t stepped on it since. Not as some triumphant decision, just: what’s the point? No one is coming to hand me a badge for getting back to my pre-baby weight. The scale is still gathering dust under the vanity and should probably be in the trash by now,

My new and improved body.

I get dressed in front of a mirror I haven't cleaned in weeks, then pass another one smeared with baby lotion because my daughter decided it needed "cleaning." My pants go up and my stomach jiggles a couple of times on the way. My nipples point down now instead of up, especially since I've dropped to breastfeeding once or twice a day. There is extra skin nearly everywhere, enough to pull and fold, which my daughter discovered one night in the bath and found so entertaining that she now requests it like a bedtime story. I fold my stomach in half and talk to her through my belly-button mouth, and she slides down into the water laughing, every single time. She asks her dad to do it too, but he's not quite as committed to the bit. I don't have precise language for what that moment is. Not pride, exactly and not sadness either. Something softer and stranger than both.

But my strong, beautiful body wasn’t always this loaded. There was a version of it that used to be funny and sometimes even a form of entertainment for my girlfriends without babies.

About a year and a half ago, at a friend’s bachelorette, I snuck away to pump. Two friends came to check on me, and I showed them I could squeeze and shoot milk clear across the room. Foolish, I know. I was seven months postpartum, sleep-deprived, not drinking, trying to prove I was still fun, still me. It was almost a party trick, except I was also genuinely amazed by what my body could do. Underneath the amazement, my boobs were full and loud about it, and somewhere deep down I could feel my baby needed me home, even though I’d only been gone three hours. The signal and the performance, all at once. Some days I miss that amazement more than I’d like to admit.

My girlfriends and I talk about our bodies like a weather report now. The lines that are staying and the pants that won’t go past our hips. The bra size that’s changed ten times over the year. These conversations happen over water now, not wine, which says something about where we all are. A year ago, I probably wouldn’t have said any of this out loud to an audience. Now it’s just a regular Tuesday while my daughter naps.

Becoming a mother has made me pay attention not just to my own body, but to the language that surrounds it. I’ve noticed how easily conversations about calories in food, weight, and “being good” with food happen around little girls and I truly believe no one means harm. Many of the women likely grew up hearing the same type of thing discussed casually. But I wonder what gets tucked away in a child’s mind when she hears the women she loves measuring themselves against a standard none of them can actually meet.

My own mother was careful in a way I didn’t fully understand until now. I almost never heard her speak negatively about her own body, and she rarely commented on mine — not until recently, when she told me I had a beautiful body. I realized then she was seeing something I hadn’t yet learned to see in myself and I want to be that for my daughter.

If my daughter found the scale under the vanity and asked what it was for, here is what I’d tell her: it’s a piece of plastic and metal you sometimes step on at the doctor, weigh luggage at the airport, or use to check how heavy Daisy is (our cat). Honestly, I don’t fully know what I’d say. It does not measure the way your stomach folds in half and makes the person you love most fall over laughing in a bubble bath. It does not measure strength, or softness, or what your body carried, and grew, and fed, and survived. It measures one number, on one morning, in one season of a body that is still becoming. That is all it is and that is all it ever was.

I’m not done having children, not done becoming who I’m becoming, not done figuring out what this body means to me in this season. If I went back, I wouldn’t trade any of it — not for the body I used to have, not for how easy it was to be reached. My lines are staying as I am almost thirty-three, and I am not who I was at fifteen, or twenty-five, or even thirty-one. I have been changed by the work of becoming a mother. Some of that change is loss but most of it is gain. And even more of it is simply mine.

There is a lot of pressure, in the world right now, to be recognizable again — to smooth the brow, reclaim the body, be as easy to reach as you used to be. I’m learning to let that pressure exist without answering it. The work was never going back. It’s learning which changes are asking to be honored, and finding the courage to honor them, in a life that’s building itself around the woman I’m becoming rather than the one I used to be.

I’d love to hear from you.

Which bounce-back has felt the loudest for you — and have you started letting it go, or are you still in it?

Leave a comment — I read & reply to every one.

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There’s a version of this little crumb that sounds like loss because the identity got restructured and the old ambitions were rearranged around someone who needs me in ways I didn’t anticipate. And yes, some of it is loss so I won’t skip over that.

But there’s another version of what was “taken” from me that took me longer to see.

Because motherhood didn’t only give me a baby, it gave me an exit from things I’d been doing out of fear for far too long.. habits and performances and patterns I’d never consciously chosen, but had been carrying so long they felt like character in my own life. So, when they became impossible to sustain after becoming a mom, I had no choice but to set them down. And some of them, I realized, I’d been desperate to put down for years.

This is that list of the little crumbs I am still-unfolding and what I found when I did.

01 I stopped performing competence for people who don’t know me anymore.

Some of the women closest to me have built remarkable careers. They're executives, psychologists, doctors, business owners. Many of them became mothers and returned to work shortly giving birth. I have one child, and I've been home with her for almost three years.

Before my daughter was even born, I was already rehearsing how I'd explain that decision, not because anyone was asking because most people never did. But I'd still find myself preparing an answer before small friend/fam gatherings or catching up with old friends. I'm working too, I'd think. I have a couple of coaching clients during nap time. As if I needed to prove that my days counted.

It wasn’t only them. There were girls from my small town who’d made those years harder than they needed to be,ugh, girls I’d kept on social media long past any logical reason, so yes, I noticed when they watched my Instagram stories. Some small, embarrassing flicker of see? I count.

I’m fairly certain they weren’t losing sleep over me lol so I deleted my Instagram & TT four months ago, and I stopped performing for people who don’t know me anymore.

There’s something harder underneath, and I’m still a little embarrassed to say it: before I became a mother, I quietly believed that women who stayed home were choosing something less. I didn’t say it out loud, obvi (WTF, Emma) I barely let myself think it. But it was there: the assumption that ambition had to look like a booming LinkedIn worthy career, and that staying home didn’t count the same way.

I sat with that for a long time. Then I chose to stay home, on my own terms.. leaving behind a decade-built career, the global travel, the client dinners, the big fancy words like strategy and executive. And I found out this work, right now at home with just my daughter, is the hardest and most important work I’ve ever done.

I still don’t know fully how to make peace with that old version of me but I know she was wrong. So much of what I’d been performing was for people who weren’t watching, weren’t judging, weren’t keeping score. They had their own lives — they always did…

When I stopped preparing for those conversations I felt like I could finally breathe, and also just relax like everyone else seemed to be doing in these fam gatherings.

02 I stopped pretending I missed my old life the way everyone expected me to.

I stopped pretending I missed my old life the way everyone expected me to.

There’s a script for this: I love being a mom, but I miss the freedom, the career, the person I was. And yes, there’s grief in this transition… real grief, and I won’t minimize it becasue I do miss the freedom and spontaneity.

But somewhere in that first year, I noticed something I wasn’t supposed to admit. I had spent years wanting to be number one (specifically in software sales, with clear, measurable outcomes and targets). It was never just about doing good work, it was about winning, being top of the chart, then finding a higher ceiling to chase. If I hit 120% of target one quarter, surely I could hit 150% the next. That hum of never being quite enough followed me everywhere.

Some of what motherhood dismantled, I hadn’t wanted in the first place. I’d just never had permission to stop until I landed here.

03 I stopped trying to want the things I used to want.

In the first year, I worked every nap time, imperfect, but quite functional really, testing three different side hustles moms swore could earn $10k/month. In the second year, I took on a consulting client for about a year and a half. Not because I was building something, I realize now, but because working for someone else felt safer than building for myself which looking back was a very good disguise.

Then, obvi, the nap times shrank as my daughter got older, so last summer I got creative: a shared babysitter with my daughters cousins three hours a week for client work, a university student for admin and a brand new shiny goal: get my Etsy shop live so that my husband could quit his job (lol wtf?!). My pressure to achieve returned hot and heavy and I did get the shop live and it continues to make sales, yahooo! But, it makes just enough to cover my recurring subscriptions and some fabric for new sweing projects but not much else. It was also roughly the fifth thing I’d tried.

Before that, there was the digital course from a mom with a faceless Instagram account who promised that by month two, I could be making $10,000 a month. I believed her and I wanted so badly to prove I could do it, not to her, not even to my family, but to some older version of myself who expected more from me by now.

That’s the part that’s hardest to say plainly: it was never about the Etsy shop, or the $10k by month two (that did not happen, lol)… it was about proving something to someone and the thing I was so desparetly trying to prove kept moving.

04 I stopped earning rest.

I used to treat rest like something I had to justify. I’d worked enough, given enough, been productive enough then I could stop. It was always conditional.

After becoming a mother, that math stopped working entirely.. and my body was mad about it.

I got mastitis thirteen times in two years and every time I pushed past what my body was asking for cough rest cough, every time I went too long without sleep, too long without stillness it came back. For a while I thought I was just prone to it, and maybe I am becasee my mom got it too (maybe thats something else for another essay where the body says no…) Eventually I understood it was information. My nervous system had been telling me, clearly, that I had been running past empty for a long time and I’d had just enough structure in my old life to keep ignoring it.

Motherhood completely took my structure and left me simply with the truth of what simply works and doesn’t.

At some point along the way I stopped asking for permission to stop.

05 I stopped answering everything immediately.

I used to be organized in a way that felt like control with spreadsheets, lists and many pros and cons lists. I studied accounting in university and for a hot minute after but didn’t finish my CPA. I kept the impulse: the belief that a good life was one you could put a formula on and check off immediately.

And then I had a daughter who never fit the formula. Colic, not sleeping and guess what still not sleeping like they said!! She kept unraveling the spreadsheet, week after week, season after season because ding ding ding she was never meant to be a data point!! That’s what I finally understood.

Somewhere in the fog of early motherhood, I became unreachable in ways I couldn’t control and then eventually in ways I started to choose. The world didn’t collapse and the relationships that mattered didn’t thin if it took me three days to get back. What I noticed instead was that I’d been using availability as proof: proof that I was necessary, that I was enough and that I no longer needed it the way I once did.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: so much of what I was doing before was fear with a good excuse. Fear of being forgotten, of taking up too much space, of not justifying my existence with enough visible effort.

I’ve been home for almost three years now, and my goodness, it’s flown by. The conversations I’d spent so much time anticipating have hardly happened at all. Turns out, everyone else is busy living their own lives. Why would they be keeping score of mine? Why did I ever think my choices required an explanation?

The almost funny part is all the preparing. All the workshopping of a thirty-second explanation. The tidy version of myself I’d walk into a room with, ready to justify a life no one had actually put on trial. I spent years rehearsing conversations that mostly existed in my own head, for an audience that wasn’t paying nearly as much attention as I imagined. I can almost laugh at it now—which is probably how I know I’m done with this list.

I’m still figuring out who this new version of me is on the other side of everything mentioned above and of course that will take time. But, I think that’s the work of this chapter and I am embracing it now.

But for the first time in a long time, I’m not adding more to figure it out but instead I’m watching what’s left when I stop.

I’d love to hear from you.

Who were you performing for — and when did you realize they’d stopped watching?

Leave a comment — I read & reply to every one.

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The What to Expect app. The Flow app. The Pre-Mom app. I’d scroll the due-date forums, track my symptoms, compare notes with strangers who were also 28 weeks, 30 weeks along. After she arrived, I added two more. The Wonder Weeks app, which I used for nearly two months before my husband gently but firmly took my phone to delete it because I had started to fear the leaps and every upcoming developmental window felt like something to brace against rather than simply live through and experience it. I was a grown woman with fifteen books, a doula, and a lactation consultant scheduled for day 5 before the baby had even arrived. What I did next was open my Notes app and start logging everything manually aka I found a loophole lol. Wake time, sleep length, nursing length all that jazz as if I could reverse-engineer my daughter without the app and as if she were a data set waiting to be cracked and to figure out the perfect formula.

This is who I am. This is how I prepare.

I got pre-eclampsia, went off work ten weeks early, and was induced — none of it was what I ever so carefully I had planned. But I still had my epidural-free birth which I really wanted so I did at least one of the many things I had prepared for.

What I hadn’t prepared for was what came next…

Day three or four at home I was sitting with a baby who couldn’t latch due to “inverted nipples” (did not know of or prepare for these) and milk that hadn’t come in yet, I understood something for the first time: reading about breastfeeding has almost nothing to do with how your breastfeeding journey will actually go. I ordered a supplementary nursing kit because my SIL told me to and then she sourced milk from my other sister-in-law. And then five days later my supply arrived all at once and so overwhelming/extreme I could only nurse lying flat on my back, because sitting upright my daughter would choke, or I would spray milk across her face before she could latch. Sooo, I went from nothing/no milk to too much in less than a week (also, I think it was the Hakka that gave me an overproduction early on. I am not an LC but I had that on the other side just pumping milk while she nursed on the other side).

I ended up getting mastitis thirteen times in the first year and a half, and trust me no book mentioned that nor did I have any idea what was happening when I got it for the first time. I actually felt like I was dying since I kept fainting from the pain.

And I remember thinking not dramatically but just the way you think things at 3am when you are the only one awake… this is not what I prepared for. I thought I meant the breastfeeding but I didn’t realize that I meant everything.

So for me, the rupture didn’t happen in one moment it really happened in accumulation, and roughly three “big” times over the first 18 months

It happened most clearly at twelve weeks. I went to brunch with my girlfriends — the friends I’d had before I was a mother — and I must have glanced at my phone twenty times and clicked it on and off. Not for anything in particulat since my daughter was home with my husband perfectly fine. She wasn’t going to text me lol I ate faster than everyone, as if finishing first would somehow speed the table up, offered to drive someone home and immediately felt the weight of those extra seven minutes like they might actually break me. I smiled through all of it, a stranger wearing my own face. One of the girls there drifted away from me not long after. She went through her own loss and we never really spoke again the way we used to, and I still wonder if something I said that day, or didn’t say, had anything to do with it.

I had fully expected to bounce back by then… legit bounce back as if identity is a trampoline you jump off of and then perfectly return to.

It happened at Winners, maybe eight months in while I was texting a girlfriend (Hi Laura!) who was at twelve months, the first time either of us actually said it out loud. We both put LOL before all of what we admitted because without the LOL, saying the thing felt like confessing to something criminal. What the LOLs meant was: we both thought we’d feel completely fine by now and neither of us did.

I eventually saw a therapist who told me what I was experiencing was normal — not depression, not anxiety. But I’ve wondered many times since: what if she’d given me a single word for it? I didn’t find that word until later, on my own. Matrescence. The biological, psychological, and social transformation of becoming a mother. I didn’t know it existed, nor had I heard the word/phrase so I just kept waiting to feel like myself again.

And then, just a few weeks ago, I was on a walk by myself, on the phone with my best friend, whose daughter was born in March. She was asking me about those early months. I stopped walking and something opening in my chest that I’d been holding at a careful distance for a long time. I wanted to interrupt her with same, same, same.

And something became clear that I hadn’t been able to see from inside it:

I had spent every second preparing for our daughter and not a single moment preparing for myself.

Not one of the fifteen books. Not one of the five apps. Not one conversation, appointment, or carefully curated list.

The person who was going to be transformed by all of this and who was already transforming wasn’t anywhere on my list.

The grief from that first year isn’t the kind people expect. It’s not the sleep, though it lasted well past two years, it’s not the breastfeeding, and yes those things were (and still are) hard. They aren’t what I mean…

What I mean is quieter because I lost the feeling of thoughts that were only my own. The freedom of a mind that wasn’t always running three steps ahead of someone else’s needs.

And then there’s the thing I truly wasn’t prepared for: grieving the present moment while I’m still living it. I find myself nostalgic for right now. For the exact version of my daughter that exists today, knowing she’ll be slightly different next week, and that this version — the one I’m holding — will be gone. Nobody told me you could love a stage so completely that you feel its ending before it’s over.

Here’s what I think the real problem is.

Not one conversation I ever had — not with my mother, not with friends who were months ahead of me — was ever about me. It was about leaps and regressions, feeding and milestones. The closest anyone came to the mother was you can’t pour from an empty cup. And it ended there, as if the cup were a logistical problem rather than an identity one.

I don’t think anyone was withholding… I think we’ve all absorbed the same belief: that preparing for yourself, when a helpless baby is coming into the world, feels selfish. And the bounce-back assumption makes it worse — the belief that you should be adjusted by a certain time, not happier, just easier. When you’re not, you start wondering if something is wrong with you specifically.

I wasn’t depressed, I was simply confused. A new version of me was appearing that neither I or the people who loved me had met yet and I kept thinking it should feel easier by now — and the gap between where I was and where I thought I should be was its own quiet kind of suffering.

What I wish someone had said to me then:

I didn’t want to believe it either but it is true and I think if someone had said it out loud, in those exact words, I might have cried with relief instead of spending months wondering quietly if I was the only one.

I want to complicate this, because the essay isn’t honest without it.

I chose on my own terms to stay home. I walked away from a career I never thought I’d leave, went against what most of my family did, what most of my friends did. My sister-in-laws went back to work and we have never directly spoken about it — not once. There is something odd about making the most significant decision of your life and having it exist inside relationships that matter to you.

I don’t regret it and I actually I find immense joy in it, in a way that still surprises me. And I would choose this life a thousand times over, and I still wasn’t prepared for who I was becoming inside it.

I had a very clear picture of how things would go (as you can likely tell…) three children by 35, a nanny, a career I was building toward something. None of that picture included lying on the grass with my daughter, looking up at the sky, making muffins and having that be the whole day. And then writing? I never imagined any of it.

The life I actually have is one I couldn’t have pictured and I think that might be the thing nobody can prepare you for — not the sleepless nights, not even the grief of losing access to yourself. It’s that you are going to love a life you may never have chosen and that you are going to become someone brand new who you never could’ve imagined.

I’ve thought about whether someone tried to tell me about this.. whether there was a woman, a mother, a friend, someone a few steps further ahead who offered me the language and I just couldn’t take it in. I think there probably was and I think I had selective hearing, the kind you develop when you’re protecting a version of yourself you’re not ready to let go of yet. You can’t hear what you’re not ready to receive.

Was there someone who tried to tell you — and you didn’t hear it? Or was the silence actually complete?

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I’m Emma — an ICF-certified coach (CPC, ACC), writer, and mom in the middle of my own matrescence. I work 1:1 with ambitious mothers who are still becoming — women quietly rebuilding underneath everything they’ve built. I take only two clients at a time. Depth over volume.

🤍 If something in this piece reached you — the soft pivot, the quiet pull toward something truer — that’s usually the signal. Book a free clarity call → and we’ll make space for what’s actually next.

There’s a particular kind of content that surfaces every once in a while in the motherhood corner of the internet… I call this the resentment content, aka he doesn’t notice, he helps once and expects recognition. She hasn’t had an uninterrupted thought in six months, and he slept nine hours.

I read it, and I feel I understand it. Some of it is real and I do believe that some of it is performance (I can’t always tell which)but the anger is legitimate and the exhaustion is real, and I believe that.

Which is exactly why I didn’t know what to do with this: I don’t feel that way.

A few months ago I wrote a post about it. About my husband, our particular shape of a partnership, the fact that I picked well and I know it. I wrote it because I kept seeing myself reflected in a story I don’t actually live, and something in me wanted to say, clearly: this is not my experience.

Then I deleted it before anyone could read a single word.

What I couldn’t figure out was how to say I’m not in the resentment without sounding like I was performing contentment at women who are in something genuinely hard. That’s the last thing I want to be but I’ve been sitting with this long enough to say it anyway.

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Our 50-50 doesn’t look like the version being described online aka the alternating night wakings, the divided bedtimes, the carefully tallied tasks. What we have looks like this: he carries the full financial weight of our household while I stay home with our daughter, run our home, and slowly build something in the margins. He does most of the cooking and still helps with the cleaning and he shows up at the end of his day and I am quiet confident he doesn’t keep score.

We know our lanes and we stay in them where it makes sense to. Inside those lanes, we both work hard.

Here is another truth. I used to silently tally the moments he sat on the couch after bedtime because I’d read it as tapping out, he had done enough. Now I see that he’d been in a different building doing the same thing I had been.. grinding. He needs a break too so sometimes the couch cushions don’t always get put back after we have turned them into a tramponline and that’s fineeee.

Neither one of us thinks our half is the lesser half. That’s our whole marriage/partnership arrangement and yes it may be unglamorously built.

To the woman who is also quietly happy:

You’re allowed to say your marriage works and that you have an arrangement that looks nothing like the diagram on your IG carousel and still call it equal. You’re allowed to feel, most days, like you picked the right person without minimizing anyone else’s harder reality and you’re allowed to have written the post and deleted it!!

There’s an interesting loneliness/feeling in being in a partnership that mostly functions in a way that doesnt land on my feed. The content I had been seeing on TikTok specifically felt a lot like "he gets to…” vs “I have to….” or here is what you are owed, here is what fair looks like, here is what to demand. Maybe that content is necessary but it leaves almost no room for the woman who isn’t fighting that particular battle who is in something more mutual and mostly fine.

You don’t have to apologize for that version.

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I’m posting this now because I think the deleted-post instinct is its own kind of loss since something true disappears because we’re afraid of how it will land, and the silence becomes the story by default.

I don’t want that to be the story.

My marriage is not without pressure. This is a season with real weight, income stress with only one income while still not slowing down with the way we do things, the particular tension of one person earning while the other is still becoming, the uncertainty of not quite knowing yet what I’m building but spending time away from our family on the weekend to pick away at it. None of that is invisible to me but it doesn’t change what’s underneath it.

I love him and I picked well. That’s the post I never published and I’m finally letting it live.

I would love to hear from you.

What does your 50-50 actually look like — and have you ever been afraid to say it out loud? I read and reply to every comment.

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Three years ago, I would have been horrified by this morning.

I was leading sales at a fast-growing startup in New York, working for two female founders on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. I was at the top of the leaderboard and I was always at the top of the leaderboard — I wanted to be. I know how that sounds, grossssss… but it’s true.

A full life back then looked like multiple vacations a year, the bucket list checked off, friends on weekends, a workout before the day started, sleeping well, eating well, always being number one.

By that point I’d already been to the hospital twice for fainting and high blood pressure and then a few weeks later I’d be diagnosed with preeclampsia. Then I ended up going off work 10 weeks before my due date. I was finishing my coaching certification on the side, telling myself that maybe in five years, after one or two maternity leaves, I wouldn’t have to go back to the hustle.

I had no idea then that I wouldn’t want to.

That version of me would roll her eyes at this morning.

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This morning, I threw a pillow at my husband’s head so his alarm wouldn’t wake us up. My daughter had squirmed half the night and my neck was kinked from a fourth night of holding her in the tightest ever spoon position and it was raining. We stayed in bed longer than usual, having conversations through stuffed animals about what to do with a slow, gray day.

The routines — or “rhythms,” as we’ve started calling them — are very simple. Reading, cooking, a grocery store run, laundry, playing in the backyard, a trip to the library down the street. No constant what’s next. No louder, faster, bigger.

And somehow, it feels full in a way I didn’t expect.

No one tells you that the bounce-back doesn’t happen at six weeks, or twelve, or whenever it is the world quietly expects you to be “back.”

The biggest identity shifts come later for me eight months then thirteen and another biggie at twenty-one. You don’t become one new version of yourself, you become many. And just when you start to recognize one of them, she changes too.

I thought I had failed at something when my daughter stayed this attached to me at fifteen months. That somehow I hadn’t set the right boundaries, hadn’t shared the load well enough. Her dad hasn’t done bedtime since she was eight months old — we’ve tried, and it ended in tears and puking, and we haven’t tried again. She never took a bottle and in the early days I tracked every feed by the hour, convinced I was drowning.

I’m starting to think it isn’t a failure and it’s just a really healthy bond… and it’s going by faster than I want it to.

If I could tell the version of me who was tracking feeds at 2 a.m. one thing, it would be this: trust your gut. Turn off the noise. You know your baby better than any expert. You were wired for this mama.

What I was really afraid of underneath all of it, I think, was becoming invisible. I had built a life where success was visible — leaderboards, titles, a city, a calendar that looked impressive from the outside. Stepping out of that felt like disappearing.

Until I realized the people who needed to find me, would. My first two coaching clients came from a long-form blog post — not the perfectly curated living room I thought I was supposed to share. When I came to Substack, I messaged thirty friends who had cheered for me from the start, and quietly left the rest behind.

This morning, my daughter handed me a half-eaten muffin with some mushy parts, and I ate it without thinking. Before becoming a mom that would have horrified me (which is foolish, I know) and today it felt like love in its most ordinary form.

I used to think a full life meant movement — growth you could measure, progress you could point to, something that looked impressive from the outside.

Now I’m realizing it can look much quieter than that and still matter… maybe even more.

If you’re in the in-between right now — the version of you before this ended, but the next one hasn’t quite shown up — I know it’s lonelier than anyone warned you. I know you feel like you’ve already met so many versions of yourself, and none of them feel like home yet.

She’ll come and she might take longer than you want. And when she does, she might change again.

That’s not you doing it wrong because that’s just how this works.

My life might look small from the outside but it surely doesn’t feel small from in here.

So tell me — what’s the thing in your life right now that looks small to other people, but doesn’t feel small to you?

Leave it in the comments. I want to read what you’re carrying that no one else can see.

Leave a comment

About me:

I’m Emma — an ICF-certified coach (CPC, ACC), writer, and mom in the middle of my own matrescence. I work 1:1 with ambitious mothers who are still becoming — women quietly rebuilding underneath everything they’ve built. I take only two clients at a time. Depth over volume

Let’s connect:

🤍 If something in this piece reached you — the soft pivot, the quiet pull toward something truer — that’s usually the signal.

Book a free clarity call → and we’ll make space for what’s actually next.

We couldn’t Google anything. Couldn’t check the weather. Couldn’t look up the best café or the most photogenic corner of the island. We were just — there. Completely, uncomplicatedly there.

On day two, all three of us fell asleep for three hours in the middle of the afternoon. At home, a nap that long would have sent me into a quiet spiral about bedtime. But nothing held its normal weight out here. We were camping. The only thing waiting for us after dark was a fire.

This was our first real family vacation since I deleted Instagram. And the irony isn’t lost on me — it’s also one of the most beautiful trips we’ve taken. Golden hour light through the trees. Marthas Vineyard charm. My daughter’s face doing the thing it does when she’s completely content looking out at the ocean. The camper that started as a couples’ dream and somehow became exactly the right kind of life for three.

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I still took hundreds of photos. I always do — not for an audience, but because I genuinely love it. Because our walls at home are covered in pictures from our travels, and I never want to forget what it felt like.

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel the absence.

Not of Instagram itself, exactly. More like — I used to post a story from a trip and have 45 replies by dinner. Other moms asking for tips. Family checking in. A kind of ambient closeness that felt like something. This was the first vacation I planned without any of that. No algorithm to tell me which spots were worth visiting. No comment section to confirm I was doing it right.

What surprised me was how quickly the itch faded. By day three, I didn’t miss the replying. I didn’t miss the busyness of being seen.

What I missed — sometimes, quietly — was being able to say look at this to someone who would care. The specific golden light on the water that second evening. The way she ran ahead on the beach without looking back, so sure of herself, so completely unself-conscious. The smallness of us against the trees and the particular feeling of that smallness being good rather than lonely. There were moments on that trip I wanted to hand to someone. Not for proof. Just — because beauty feels different when it’s shared, and I’m still figuring out what sharing looks like now.

I’m figuring it out here, I think.

Writing this a few weeks later, it doesn’t feel like posting. It feels more like what I actually wanted all along. Not performance. Not proof. Something closer to — a record. A small document of the life we’re building, slowly and without an audience, for no one but us.

The trip no one knew we were on turns out to be one of the best ones we’ve taken. I keep coming back to that. Not as a conclusion about social media or presence or any of it — just as a quiet fact I want to hold onto. We were there. It was beautiful. We don’t need anything else to make it true.

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A little note from me to you 🤍

If you found yourself nodding through any of this, you’re not alone — and you’re probably closer to your own answers than you think.

I’m a Matrescence & Life Coach. I work 1:1 with mothers who are still ambitious and quietly rebuilding underneath the version of themselves who used to run the meeting, hit the number, hold it all together.

You don’t have to know what’s next. We just start where you are. If you’d like to talk, I offer free clarity calls — you can reach me here.

My daughter was awake and decently happy when a woman I didn’t know walked over and asked to hold her. She was in her 40s, dressed in something bright, friendly and bubbly — she was almost kind of hyper. She immediately scooped my daughter up and instantly started bouncing and swaying side to side, talking about her own kids, who are now in their 20s. Within two minutes she was on the other side of the room.

I stood there, stuck with people I’d just met, watching my baby across a room I didn’t know. Tbhd, it was a truly out-of-body experience and I didn’t know how to get her back.

When I finally walked over and said, “I’ll take her,” the woman said it twice. “No, no, she’s happy!! just take a break, enjoy yourself.”

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I cried the entire drive home…not soft tears — full hyperventilating, can’t-catch-my-breath crying. I didn’t even have words. I just kept saying that my daughter had been taken from me, that I didn’t want that, that I was so angry at myself for not knowing how to say no.

The woman was being kind and she thought she was helping. And here’s the thing I wish someone had told me earlier: sometimes a new mom doesn’t want you to hold her baby. Sometimes the most helpful thing you could do is carry the laundry up from the basement, or load the dishwasher, or stack the bottles by the sink. Holding the baby for me wasn’t the gift. It was the opposite of one.

That was one of the small fears and there were a lot of them in those early months. They didn’t always announce themselves, they snuck in around the edges and stayed.

When my daughter was around three months old, an old colleague came over. Someone who used to report to me and she brought her almost one-year-old, who was a tornado during that visit — busy, squirmy, pinballing from one room to the next. The visit was only twenty minutes, and she came in fast, dumping advice on me before I’d even poured us a glass of water.

You haven’t put her on any daycare lists yet?

She said it three or four times, in three or four different ways. If we didn’t go to daycare, my daughter wouldn’t be socialized. If I didn’t return to work soon, I wouldn’t be able to find a job again. It was delivered as fact, not opinion. (As soon as she got into her car, she sent me a long apology paragraph about how chaotic the visit had been. I think she was overwhelmed, too. We both were.)

I sat there nodding, slowly panicking, holding my tiny three-month-old who still looked like a little alien. (And quietly confused — in Canada, most often women can return to their previous role after maternity leave. So why was I panicking?)

But that was the start of it.. the fear of becoming obsolete. Of disappearing. Of doing something different.

What I didn’t realize that morning is that this — being needed, here, by her — was the one place I would never become obsolete.

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For most of my 20s, my success was very public. I was ambitious in a way that left a trail. Promotions, wins, recognition. (Yes, my ego liked that. We can be honest about it.)

So when I became a mom, the silence was deafening. No one was around to tell me I’d done a great job today, my family was busy and there were no parents moving in for the night shift. There was just me, a newborn, and a husband who came home in the evening and went back to work the next morning. The whole world keeps spinning, and you’re somehow inside this strange, suspended bubble where time both stretches and disappears.

That was the first big fear: becoming invisible. Doing meaningful work that no one was clapping for.

Another fear was that we were already doing this whole motherhood thing differently — and I didn’t have a roadmap.

We didn’t put my daughter on a daycare list a year before she was born and we didn’t hire the local sleep trainer/coach. My husband kept saying, “We’ll figure it out,” and I didn’t push back. I’m so glad I went into it that naive, because if you’d told me at the start that this would become my work — staying home with her, building something slowly from scratch — I almost know for certian I would have spiraled.

But I didn’t know, so I just kept going.

The smaller fears stayed for a while.

There was the quietness throughout the day, the lack of things to check off a list, my habit tracker, which used to feel like a scoreboard, suddenly felt like a museum. I wasn’t moving toward a clearly defined role anymore, and the stillness of that was uncomfortable in a way I hadn’t expected.

And there was the slowing down itself. Coming out of the fast-track corporate world and into days that ran on a baby’s rhythm — that was the one I underestimated the most. Two years in a row, I chose rest as my word of the year and both years, when rest actually showed up, I had no idea what to do with it.

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Lately I’ve been thinking about the idea of soft ambition. Not because the ambition softened — mine actually got sharper, clearer, more specific. The parameters softened, the edges around the work, my time blocks, the windows I had to focus in.

The old me built things in five-hour chunks and didn’t move from her computer until it was done. The new me builds in twenty minutes during a nap, then closes the laptop. That’s the part that had to change.

I think the corporate definition of ambition still wears a hard edge — fast, public, structured, masculine in its rhythm. Soft ambition is the same fire, just held differently, quieter, more flexible. Aka, built around a life instead of inside one.

I didn’t have words for that early on, I just had the old definition, and when I couldn’t perform it anymore, I assumed I’d lost it.

I hadn’t. It was just changing shape.

The fears above are mostly gone now. Not because I conquered them, but because they slowly softened on their own, the way most things do when you stop fighting them.

Here’s a small example. Last night, after I put my daughter to bed, I cracked something open in my head about a piece I’d been writing. I came downstairs at 9pm, opened my laptop, and gave myself thirty minutes to get the thought out before I came back to my husband. Old me — when I was chasing seven different side hustles, convinced I could replace my full sales salary while being fully present at home — basically disappeared from my hudband and my daughter for four months. Mornings, evenings, weekends. I don’t love that I did that, but I think it was part of how I learned. It was also before I’d decided that staying home was the work.

Now I’m aware. I notice when my phone is too close to my daughter. I notice when a yes costs me something I didn’t want to spend. I’m okay turning down the catch-up coffees that won’t fill me up — the rhythm of our weeks matters more to me than the optics of being available.

Every yes is a no to something else. And, more honestly: every yes is a no to myself if it doesn’t feel right.

I can lie down during a nap now without guilt. I trust that the things I want to build will get built, even slowly. I know that being home with a toddler who feels safe and steady is, somehow, my most ambitious work right now.

Maybe it’s because my daughter is older and easier. Maybe it’s because we found our rhythm. But I think most of it is that I got calmer — and she felt it. We softened together.

If I could go back and tell two-month-postpartum me one thing, it would be this: the fears aren’t warnings they’re just the friction of becoming someone new. And no, not every voice in the room is one you have to listen to — including the loudest one.

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Journaling prompts

• What’s a fear you held early in motherhood that has quietly disappeared?

• Where in your life did you confuse ambition with approval?

• What does soft ambition look like for you, right now, in this season?

• What’s a yes you’ve been giving that’s secretly a no to yourself?

• When did you last let advice override your own gut — and what did your gut already know?

• What does helpful help actually look like for you? (Laundry? Dishes? Quiet?)

Which of these prompts lands with you? I would love to hear from you!

Leave a comment

About me:

I’m Emma — an ICF-certified coach (CPC, ACC), writer, and mom in the middle of my own matrescence. I work 1:1 with ambitious mothers who are still becoming — women quietly rebuilding underneath everything they’ve built. I take only two clients at a time. Depth over volume.

Let’s connect:

🤍 If something in this piece reached you — the soft pivot, the quiet pull toward something truer — that’s usually the signal. Book a free clarity call → and we’ll make space for what’s actually next.

In early 2026, two consumer brands built on mothers' loyalty took out a full-page ad in The New York Times and asked the public to add ‘matrescence’ to the dictionary.

The ad was clean, beautifully designed and the word at its center: matrescence. Below it, the logos of two brands — Peanut and Tommee Tippee — and a campaign name that landed somewhere between petition and manifesto: Add matrescence to the dictionary.

I saw it the way most people did while scrolling on Instagram. But I already knew the word so I paused for a long moment since I didn’t know what I felt.

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I should tell you something… I built a brand and my coaching business surrounding this word before it was a marketing asset.

When I first heard “matrescence,” I was eighteen months postpartum, half-listening to a podcast with my daughter in the carrier sleeping while out for a walk. Something in the episode made me stop — actually stop, reach for my phone in my pocket, and send it to four different girlfriends with a message that amounted to: you have to hear this right now!!!! Not because it told me something I didn’t know but because it finally named what I’d been living. The invisible thing I’d been trying to articulate in quiet moments when I didn’t feel like myself and couldn’t explain why.

Before motherhood, I had done my research and read everything I could find but all of it was about the baby — sleep schedules, feeding, infant development. Nothing I read was about what having a child would do to me. My own transformation was an afterthought and in that first year, when everything was moving fast and I kept waiting to feel like myself again, I genuinely believed I would bounce back. By some invisible deadline, back to who I was identically before she came.

There was none of that.

What I found instead, eighteen months in, was a word and finding it felt like pressing your hand against glass and realizing someone is pressing from the other side.

So when I saw the New York Times campaign, I felt two things at once — and it matters that I’m honest about both. One part of me was glad because Of course I was glad!!! The word was reaching people who absolutely needed it. The other part of me felt something harder to name, almost an ughhh no so not quite loss, but something adjacent to it.

The word “matrescence” was coined in 1973 by Dana Raphael, an anthropologist who watched women transition into motherhood and understood that what she was witnessing deserved its own language. Not a marketing category, a full blown human truth. The word sat largely outside mainstream awareness for decades, until Alexandra Sacks gave a TED Talk that now has over four million views — still the clearest, most accessible explanation of what matrescence actually is: the developmental passage a woman moves through when she becomes a mother, as significant and disorienting as adolescence. Sacks didn’t invent the word, but she gave it a stage and for a lot of women that talk was the first time they heard it.

The Peanut and Tommee Tippee campaign built on that momentum because the stat that accompanied it: 67% of mothers had never heard the word before the campaign launched. That number truly stopped me because when I asked the women in my life, it was closer to 100% and those numbers are wayyy too high.

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What the campaign got right is real, that so many women still don’t have language for the biggest identity shift of their lives is not a small problem. If women knew about matrescence before they became mothers — if it were part of how we talked about pregnancy and postpartum — there might be less desperate searching for the version of yourself you were before. Less confusion at month eight, or fourteen, or twenty, when the shift still isn’t finished and no one told you that was possible.

No one told me about this and I thought the hard identity work happened in the first three to six weeks (if at all??). My biggest waves came at eight months, fourteen months, twenty months and I didn’t have a map for that but the word would have helped for sure.

This is what I mean when I say “matrescence” mattered before it was an ad.

The question isn’t whether corporations should be allowed to use it. They can and they will. And honestly, if you have to choose between the word reaching no one and the word reaching millions through a branded campaign the math is obvious.

But there’s something worth watching when language becomes product. The word “matrescence” did something specific before it appeared in a full-page ad — it gave women a private name for a public experience they couldn’t articulate. It was a thing you found late at night, alone, when you finally typed “why don’t I feel like myself” into a search bar for the tenth time. It was the word that stopped you cold, and me on my walk.

Once it’s a campaign, it arrives differently because its pre-packaged, aesthetically curated, attached to brands with profit motives. And when it’s delivered through the kind of polished, aspirational motherhood content that already makes so many of us feel subtly inadequate, there’s a real risk we apply the comparison trap to the transformation itself. So then we start to wonder whether we’re doing our matrescence right and whether our version of becoming looks like theirs.

I deleted Instagram four months ago partly because of the comparison trap. It’s already exhausting in ordinary contexts and the thought of it being applied to the most profound identity passage of a woman’s life genuinely concerns me. Matrescence isn’t an aesthetic and it def doesn’t arrive polished. It arrives when you’re least prepared, changes you in ways you didn’t consent to, and can unfold over years — not weeks. Research tells us it literally rewires the brain and that’s not a campaign… that’s a metamorphosis.

Every matrescence is different just like adolescence: the same passage, a completely different experience for every person who moves through it. There’s no version to compare yourself to and absoutely no correct way to be becoming.

What I hope — for all of it, including the campaign — is that the visibility leads somewhere deeper and that it creates space for the kind of conversation a billboard can’t hold: the slow, honest education that tells women this is coming before it arrives. That it opens doors into healthcare, research, policy — the places where the real work of honoring matrescence actually happens. That the 5,000% increase in search that followed the campaign doesn’t just lead women to a beautifully designed website, but to something true.

If you found this word on your own — not through a campaign, not through an ad, but in a late-night search, or a podcast you almost didn’t listen to, or a friend’s text that said you have to hear this — I want you to know that what you felt in that moment was real.

The recognition belongs to you and no brand can take back a private reckoning.

The word still does what it always did because it names the thing were all going through and the thing is real, whether it has a full-page ad behind it or not.

What I knew going into motherhood was that having a daughter would change my life — because I’d be carrying her my whole life. What I didn’t know was that it had anything to do with me.. that the change was mine. That I was the one being remade.

That’s what the word gave me. Not a product, not a campaign, a mirror.

I would love to hear from you.

When did you first hear the word “matrescence”? And what happened in you when you did?

Leave a comment — I read & reply to every one.

Leave a comment

A little note from me to you 🤍

I’m Emma — a writer, ICF-certified coach, and mom in the middle of my own matrescence. I work 1:1 with ambitious mothers who are still becoming: women quietly rebuilding underneath everything they’ve already built. I take two clients at a time. Depth over volume.

If this piece found you at the right moment, you might also love The Matrescence Map: 7 Identity Shifts No One Warned You About — a field guide to who you’re becoming on the other side of motherhood.

And if you’re in a season where something needs to shift — I offer free clarity calls. No pitch, no pressure. You can reach me here.

We made a Greek yogurt lemon poppy seed cake. She poured the dry ingredients in before they were supposed to go in. There was flour on the floor. A whimsy playlist was playing. We put candles on it when it came out and sang her happy birthday — and then sang it again, and blew them out a second time, just for fun. It was completely unhinged and completely sweet.

It would have made an incredible reel. The chaos, the song, the candles in May. POV: my toddler decided it was her birthday so we just went with it. I could already see the caption.

We never took a single photo.

I’m telling you that because I want to be clear about who’s writing this. I have a beautiful kitchen. I have faux flowers tucked into real ones all over our house. I used to run a small side business arranging them, so I’ve spent real hours of my life thinking about how a counter should look in the morning light. My kitchen is photographable. My aesthetic is, by any honest definition, an aesthetic. So whatever I’m about to say about the performance of being present — I’m implicating myself first.

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A few weeks ago I wrote I Nailed the Aesthetic — about getting the look of intentionality without becoming intentional. This is what I think is actually happening underneath.

Somewhere in the last few years, intentional became an aesthetic. Slow living got a uniform — the linen apron, the unglazed cup, the morning light slanting across the wood. Minimalist mom, decluttered home, slow life. A whole visual language for an internal practice. We took something that used to be private and turned it into another thing to be seen doing. Rest with a ring light. Stillness with a caption.

I started feeling it most in my own feed. The algorithm learned fast — Pinterest, Instagram, the same beige-linen-soft-light loop everywhere I scrolled. And after a while it just started bothering me. Not because it was beautiful. Because it couldn’t possibly all be real.

Jenny Odell wrote that “attention may be the last resource we have left to withdraw.” The part she names — withdraw — is the part the aesthetic can’t fake. You cannot photograph a withdrawal. You can only photograph the room you withdrew into.

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I’ve had to learn this the dumb way, and I am still learning it. My ambition still lives inside of me, loud, and a lot of the time I am physically with Violet while mentally somewhere else — drafting a Substack post in my head, writing a hook, building something.

I’m in my third season of ambition since becoming a mom. The first was figuring out how to go back to work without losing her. The second was trying to build something new in the margins — an Etsy shop, UGC, anything. This one is quieter. I’m trying to work smarter, not harder. I write almost everything in voice notes — on a short walk, on a drive to the grocery store. One hour a day, capped. My husband has said, more than once, that he’s worried I’ll burn out on Substack the way I’ve burned out on things before. My consistency since becoming a mom isn’t great. My passion is there, my drive is there. I go hot, fast, and disappear.

About a month ago, I made my daughter a little pop-up cardboard theater. Bedtime — already long — started stretching another hour because she wanted to do puppet shows. I’ll be honest: I was annoyed. Not at her. At the math. The evening is the only pocket of time I have for me, for the ambition I’m trying to fit into the smallest possible window, and a puppet show was eating it.

The second-to-last night, I rushed her. I wanted it over. She felt it.

She waited almost a month until she asked again.

The thing I keep sitting with is that I wasn’t annoyed about a puppet show. I was annoyed that I couldn’t get back to building. And the building is real, and it matters to me, and also — this was the only room I am not replaceable in, and I half-phoned-it-in through one of the last nights of a thing I didn’t know was ending.

The frame I keep returning to is this: real presence has no audience. That’s the test. Not whether the moment looked good. Not whether anyone — including me, watching myself — was watching.

I’d like to say I never fail this test, but I do. When she and I bake, I take photos of her on the counter. Some are for me, because I print them. Some are for my husband, because I send him pictures all day. But some — and I have to be honest about this — are framed. Lit. Angled. Taken with the half-thought of this could be shared someday. I always feel it in my body when I’m doing it. The slight pulling-out. The small betrayal.

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A few years ago, I read about a mom with around 800,000 followers who deleted her Instagram. Vacations had become shoots. Hotel stays had to deliver UGC. There was no version of family life that wasn’t also content. And honestly, did I want to be a mommy influencer at some point? Yes. Did I want it to fund a freer life for our family? Yes. I worked in that world long enough to know what it costs. I just realized, eventually, that I wasn’t willing to pay it.

And underneath all of that, I had to look at something harder.

I did not do well in school. My mom likes to remind me I failed my English literacy test three times in high school. I was put in English class while almost everyone I knew was in French immersion, which in our school basically meant you were the slow one. By grade twelve most of my friends were on high honours and I don’t think I even made honours. I always felt dumb.

Then I went into sales. I was at the top of the leaderboard ninety-five percent of the time. My name was attached to numbers. Numbers were public. The praise was constant, and I got addicted to it in a way I didn’t understand until I stopped having it.

So when I tell you the fear under all of this is becoming invisible, becoming irrelevant — I want you to know it isn’t abstract. It has a specific shape. It started long before motherhood, and the aesthetic, and the algorithm. The aesthetic is just the newest version of a leaderboard I’ve been climbing for twenty years.

Quieting that fear is the work. I don’t think you can do it and perform it at the same time.

This morning I woke up before her. Her feet were tucked between mine, the way she always sleeps. Her face was sharing my pillow. We co-sleep, and I have been the one to put her to bed for two and a half years, every night except one. I’ve taken plenty of photos of her dad and her sleeping curled up together. There are none of me and her.

Nobody sees those mornings. I don’t really talk about them. We share one queen-size pillow. Her feet are always cold.

That’s the whole thing.

I’d love to hear from you.

Which part of this landed? What would you add from your own experience?

Leave a comment — I read & reply to every one.

Leave a comment

About me:

I’m Emma — an ICF-certified coach (CPC, ACC), writer, and mom in the middle of my own matrescence. I work 1:1 with ambitious mothers who are still becoming — women quietly rebuilding underneath everything they’ve built. I take only two clients at a time. Depth over volume.

Let’s connect:

🤍 If something in this piece reached you — the soft pivot, the quiet pull toward something truer — that’s usually the signal. Book a free clarity call → and we’ll make space for what’s actually next.

Right now, tbh it’s Substack. I sit down after bedtime and feel that familiar giddy intensity — the want-to-crack-the-code feeling. The soft hustle hum. For a long time, I would have called that a red flag. There she goes again, chasing numbers.

But this time the fixation feels different. Softer. Like the same engine, retuned.

I learned recently that I’m a manifesting generator in human design — which, if you don’t know the system, basically means I’m wired to follow multiple interests in waves. When the spark is there, I’m supposed to listen. When it leaves, I’m supposed to let it go. Nothing has explained me to myself quite so cleanly. For years I’d cycled through obsessions and wondered what was wrong with me. Turns out: nothing. That was the design.

So now when the old hustle self resurfaces, I don’t try to silence her. I just notice what’s underneath.

The grief I didn’t expect

If I’m honest about what I miss, it isn’t the job. It isn’t the schedule. It isn’t even the income.

It’s the praise.

I miss managers seeing the work. I miss visible targets. I miss the loop of do the thing → get acknowledged → feel valuable. Writing that out loud feels icky — but it’s true, and I think most ambitious women who left their careers for motherhood quietly miss the same thing, even if they’d never say it.

Because right now, my husband is essentially the only adult who sees the work I do at home. Stay-at-home motherhood is a long game. You plant for a decade. You don’t get a quarterly review. There’s no manager nodding at the report.

The grief isn’t about the old life. It’s about no one being able to see this one.

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The fear wasn’t getting smaller. It was disappearing.

I never worried that motherhood would make me less interesting. I worried that leaving my career — with no plan to come back — would make me invisible to the world I used to belong to.

People asked me, again and again: but what will you do? When are you going back? What’s next? And underneath the questions was the implication I felt in my chest: if you’re not building something visible, you’re disappearing.

So I disappeared a little on purpose. I left Instagram. I left TikTok. I left Facebook. I came over to Substack. I gave up the old audience that had watched me grow up professionally — colleagues, classmates, the high-school mean girls who still lived rent-free in some corner of my mind. (Why did that ever matter? I don’t know. But it did.)

Starting from scratch here has been one of the most clarifying things I’ve done. For the first time, I’m writing without performing for anyone from my old life.

The reframe

Most women don’t actually want their old lives back. They want access to the parts of themselves that felt alive inside them.

That’s the line I keep coming back to.

You don’t miss the commute or the meetings or the deadline pressure. You miss the feeling of being witnessed. The feeling of momentum. The feeling of authoring your own days.

Motherhood doesn’t erase those needs. It just buries them under a hundred other people’s needs first.

Where the conversation gets it wrong

The cultural script around motherhood and ambition has narrowed into a binary I don’t recognize.

You’re either a Working Mom (productive, optimized, building) or a Stay-at-Home Mom (slow, present, surrendered). Pick a team. Defend it online.

But every stay-at-home mom I know is a working mom. We work 24/7. We just don’t get paid and we don’t get praised. And every working mom I know is doing the emotional and logistical labor of stay-at-home life on top of her job.

Neither version of the script honors what’s actually happening in matrescence: a full identity reshape. An ego death, even, if I’m being honest about what this season has felt like.

You don’t need to fully surrender ambition. You don’t need to optimize motherhood like a startup. You’re allowed to refine ambition — slow it down, change its shape — without abandoning it.

The Three Things Women Actually Grieve After Motherhood

After sitting with this for a while, I think the grief breaks into three pieces.

1. Momentum. Not productivity. Movement. The feeling of being in motion toward something. In motherhood, the days can feel like they loop — same wake-ups, same snacks, same bedtime — and even when meaningful work is happening underneath, the forward of it can be invisible.

2. Recognition. Being witnessed outside caregiving. Someone — a boss, a peer, a stranger on the internet — saying I see what you’re making. This is the one I miss most. And I think it’s the one most women feel guiltiest about missing, because we’ve been told a good mother shouldn’t need it. We do.

3. Self-authorship. The sense that you are still the author of your own becoming. Not a supporting character in someone else’s story, not a service role in your own household. Still writing.

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What I actually want now

I used to think I wanted to be validated. What I actually want is to love myself without needing anyone else to confirm it first.

That sentence is still under construction. I’m not all the way there. But I can feel the difference between writing to be seen and writing because it’s mine.

A year from now, I want to be running a small, thriving community of mothers who are reshaping ambition into something that fits inside small pockets of time. Not the three-hour-block moms. The five-minute-window moms with something still growing inside them.

I want to be writing weekly. Maybe hosting quarterly group meetups with women all over the world. Watching a chat full of women find each other and connect.

In that version of my life, ambition feels steady. Not loud. Not chasing. Just moving — at a pace I actually built.

Your reframe — a small piece of homework

If any of this caught you, sit with these this week. They aren’t formal journaling prompts. They’re the questions I’d ask you in a coaching session.

1. When the old version of you resurfaces, what is she actually wanting? Not the job. The feeling. Name it in one word.

2. Of the three — momentum, recognition, self-authorship — which are you grieving most right now? Where in your week could you give yourself even a small dose of it?

3. Finish this sentence honestly, the way I had to: “I used to think I wanted ___. What I actually want is ___.”

Don’t try to make it sound graceful. Just write the true thing.

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You don’t have to leave motherhood to feel alive inside it. You just have to stop pretending you don’t miss her — the version of you who got to be ambitious out loud.

She’s not gone. She’s been waiting for you to make room.

A little note from me to you 🤍

If you found yourself nodding through any of this, you’re not alone — and you’re probably closer to your own answers than you think.

I’m Emma — an ICF-certified coach (CPC, ACC), writer, and mom in the middle of my own matrescence. I work 1:1 with ambitious mothers who are still becoming — women quietly rebuilding underneath everything they’ve built. I take only two clients at a time. Depth over volume.

🤍 If something in this piece reached you — the soft pivot, the quiet pull toward something truer — that’s usually the signal. Book a free clarity call → and we’ll make space for what’s actually next.

For most of my twenties, ambition had a shape I could point to. A title. A company. A salary. A clear ladder with very specific rungs — account executive, senior AE, manager, director, VP, CRO. You knew what climbing looked like, because someone above you was watching and someone beside you was racing. Even on the days you didn’t feel particularly driven, the structure itself did the work. The audience was built in.

And then I stepped off.

Not because the ambition went away — but because I wanted my life back inside my own hands. I wanted to be home with my daughter. I wanted to homeschool, eventually. I wanted to be the one watching her learn the world, not the one being briefed on her day at 6:15 p.m. So I left the path. I closed the public-facing parts of my old life. I stopped posting. I shrunk my Instagram down to almost nothing — once from a few thousand followers, once from over five thousand on my pyjama brand — until almost no one from “before” could see what I was doing now. And then, a few months ago, I made it permanent: I deleted Instagram and TikTok completely.

And here is what I want to write about: what happens to ambition when no one is watching anymore.

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What people assume when you step off the path

When I told my aunt — who doesn’t have children, and who I should add barely knows me beyond what I’ve shared in small pockets online or the times we see each other every few years — that I was planning to homeschool and stay home with my daughter, she told me, word for word, that she wasn’t going to congratulate me on that. The shock through the phone was layered onto a version of me she remembered from my twenties. Driven. Sales. Constant global work travel. Big plans. That girl, she could clap for. This one, apparently, not yet.

My grandmother asked, early on, what I was going to do “after all this,” circling her finger around my daughter Violet like she was a phase that would conclude. After. As if presence were a stopover.

Both moments left me speechless in the moment, and clear-eyed about it later. They weren’t really about me. They were about a story we’ve all inherited — that ambition is something you wear publicly, something attached to a title, something that requires an audience to count. If no one is naming you, promoting you, or paying you, the assumption is: she must have given it up.

I didn’t. It just got quieter. And quieter is not the same as smaller.

The cultural moment we’re in

There’s a name for some of what I’m describing. Soft ambition. It emerged around 2023 as a counter-movement to Girlboss culture and the always-on hustle that defined the 2010s. The idea is not that women are less driven — it’s that the definition of “winning” has changed. Soft ambition is about demanding flexibility, refusing to overwork as identity, and prioritising actual life. (Marie Claire, AllBright)

I’m not writing about Girlboss culture from the outside. In 2016, I got hired at a tech startup right as Instagram was becoming the home of a whole new wave of women-led brands — and my company started signing the ones that would come to define an entire aesthetic. Glossier was one of our first clients. Girlboss was another. We worked with Nasty Gal. We ran events at The Wing. I was flying around the world to female-founded companies, walking into millennial-pink offices, watching founders my age build the kind of brands I’d only ever read about. I sold a contract to Outdoor Voices and got on a call with Tyler Haney — exactly my age — and walked away thinking, of course I’m going to start my own. That spark turned into my pyjama brand, Emma Lyn Essentials. Very millennial pink. Very beautiful. Very on-mould for what Girlboss was selling us all on.

Then I went to three Girlboss Rallies and left each one even more inspired. After the very first one, I dove headfirst into building a software company designed to help modern millennials align career success with actual engagement at work — because I was quietly feeling, in my own job, that those two things had come apart. I brought on a business partner. We started pitching. We had real VC interest. About a year and a half in, I was so burnt out from doing it on top of an already demanding full time job that I had to walk away from all of it. Before that, I'd already quit my very secure job with plans to leave for the startup — then never followed through, and ended up staying another three years. Sophia Amoruso and the movement around her really did spark something in me at the time. But the spark and the burnout came from the same source: the idea that ambition had to be loud, fast, and visible to count.

That whole chapter is part of why I trust the soft ambition reframe now. Not as a step backward. As a correction.

The most recent McKinsey x LeanIn Women in the Workplace report flags something more sobering, too: a growing ambition gap between men and women at work — and it’s not because women have stopped wanting things. It’s because the systems they’re climbing inside still extract a different toll from them. (CNBC, McKinsey)

That toll has a name too. The motherhood penalty. Mothers earn around 63 cents for every dollar paid to fathers, with a per-child wage penalty of 5–20% for women — while fathers, for the same act of becoming a parent, get an approximate 6% raise. (Bankrate, Third Way) Fatherhood, in the eyes of employers, signals stability. Motherhood signals distraction.

So when a woman steps back, it isn’t always retreat. Sometimes it’s the only honest move inside a game that’s quietly rigged.

What success started to look like for me

In the past few months, I’ve caught myself listing — out loud, to my husband, to my parents— the things that have made me feel successful. They are not the things that would have made my twenty-six-year-old self feel successful.

Violet waking up from a nap and not crying or needing me immediately. Violet staying with her grandparents for a longer stretch of time throughout the day and being totally fine. Violet, at the grocery store or at a friend’s house, walking up to an adult stranger with no fear at all and starting a conversation and continuing it.

Yes — those moments are about her. But they’re also about me. About the work of being home, and present, and the kind of secure base she gets to push off from. They’re milestones no algorithm will ever surface, no LinkedIn post will ever capture, no boss will ever review me on. And they have made me feel, in a quiet but unmistakable way, good at my life.

This is the part of ambition we don’t talk about. The part that lives outside of work entirely. The part that is about who you are becoming, not what you are producing.

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The long game

Here’s where I want to push back on the assumption baked into both my aunt’s reaction and my grandmother’s question. Stepping back is not the end. For a lot of women, it’s the runway.

The average age of a U.S. entrepreneur is 42. For the fastest-growing startups, the founders are around 45. The highest concentration of female entrepreneurs sits between 40 and 44. Gen X women — between 44 and 59 — made up 69% of women business owners in 2023. And businesses started by people in this age range have a roughly 70% chance of surviving the first five years, compared to about 28% for ventures started by younger founders. (Dexterous Talent, Gusto, Entrepreneur)

That’s not a coincidence. That’s experience, capital, clarity, and a refusal to build something that doesn’t fit your life talking.

I have a couple of girlfriends in their forties who took a step back to be home and then — almost as a surprise to themselves — started businesses they never saw coming. Watching them is part of what reshaped my own time horizon. I am not Emma Grede, and I’m not trying to be a three-hour-a-day parent. But I am very much trying to build something. Just not at the cost of being where I actually want to be right now.

What sharper ambition actually looks like

I had a conversation with my accountant recently that made me laugh out loud. He gently walked me through the fact that, between paying myself nothing personally and carrying a sizable net loss from my old clothing brand’s inventory, I have a long stretch of runway before I’d even owe meaningful tax. The subtext was kind, and clear: we should probably talk about a plan.

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And I had to laugh, because the honest answer is — yes, I want to make money. I do not want my highest-earning years to be in my twenties. But am I willing, right now, to outsource my daughter’s days or to trade my mornings with her for a faster financial trajectory? No. Two years ago, at the six-month mark of maternity leave — when I was still seriously entertaining a job in Paris — I might have laughed at the version of me writing this. But here she is.

So my ambition didn’t disappear. It got sharper.

It looks like writing here, openly, in a way I never could on Instagram — where I always had a filter on for an audience I couldn’t even name (the girls who bullied me in high school? a hometown group I’d imagined gossiping about me? probably both, probably neither, definitely beside the point). It looks like an Etsy shop and a Substack and a daughter who is becoming a small confident person in front of me. It looks like building slowly, on purpose, in pockets of time that are mine. It looks like a long game I am actually playing, not a sprint someone else designed.

Ambition without an audience is the truest version. It’s the version that doesn’t need anyone else to validate that it counts. It’s the version that can hold both I want to be deeply present and I want to build something significant in the same hand — and refuses to be told that’s having your cake and eating it too. It’s a reshape, not a retreat.

If no one were ever watching me again, I would still be doing exactly what I’m doing.

That is the answer to the question. And it’s the only one that’s ever mattered.

If you read any version of yourself in this — the one quietly building, the one who stepped off the path, the one whose biggest wins lately don’t fit on a LinkedIn post — I’d love to hear from you.

What’s a recent success of yours that no one else would ever clap for?

Leave a comment — I read every one.

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About me

I’m Emma — an ICF-certified coach (CPC, ACC), writer, and mom in the middle of my own matrescence. I work 1:1 with ambitious mothers who are still becoming — women quietly rebuilding underneath everything they’ve already built. I take only two clients at a time. Depth over volume.

🤍 If something in this piece reached you — the soft pivot, the quiet pull toward something truer — that’s usually the signal. Book a free clarity call → and we’ll make space for what’s actually next.

If this resonated, I’d love for you to stick around. I write weekly about motherhood, intentional living, and the quiet art of building a life that feels like yours. Free to subscribe — and always honest.

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Because here’s the thing: Emma is the kind of woman who could read, on paper, like the opposite of what I’m choosing. She’s meshed motherhood with ambition and a global career, and she’s vocal about it. Margot Robbie is another example as she was back on set at three months and didn’t even publicly acknowledge having a child. And then there’s me — still very much ambitious, but I chose to stay home (2.5 years in now) and not return to my career I was building. I chose to take my drive and squeeze it into the small pockets of time motherhood leaves me.

You’d think someone like Emma would make me feel small. She doesn’t. She stretches me — but not in the direction you’d expect.

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“Motherhood didn’t get harder. The expectations on mothers got harder.”

This one hit me like a ton of bricks.

Think about how mothers used to shop. They grabbed the first toothpaste on the shelf. The first yogurt. They didn’t read every label or do a deep dive on seed oils before lunch. Now we’re parsing ingredient lists, optimizing screen time, second-guessing every answer to every question because we’re worried about “responding the right way.”

The work of feeding and loving a child hasn’t changed. The performance of it has. And the performance is broadcast everywhere — what kind of parent you should be, in HD, 24/7. That’s the part that’s harder.

This point, I agree with full stop.

“I stopped being ambitious for my kids.”

Emma’s example: she doesn’t go to every birthday party. She’s not interested in spending hours prepping or making small talk with moms she doesn’t know so her kid can hang out for an hour at an age they won’t even remember.

And honestly, how do you fully disagree when she puts it like that and doesn’t waver in her answer? She says it with so much confidence. I think part of why she rattles people is that she’s saying things a lot of moms quietly may think but feel they can’t say out loud.

She’s also saying it from a place of real privilege — and I think both things are true at once. The privilege gives her the platform and the ability to really say no to these little things. The confidence is what makes the message land so hard whether you agree or not.

“Don’t teach him how to make a sandwich. Let him make the shitty sandwich.”

Her point on the default parent is the one I find hardest to hear. She says if you micromanage everything your husband does, of course he’s not going to do it. So back off. Let him make the bad sandwich. Let him do bath time his way. Let him dress them in miss match clothing. Full stop. Let go.

I am the default parent. I like being in control. This is a stretch for me. However, something I am more aware of since listening to this podcast.

But she’s right, and the most honest thing I can say is that the women in our generation who are most exhausted are also often the ones who’ve quietly made themselves the only person who can do it correctly. Emma’s giving us permission to stop.

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If we were on a panel together

If I were on a panel with Emma, the one thing I’d say to her is: good for you…

She’s a role model and a leader for so many women, and she clearly sees her importance extending well beyond her family. If her privilege lets her be all the way “on” for those three hours with her kids, fine. That’s her shape of it.

I just can’t choose it. Not in these early, formative years. I can hear her case and still know it isn’t mine.

What I’d want her to say back to me is the most freeing thing she could say: both can be true. Her experience is right for her. Mine is right for me. Neither one of us is the cautionary tale.

Why Emma matters, even if she’s not talking to me

Emma isn’t speaking to slow-living moms. She’s not speaking to stay-at-home moms. She’s not really speaking to me.

She’s putting more women and more mothers into leadership roles, and we need that. Badly. The fact that her version of motherhood looks different from mine doesn’t make her wrong — it makes the conversation bigger.

There should be room for all of us. The mom in the boardroom. The mom on set at three months. The mom doing voice notes between snack and nap. None of us is the template. We’re just the options.

Emma’s version of motherhood doesn’t threaten mine. Mine doesn’t invalidate hers. Both can be true. The only question worth asking is whether the version you’re living matches the one you actually want.

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Next week, I’m sharing the post I wrote about my husband and then deleted — and why I almost didn’t admit any of it.

I’d love to hear from you.

Which part of this landed? What would you add from your own experience?

Leave a comment — I read every one.

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About me:

I’m Emma — an ICF-certified coach (CPC, ACC), writer, and mom in the middle of my own matrescence. I work 1:1 with ambitious mothers who are still becoming — women quietly rebuilding underneath everything they’ve built. I take only two clients at a time. Depth over volume.

Let’s connect:

🤍 If something in this piece reached you — the soft pivot, the quiet pull toward something truer — that’s usually the signal. Book a free clarity call → and we’ll make space for what’s actually next.