I think the trad wife/mom influencer movement is one of the most disingenuous trends happening to women on the internet right now.

I say trend, because this claim is in no way targeted at the women who are fulfilled by living more traditionally and enjoy being homemakers. I think there is so much beauty to be found when women choose to stay home, raise their children, and have a more traditional family structure.

The version of “traditional living” I am talking about is about the women who have turned “traditional womanhood” into a highly curated, highly monetized version of femininity. The same women who then present this lifestyle as though it is simply what life looks like when women stop chasing careers and return to the home.

The issue with this argument is that when you take a closer look, these “traditional” women are not actually opting out of work “outside” of the home (despite what it may appear like).

We see these women wearing maxi-dresses, cooking organically from scratch, and cleaning their homes. But they are also running a full-time business. This business is a little bit more hidden because it revolves around the curated appearance of their lives.

The dinners made from scratch are filmed and perfectly edited. Brand deals are being negotiated behind the scenes by social media managers, affiliate links are actively updated and posted, and an audience is consistently worked towards and built.

This clarification of what is actually happening in these “traditional” homes is extremely important to note.

Have you ever wondered who is watching the children when these mothers spend hours upon hours curating their content? Have you guessed who is actually doing a full home deep-clean while hours are spent filming?

To be honest, I didn’t ask these questions for awhile. Instead, I used to believe part of the fairytale that these women were simply able to do it all.

In actuality, for many of these women, there is a nanny, a cleaner, extended family, a personal assistant, or some combination of help. Help that allows for this “traditional” lifestyle to be maintained and pushed towards their audiences.

Mothers need help.

This is a fact. In fact, mothers often need much more help than what they have available. I take issue, however, when this help is hidden behind marriage and motherhood content in order to deliver the idea that a woman can simply wake up every morning and do it all.

Why is this such an issue?

Because we have already spent decades delivering this lie to women and mothers.

We have been told to have the career, have children, keep our houses clean, cook healthy food, stay active and fit, pour into our marriages, stay present with our children, and somehow also make time for ourselves in between all the prior expectations.

This social media trend is just a newer version of that same expectation.

We should be able to stay home with our children, make most of our meals from scratch, maintain a clean and aesthetic home, raise perfectly behaved children, prioritize looking beautiful and feminine, and make our husbands feel supported and loved. OH! And while we’re at it, we also need to be able to build our own six-figure business from our phone.

The mantra is still “do it all.” Now it’s just packaged with added “femininity”.

This message makes it a lot more disturbing than simple social media posts and content from women living traditional lives.

Because when women are constantly shown one very specific version of what a “good” woman or mother looks like, it starts to shape what we think we should want and what we think we should be capable of.

If being a good mother means staying home, cooking everything from scratch, keeping a beautiful house, looking put together, having happy children, keeping our husbands satisfied, and somehow earning an income from home, then what happens when we decide we don’t want all of that?

What happens when we’re exhausted or when dinner comes from a box? What about when our house is a mess or we do want a career? What if we hate to cook or our husbands do half the housework because we’re both adults who live there?

Suddenly, those choices can feel like failures instead of what they really are: just different choices.

And that labels exactly what bothers me about the way “traditional” womanhood is being sold. And it IS being sold.

There is a difference between choosing a traditional life and creating a hierarchy where that life is presented as the more feminine, more fulfilling, or more morally correct way for women to live.

Women have spent generations fighting to have choices. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe the answer is convincing women that they should all choose the exact same thing, especially when the version of this being sold online is often only possible because of money, help, and a business built around making it all look effortless.

I additionally find so much irony in the use of modern technology, modern marketing, sponsorships, affiliate links, and social media algorithms to convince women that modern life is what ruined womanhood. But maybe that’s a topic for another day…

These “traditional” women aren’t actually rejecting careers as they like to say. They actually just do a great job of monetizing it in a different, more hidden form.

I think women have had their fill of impossible standards. Don’t you?

We have the choice to be a homemaker without having a 24/7 spotless house. We can be good wives despite not making every meal from scratch. And we can love traditional family roles without believing that women are supposed to be able to do everything.

Women wanting to live a traditional life is not the problem, and it will never be. Because that is our choice.

The problem is when we take a highly produced version of it and convince women that they should be able to recreate it alone.

That doesn’t give women more freedom. It just gives us another way to feel like we’re failing.

And we’ve already asked women to do enough.

Last week was my sons’ third week going to daycare. It was also the second time in those three weeks that they each came down with a virus. The first time, it was a stomach bug and a viral sinus infection. This most recent time, it was some mysterious virus that caused a 103 fever in my 3 year old and a secondary viral sinus infection in my 1 year old.

I was warned when they started daycare that they would probably get sick often in the first few months as their immune systems were developing. And yet, I wasn’t expecting it to happen so fast, and I surely wasn’t expecting all the emotions that would come it.

These sicknesses, in and of themselves, are not life-threatening and they will not cause lasting harm. But obviously, no parent wants to see their children sick, common illness or not.

One lasting consequence of my sons being sick is the mental and emotional roller coaster I have found myself on. I keep finding myself coming back to this same mantra:

If they were still home with me, this wouldn’t be happening.

Not only has this thought been persistent, but it has carried with it an immense amount of guilt.

I hate seeing my kids sick. I hate wondering if I made the wrong decision in being a working mom. I hate knowing that sending them to daycare exposed them to things they probably wouldn’t have come down with if I had stayed home.

After struggling with these thoughts over the last few weeks, I started to do some internal searching to see where this was all coming from. I landed on the conclusion that my guilt was in fact not coming from the fact that I had done something wrong, despite what my mind and heart would have me believe.

No, my guilt came from something much more hidden and harmful. I realized that I had absorbed the belief that if anyone’s dreams should be put on hold for the sake of the family, they should be mine.

This realization sent me into a spiral, and if I start to sound like a feminist, maybe it’s because this belief originated from the idea that women are expected to hold everything together. And if they don’t, it’s to be taken as a personal failure.

If my husband had stayed home with my sons and then they got sick from daycare after he went back to work, nobody would look at him and question if his career was worth it. You wouldn’t hear whispers of people asking if he should have stayed home instead. Nobody would expect him to carry the emotional weight of every runny nose, every fever, or every stomach bug that comes home.

As mothers, we are expected to carry that weight automatically. And yet, it extends even further than this.

We’re expected to be grateful for the opportunities we have outside of motherhood while also feeling guilty for taking them.

As working mothers, we are somehow supposed to build something for ourselves while never letting it cost our children anything.

What I am becoming acutely aware of is how impossible this standard is, because every choice has its tradeoffs.

My sons getting sick is not indicative that I failed them. It’s part of a normal childhood, at some time or another. Children who stay home and those who go to daycare get sick. Children with sahms, working moms, grandparents, nannies, and any other family dynamic you can think of get sick.

One thing I would never do is tell another mom she should feel guilty about the career she loves because her child caught a virus at daycare.

So why was I so willing to tell myself that?

I’m still going to feel sad when my boys are sick. As a mom, I don’t think that feeling will ever go away.

But I am done mixing that sadness with guilt.

I can wish I could take every sickness away without, at the same time, believing I caused it.

I can miss my sons while they’re at daycare and still know that I am allowed to have work that fulfills me.

I can love being their mom without believing that motherhood has to be the only part of me that gets to grow.

If you’ve been carrying that same guilt around, I hope you’ll question where it came from before you accept it as truth.

Because I have a feeling it didn’t start with you.

The first thing I want to say is that I don’t think I’m some Substack expert or coach.

There are people with much larger publications than mine, people who have been here for years, and people who know the platform way better than I do. But I have gone from 0 to 600 subscribers in my first two months, and enough people have asked what I’ve been doing that I thought I’d make a post about it. I do feel like I’ve learned a handful of things that have made a really big difference for me and my growth thus far.

None of these lessons are groundbreaking, but that might be why they are sometimes overlooked. I wish I had some secret strategy to share, but I don’t. These are just the things that actually made the biggest difference for me, and I hope at least one of them helps.

Write Notes that you want to see.

This is probably the biggest lesson I have learned since starting my account.

When I go to write my Notes, I try not to think, What will get the most engagement? I try to prioritize asking, Would I stop scrolling for this? Would I comment on this? Would I send this to someone?

The Notes that have done the best for me have almost always been the ones that felt the most like me. Sometimes they’re observations I’ve had, little moments from motherhood, thoughts that have been sitting in my head all day, or something I just thought was funny. I really do think people can feel when you’re writing something because you actually wanted to say it versus when you’re writing something because you think it’ll perform well.

Writing the things you enjoy usually ends up attracting the people who enjoy you.

Consistency really is as important as everyone says it is.

I wish I had something more exciting to tell you, but people are right about this one.

As I continued to post consistently, Substack slowly but surely started putting my content in front of people who had never heard of me before. Most of my Notes haven’t “taken off”, so to speak, but there have been many that have gotten more exposure because the algorithm rewarded my consistency. At least, that’s what I believe happened. The platform has a difficult time learning who to show your writing to if you disappear every few days.

By no means am I telling you to post a million times a day. But I think giving yourself enough opportunities to be seen is super beneficial to your growth. When it comes to Notes specifically, they will usually either flop or thrive. You also don’t really learn what resonates with your readers if you aren’t giving yourself enough chances to find out.

Be patient. The growth multiplier really does happen.

For the first month or so, growth felt steady. I was really happy with how things were going, but there wasn’t a time when I felt like, Wow, this is taking off.

However, in the second half of month two, it felt like things started stacking on top of each other. One subscriber would recommend my publication. A Note would reach people outside my little circle, and then another one would. It started to feel like each thing was building on the last instead of starting over every time I hit publish.

I can’t say for sure when exactly that switch happens, because it’s different for everyone. I do, however, think it will happen if you stick around long enough.

Being patient with that part can be really hard, but I wouldn’t quit before you give it the chance to happen.

Connect because you actually want to connect.

One thing I will stand by when it comes to Substack is intention. I truly believe people can sense it through their screens.

If you’re leaving comments because you’re hoping someone clicks your profile and follows you back, people will pick up on that. But if you’re commenting because something made you laugh, made you think differently, or because you really do want to encourage another writer, that feels different to the person on the receiving end.

Some of my favorite relationships that I’ve built on Substack started because we were having normal conversations about life, and not because we were trying to grow our subscriber counts.

The algorithm matters, of course. But people are still people, and they matter more.

I schedule the majority of my Notes.

This one might be surprising.

I’m in a really busy season of life right now, and I truly don’t have the free time to post Notes consistently at specific hourly increments. If I tried to rely on free time, I would probably never post Notes at all.

Instead, I like to carve out some time and let myself be inspired by Note ideas. I write most of them down and then schedule them throughout the week.

My Notes are still very much reflective of my real life and thoughts, but this strategy also makes them much more realistic for my schedule.

I don’t think there’s any prize for posting everything live if it means you end up rarely posting or posting with lesser quality ideas. This is just what has been working for me.

Have fun with it.

This ties back to the first point, but I think it’s worth saying on its own also.

The writers I keep coming back to are almost always the ones who sound like they’re enjoying themselves. Their personality and humor are able to come through their words.

When writing starts feeling like checking another box on a to-do list, I really do think readers notice. Your voice changes without you even realizing it.

The Articles and Notes that I’ve had the most fun writing have typically been the ones that people connected with the most. I don’t believe that’s a coincidence.

If I could leave you with one thing, it’d probably be this: don’t spend so much time trying to become the kind of writer you think Substack wants that you forget to become the kind of writer you enjoy being.

The right people will eventually find you. The hardest part is giving it enough time to happen.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you so much for reading! I hope this was at least a tiny bit helpful and I’d love to hear your thoughts.🤍

You know those people who seem to exist with some kind of special magic? The people who are loved by everyone and embody a certain energy that makes everyone else around them feel special?

Well I did.

There was once a man I knew who could make me feel special with a single crooked grin. A man who knew how to make me laugh and one who I looked forward to seeing again the second I said a goodbye. One who made me feel comfortable in my own skin and so deeply loved.

This man wasn’t family by blood, but in every other sense, he is engraved on my heart and in my memories.

Even as I write the impact he had on me, I feel the tears welling up as if the hole he left in my heart was yesterday, and not 6 years ago. People say that grief gets easier. Maybe for some it does. I think for others it just gets a little more bearable, and that easy isn’t the right word to use altogether.

When I was little, before I can even remember, my family and I moved to a small town away from any prior family or family friends. In an attempt to get plugged into the community and find their people, my parents decided to join a church a couple towns over. One of the first people they met after walking in those doors for the first time was this man.

This man that would become my grandfather.

Half of my grandparents have been estranged from our family for most of my life, and after getting to know my family better, this man and his wife saw a missing puzzle piece and decided to fill the spot themselves.

People say they love their grandparents, and I know that’s true. But there is something special about being family with people who chose you time and again. Not out of obligation, but purely out of love and care. People like that are rare, and in my own life, I have found those people to be all but scarce.

These two people were my rocks throughout the entirety of my childhood. I would go so far as to say that they make up a portion of my brain’s chemistry. For my milestones, birthdays, holidays, celebrations, events, summers; they were always there. A constant in my life that was so normal that I never thought to question the possibility of an alternative reality.

My grandmother, too, I love more than life itself. But this specific story is about him, my grandfather.

Every single summer that I can remember, I stayed with my grandparents for a handful of days. These days were the highlight of my year. With my grandmother, we would sew blankets, make doll houses, get pedicures, go shopping, etc. And I loved it all. With my grandfather, we would eat old fashioned donuts for breakfast with orange juice in tall, formal glasses, eat Blue Bell ice cream until we couldn’t manage another bite, play card games until I finally called him out for hiding cards under the table, and watch John Wayne movies as if it was our duty. And maybe it was. Because those memories have been imprinted in my mind in such a way that I will never be able to forget. So maybe unknowingly at the time, it was my duty to do all of these things. Because I had no idea that I wouldn’t be able to do them for long.

You know when children hit those teenage years and family starts to feel like a nuisance, grievance, or whatever other negative connotation the teenage mind is convinced of? I had many of those teenage afflictions, but when it came to my grandparents, they were never capable of being one of them.

During winter finals my junior year of high school, I was home alone as my parents were out for a walk in the neighborhood. My mom always leaves her phone at home, because why need it when my dad has his (typically on do not disturb😅). I heard her phone buzzing in the kitchen and saw my grandmother’s name as the Caller ID. My nosiness and lack of boundaries at that age took over and I answered the phone. The voice on the other end belonged to my grandmother, but it wasn’t the voice of the woman I knew.

I knew in my gut that something wasn’t right. But the last thing that would ever have crossed my mind was the reality of what had actually occurred. Looking back, this is interesting to me. I am a chronic over thinker, and so the fact that imagining the truly worst case scenario didn’t cross my mind is unlike me. Or maybe my cynicism started after this. Who’s to say.

When my parents returned from their walk after receiving a phone call of their own, I saw the look. The look that confirmed that my prior gut feeling had not led me astray. The words I heard after asking what had happened are ones that I cannot comprehend to this day.

My grandfather and his dog had been out on a neighborhood walk of their own, when they walked past the house of their next door neighbor. This neighbor had been an ongoing issue in the neighborhood and was a consistently difficult person to get along with. As my grandfather approached this neighbor’s house, an interaction occurred. What exactly transpired in this interaction, can only be told by the dog or by the gunman. The gunman being that neighbor.

How beautiful the “freedom” that comes with living in the Texas Hill Country. A person can stand a few feet within your property line, and you can kill them with no legal consequence. Land of the free, home of the… I digress.

Whatever was said between the men at the end of the neighbor’s driveway resulted in them both pulling their guns and one man being shot three times, the final time being in his back.

My grandfather.

How do I know exactly where the altercation occurred, you might ask. Because I had to drive by his freshly dried bloodstains the very next day.

Before arguing semantics, my grandfather had been a cop for decades of his life and worked for law enforcement in other capacities for the rest of his career, up until the day he died. He was no stranger to procedure and his temperament was not one that resulted in egotistical, rage-filled gun fights. Anyone who knew him could tell you the same, and they did.

At his funeral.

My life and those of anyone close to my grandfather permanently changed that day. My grandmother, to this day, is a shell of the human being she once was. A woman who was once full of life, generosity, kindness, love, and care is now somewhere deep within the frame of the woman who goes by her same name but is not the same person at all. There is immense grief in losing someone who is still physically here, but who is no longer the person I knew.

People like to say that grief teaches them things or that they had some glorious moment where it all made sense. If people want to create a fairytale out of tragedy, be my guest. But I’d like for it to be kept as far away from me as humanly possible.

We are allowed to sit in our grief. We are allowed to move through it at our own pace. And we are allowed to hold our grief in whatever way we see fit.

I did not have a magical moment where it all made sense. In fact, as time goes on, I think it makes even less. No closure, no justice, and no satisfying answers. People said that “God will use this”. And maybe He did. How He did is still an utter mystery to me and the others who had this figure so violently ripped out of their lives. Maybe it will be clear one day or maybe it won’t. Either way, I’m certainly not holding my breath.

This piece is all over the place, perhaps in harmony with my processing of the stages of grief. And to close it off, maybe I leave it with no grand conclusion or satisfying life lesson, as the loss of this man doesn’t have one either.

To be honest, I don’t need this story to teach me anything at all.

I just need it to remember him.

If you had walked into many American homes fifty or sixty years ago, you likely would have known exactly where to find everyone.

Mom would be in the kitchen or tending to children. Dad would be in his recliner with a newspaper or watching television.

This setup has also been present in more recent decades. I remember holidays spent with family as a child, where the women slipped into their “rightful” roles while the men relaxed, talked, or caught up on the latest sports game. Even as a child, I remember feeling annoyed at this dynamic. I couldn’t understand why women were expected to make meals for a couple dozen people, tend to their children, and then clean up everything afterwards, all while men were able to fully enjoy the downtime of the holiday and expected a warm meal waiting at the time they expected dinner to be served.

Part of my indignation came from my own household, where family roles were much more nuanced. Both my mother and father stepped outside of many traditional roles. It was not uncommon to see my mother outside with a lawn mower or my father cooking/ cleaning in the kitchen and also caring for my needs. Growing up with this dynamic as my “norm” made those opposite dynamics difficult for me to understand.

This is not to say that there weren’t fathers who were deeply involved with their children long before parenting books encouraged it, and there are still fathers today who leave mothers to carry far more responsibility than they should. No generation has had a perfect balance of great, involved dads or absent ones.

Still, our culture does tell us a story about expectations and household roles.

For many generations, fatherhood was largely defined by one responsibility. Providing. A good father was one who worked long hours, made sure there was food on the table, and paid the bills. A father’s love was often expressed through protection and provision. There is respect earned for this role, but I would say just as much respect was earned by the mothers who kept the rest of the household together and functioning.

Today’s fathers often face different expectations than those in prior generations.

Many fathers do still protect and provide, but they also are comfortable changing diapers, packing lunches, taking kids to doctor’s appointments, reading bedtime stories, and knowing the ins and outs of their children’s preferences.

This generational shift has changed far more than family routines, but also the way in which childhood is experienced.

Children who grow up watching both parents nurture them learn that love isn’t divided into “mom’s job” and “dad’s job.” They grow up seeing comfort, discipline, play, responsibility, and emotional presence modeled by both parents. They learn that raising children isn’t “women’s work”, but family work. I think this mindset is hugely beneficial for children living in today’s world.

The benefits also extend far beyond the acts of raising children.

When a father shares the work of parenthood, motherhood becomes more manageable as well as more enjoyable. Being a parent was never designed to be an easy job, but when the weight of the responsibility rests on two sets of shoulders instead of one, it does become lighter.

In modern times, an involved father does far more than basic household chores or offer to “help” with the kids. True involvement means sharing the invisible work that so often goes unnoticed: the same mental load women carried on their shoulders for years, often all on their own. Many fathers today know the shoe sizes of their children, their snack preferences, their bedtime routines, and the names of their teachers. A modern father doesn’t have to wait to be asked because he carries ownership right alongside the mother.

The modernized version of what a parenting partnership looks like in many households now also changes a mother’s experience in ways that statistics could never fully express.

Tangibly, this looks like mothers who have the space to breathe and take time to themselves.

Many mothers now have someone who understands why they’re exhausted without needing an explanation on basic motherhood responsibilities. One of the most significant changes is that mothers have another adult in the house who knows how the household works because he also helped to create it.

These are dynamics that were far less common even a few generations ago.

We constantly hear conversations about how mothers need a village, and this is undeniably true. Grandparents, neighbors, friends, teachers, and communities can all be part of this support system. Yet the foundation of that village begins inside the home, within our own four walls.

If I had to put one word to the biggest change between fathers of prior generations and today’s fathers, it would be “presence.” Physical presence is not in any way the same as mental and emotional presence, and this is the change I am talking about here.

Something that children remember into adulthood is what it felt like to grow up in a home where both parents equally showed up for them, in their own unique ways. This also impacts the way that those children then interact with their own future families.

I see evidence of this in my own life. When looking for my own partner to raise children with, I looked for a man that would stand alongside me in every aspect. It was important to me to marry someone that wanted to be an involved father and knew what that actually looked like in practice. In having two sons myself, it is such a blessing to know that they will grow up thinking their father’s involvement with them is “normal”. And it is something I hope they carry into their own families with their own children one day.

I am not sharing this to negate the roles of all the fathers in generations before.

So much progress has been made, but it also doesn’t require dismissing the fathers who did come before our time. Many fathers loved their families and gave everything they had within the expectations of their time. Their sacrifices built the foundation that has allowed future generations to redefine what fatherhood looks like.

Fathers have always had the capability to nurture their children. The beauty is that our culture increasingly expects and celebrates that kind of involvement rather than viewing it as unusual or unnecessary. This change is one I think will continue and I truly hope it does.

Children deserve fathers who are fully present.

Mothers deserve partners who share the work of raising a family.

And ultimately, every family deserves a village that starts in their own home.

When my sons were babies, I remember reaching for my phone almost instinctively. It didn’t matter if it was a weird rash, a question about sleep, or a behavior I hadn’t seen before. Before I had even taken a minute to think about what I was seeing, I was already looking for someone else’s answer.

The search looks different today than it did a few years ago. Instead of scrolling through Google, reading twenty Reddit threads, or convincing ourselves we had every disease on WebMD, we can ask AI and have an answer in seconds. Some people love that and others hate it.

My concern isn’t necessarily about AI itself. It’s more so what our dependence on it says about the way we’ve learned to mother.

For years, we’ve been surrounded by people telling us how to raise our children. Books tell us how to feed them. Social media tells us how to discipline them. Podcasts tell us what to say to them. Experts tell us how they should sleep, how much independent play they need, how much screen time is too much, and what they should eat. AI didn’t create that world, but it certainly has exacerbated it.

What we’ve started handing over is our confidence to trust our own judgment while we’re raising our children.

Let me give a couple examples. A calculator is useful, and so is a GPS. Neither tool is a problem on its own. But if we never learn the skill because the tool is always there, we lose something. I think AI has the potential to do the same thing in motherhood. It can help us think, but it can also become something we think through.

There are plenty of moments when outside guidance is exactly what we need. If your child has a high fever, is struggling to breathe, or needs medical care, you should seek expert advice. That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about the questions that don’t have one right answer.

Should you rock your baby to sleep?

Should you let your toddler leave the table after two bites?

Should you stop breastfeeding?

Should you sign them up for another activity?

Most of us know there isn’t one universal answer to those questions. Yet we keep searching like there is.

We’ve become so afraid of getting motherhood wrong that we’ve stopped trusting ourselves.

Every time our first instinct is to search before we stop and think, we reinforce the idea that someone else probably knows our child better than we do. We collect opinions from people who have never met our kids before we’ve even considered our own.

Uncertainty has started to feel less like part of parenting and more like a failure. We have stopped asking, “What do I think?” and more often, started asking, “Who has the answer?”

Maternal intuition is something we build over time. It comes from paying attention, making decisions, getting some right, getting some wrong, and learning our children each and every day. That kind of knowledge can’t be downloaded. It has to be lived.

How many answers do we already have before we reach for our phones? Maybe the harder question is whether we still know how to recognize them.

Technology isn’t the enemy. Parenting experts aren’t the enemy. AI isn’t the enemy, either.

What worries me is that we’ve become so used to looking outward that we’ve forgotten to look inward first.

No search engine, influencer, expert, or chatbot will ever know our children the way we do. We deserve to trust ourselves more.

Before you ask AI, ask yourself.

There is something about pregnancy and postpartum that makes women feel uniquely vulnerable, and I don’t mean that negatively in any way. When I say vulnerable, I mean it in the most human sense of the word. These are both seasons marked by enormous physical, emotional, and psychological change. We’re navigating a body that no longer feels familiar, stepping into an identity we’ve never occupied before, and carrying the newfound responsibility of wanting to do right by someone we love more than ourselves.

Naturally, because this new role feels so important and heavy, we look for guidance. We read the books, listen to the podcasts, ask other mothers for advice, and spend hours searching questions that didn’t even exist in our minds a year prior. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be more informed or wanting to do your best for your child. The problem does not lie in the fact that resources for mothers exist, but in what has been built around our desire for reassurance.

Somewhere along the way, we started to lose the plot. Motherhood stopped being a life experience and started to become a consumer market.

What strikes me isn’t simply the volume of products aimed at pregnant and postpartum women, although that alone is staggering. The thing that stands out to me most is the messaging that accompanies them. Women are rarely told outright that they aren’t enough. Instead, we are presented with a subtler narrative: there is always another purchase to make, another method to learn, another habit to adopt, another system to implement, another expert who knows something you don’t. The implication is rarely explicit, but it is almost always there.

You could be doing more.

You could be doing better.

And if you cared enough, you would.

This message lands harder when we’re pregnant or postpartum than it would in almost any other period of life. This is because these are seasons in which many of us are already questioning ourselves.

Am I feeding my baby the right way? Am I bonding enough? Is this normal? Why doesn’t this feel as instinctive as everyone said it would?

The uncertainty is very real, which is precisely why it becomes the perfect ground for marketing tactics. An anxious customer is far easier to sell to than a confident one.

I don’t believe most companies set out to exploit mothers. There are many companies that create products that genuinely improve people’s lives, and many educators and creators offer thoughtful advice with the best of intentions. But good intentions don’t erase the incentives of the system itself. Marketing has always relied on identifying a gap between who we are and who we want to become. The larger that perceived gap becomes, the easier it is to sell the bridge.

When the customer is a new mother, that gap often sounds like this: “A good mother would know this. A good mother would buy this. A good mother would do more.”

That is the point where I begin to feel uneasy.

This is because motherhood has become one of the few experiences where love, in its purest form, is routinely transformed into a sales strategy. The deeper a mother’s desire to protect her child, the easier it becomes to convince her that protection is something she can purchase. We have built an entire economy around the fear of getting motherhood wrong, and in doing so, we’ve replaced confidence with consumption.

The motherhood industry doesn’t have to convince women to love their children. That part is already guaranteed. It only has to convince them that love, by itself, isn’t enough. It needs us to believe that truly good mothers read more, buy more, optimize more, and worry more. Once that seed is planted, every new product can present itself not as another thing to own, but as another way to prove our devotion.

I can’t help but wonder what this costs women. I don’t even mean financially, although it certainly does. I’m talking about psychologically. What happens when every scroll through social media reinforces the idea that motherhood is a skill to improve on rather than a relationship to nurture? At what point do we stop asking what our children actually need and start asking what the algorithm has convinced us we’re missing?

Perhaps the most harmful message lies in the idea that mothers, themselves, are perpetual projects in need of fixing. This goes far beyond product recommendations. And I don’t think that’s a harmless narrative to sell to women during one of the most emotionally vulnerable seasons of their lives.

The irony is that the more insecure a mother becomes, the more profitable she is. When a mother feels insecure, she’s far more likely to buy another course, another monitor, another routine, another supplement, another checklist, another promise that this one thing will finally make her feel like she’s doing enough. A secure mother is much harder to sell to.

This might be why we rarely see confidence sold to mothers. If we truly believed that our love, attention, and presence mattered more than endless self-improvement, much of the marketing directed at mothers would have to change.

Mothers don’t need less information. We have more access to helpful resources than ever before, and many of them really do make parenting easier.

What we do need is more discernment about who profits from our fear.

Because the most profitable thing a mother can be isn’t informed.

It’s insecure.

When I first started my home organization business, I thought everyone else had some secret up their sleeves that allowed them to be successful.

I truly thought that in order to “make it” as an entrepreneur, I needed a business degree, an investor, years of experience and knowledge, or at a minimum, a perfect plan to follow.

These beliefs made me overwhelmed because the reality was that I had none of those things. What I did have was a dream, a skill set, access to Google, and grit. As it turns out, grit can take you further than you think.

In the beginning, I spent so much time worrying about the wrong things. I thought I needed to know everything before I started, when in reality, I only needed to know enough to take the next step.

If you have a dream about starting your own business but feel like you don’t have the experience, education, or money to make it happen, this article is for you.

Before we dive in, I want to be transparent about one thing. Today, I do have a business degree. But I didn’t have one when I started my first business and I had not even attended a single class when I started building my brand.

Since that time, I have earned my degree, and I’m genuinely grateful for the knowledge it gave me. It helped me understand the “why” behind many of the decisions I’d already been making through trial and error.

But here’s something I also learned: a business degree can absolutely make you a more informed entrepreneur, but it isn’t what qualifies you to become one.

I think of it like learning to drive. Knowing how to drive a Formula 1 car would undoubtedly make you a more skilled driver, but you don’t need that level of training to get yourself from point A to point B. In the same way, a business education can sharpen your skills, but it’s not a requirement to build something you’re passionate about.

Most of what went into building my business didn’t come from a textbook. Taking action, making mistakes, solving problems, and learning along the way was far more informative than a college essay ever could be.

Here are the lessons I wish someone had sat me down and told me before I ever started.

Stop waiting to feel qualified.

One of the biggest misconceptions about entrepreneurship is that confidence comes before action. That’s just not true. Confidence is built by doing the things we feel unsure about.

Every successful business owner was once someone who had never sold a product, never made a website, never filed paperwork, and had no idea what they were doing.

The entrepreneurs we look up to today are people who started before they knew everything. Taking a risk is part of the journey, even though it can feel uncomfortable.

Your first business will not be your last.

This is something more people need to hear. The first designs you create, your logo, your color palette, your pricing model, or your business strategy probably won’t stick. Entrepreneurship is a lot of trial and error. Some strategies sound great in theory and then they flop in practice. Your pricing in the beginning may reflect your initial value, but that value changes as your business evolves. Therefore, so should your pricing.

These changes are not indicative of failure. They are indications of feedback. Businesses change because the needs and desires of people change.

“Done” will always win over perfect.

Seeking perfection is one of the quickest ways to kill your momentum.

When I first started, I thought everything had to be polished before anyone could see it. I spent far too much time tweaking tiny details that had almost no impact on whether someone would actually buy from me.

Every day you spend perfecting a logo, rewriting your website for the tenth time, or waiting until your product feels “ready” is another day you’re not learning from real customers.

The only way to know what works is to put it out into the world and allow space for feedback. Seeking perfection delays that feedback.

Instead of perfection, aim to launch something valuable. You can always improve what’s already in motion, but you can’t improve something that never gets shared.

The biggest shift that changed everything…

There is a lot of hard work and long hours that go into being an entrepreneur, but working harder is not always the thing that moves the needle. Once I was able to stop obsessing over tiny details and started following a simple framework, everything became so much clearer.

The next seven lessons completely changed the way I approached building my business. Looking back, they’re the exact framework I wish someone had handed me before I spent months learning everything the hard way. They would have saved me countless hours of trial and error (and probably a lot of money too).

Inside the full article, I break down the seven foundational pillars that helped me move from simply having an idea to actually building a business. Here’s a preview of what you’ll learn:

1. Learn marketing before branding.

Why understanding your customer and the problem you solve matters more than spending months perfecting your logo, colors, or website.

2. Validate your idea before spending money.

How to test whether people actually want what you’re offering before investing your time and money into something that may not have demand.

3. Focus on one platform and master it.

Why trying to grow everywhere at once can slow you down, and how learning one platform deeply can create more momentum.

4. Build a customer list from day one.

Why creating relationships with potential customers early can become one of the most valuable assets in your business.

5. Charge before you feel ready.

How to stop hiding behind preparation and start learning from real customers, real feedback, and real sales.

6. Keep your business ridiculously simple.

Why focusing on one audience, one problem, and one clear offer is often the fastest path to growth.

7. Stay in your own lane.

How to avoid comparison, stay focused on your own progress, and continue building even when it feels like everyone else is ahead.

Let’s get into it!

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If the title of this article made you uncomfortable, imagine how much more uncomfortable it was to be the one living that reality.

Even writing those words makes me want to immediately explain myself and add a ton of disclaimers. I know how it sounds, and I honestly would probably judge at first glance, too. Hate is a strong word, and in this context, it also sounds ungrateful, selfish, and maybe as if I didn’t love my children enough. If any of those thoughts went through your head as you read the title, just know that they are ones I thought of myself at one time or another.

And yet, none of those things are true. I have never hated my children. In fact, the reality is that my children are the center of my universe and I am forever grateful that I was chosen to be their mother. The “hate” comes from the fact that, in many ways, I ceased to exist once I became a mother. Or at least, that’s how it felt. To put it more simply, I felt as though I had all but disappeared.

Before I continue on this line of thought, some context is important.

Growing up, I always knew I wanted children. But I never dreamed about being a mom in the way it seemed the rest of my peers did. I never considered motherhood to be my destination in life or the apex of my wildest dreams. Yes, I wanted a family. But I also wanted to build a career, pursue personal goals, and discover who I was as a person. For a while, I wondered if that made me different in a bad way. I used to question whether something was wrong with me because motherhood wasn’t the center of every dream I had. Was I not cut out for the life that so many women around me aspired to?

Fast forward to when I had my first baby and stepped into my role as a mother.

The month before I gave birth to my first son, my husband and I moved away from Texas to California and away from everyone we knew. The village everyone talks about may have existed, but it wasn’t close enough when I needed it most. This was no one’s fault, per se, but simply a consequence of our living situation.

When my son was born, it genuinely felt as though time had stopped. I quickly realized that time didn’t stop for the rest of the world, but it did for me. Friends and peers were graduating, starting careers, traveling, making plans, and figuring out who they wanted to become. Meanwhile, my days revolved around feeding schedules, diapers, naps, and trying to survive on very little sleep. My world became so incredibly small, and somewhere in the middle of it, I started to feel like I no longer existed outside the four walls of our home.

I loved my son more than I knew was possible, but I struggled with the feeling that my entire identity had become centered around who I was in relation to someone else. I wasn’t Lauren anymore, and I didn’t have endless time to continue discovering who she was. Now, I was “Mom”.

One thing about me is I have always been a goal-oriented person. I genuinely enjoy working toward something, having ideas and bringing them to life, and I highly value my independence. With this all in mind, the apparent loss of autonomy that came with becoming a stay-at-home mom hit me much harder than I expected.

When people ask about what is so hard, I think they expect some resounding struggle that would quantify my complaints. But the underwhelming reality is that the hardest parts for me were the hundreds of tiny moments that slowly added up until they crushed me beneath their weight. I could no longer simply decide to do something because I wanted to. If I needed a shower because I was covered in spit-up and leaking milk, I first had to make sure someone else was available to hold the baby. If I wanted to go buy new bras because none of mine fit the same postpartum, I first would need to make sure that I had another person’s needs fully considered. Every moment of self-care, every errand, every plan, and nearly every moment depended on someone else’s needs first. My time no longer felt like it belonged to me. In fact, I was at the mercy of someone else’s alarm clock 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

Motherhood is demanding, of course. But that is not why I hated being a stay-at-home mom. If the workload was the issue, my word choice would be altogether too harsh and I would expect at least a few of you to tell me to get a grip. But no. The hardest part and where the hatred kicked in is how lonely I was and how shameful it felt to admit that I wasn’t enjoying my life.

Every time I would catch myself thinking, I hate this, I immediately felt guilty because I knew what a privilege it was to stay home with my son. I knew there were so many mothers who desperately wished they had that same opportunity. So I convinced myself that because I wasn’t happy, I must be the problem and that something must be wrong with me. More so than that, maybe I wasn’t even cut out for motherhood at all.

Looking back, I think what I was really grieving wasn’t motherhood. It was the version of myself I thought I’d lost indefinitely. It took me a long time to realize that those were never the same thing.

The more time has passed, the more I have realized that we celebrate individuality in almost every other area of life. As a society, we encourage people to find careers they’re passionate about because we know fulfillment looks different for everyone. We tell them to build lives that reflect who they are instead of who other people expect them to be.

But when it comes to motherhood, we often expect the opposite.

It is as if we have all subconsciously decided that motherhood is the one area that deserves uniformity. There is a silent pressure that every good mother should want the same things, enjoy the same things, and find fulfillment in the same ways. If your experience doesn’t fit that narrative, it’s easy to believe you’ve somehow failed.

But to my relief and hopefully to some of yours, it’s not a failure at all. It’s simply proof that mothers are people before they’re mothers as much as they are after they become mothers.

Some women genuinely thrive staying home, and I think that’s beautiful. Others become better mothers because they work outside the home, build businesses, pursue creative passions, or simply have something that’s theirs. Neither woman loves her children more and neither woman is sacrificing less than the other. It just means they’re different.

We don’t expect every person to find fulfillment in the same career, the same hobbies, or the same way of living. So why do we expect every mother to find fulfillment in the exact same version of motherhood?

Becoming a mother shouldn’t mean becoming less of ourselves. I think the healthiest version of motherhood leaves room for all the parts of us that existed before our children arrived. Our ambitions, our personality, our passions, and our dreams. They all have a place.

Our children don’t need us to disappear in order for us to become good mothers. But they do need to see what it looks like when a woman is allowed to be a whole person, too.

I had never heard of Substack until a month ago.

At the time, I was focused almost entirely on affiliate marketing and exploring different strategies to grow my social media presence. During that process, I came across Substack because I saw people using it primarily as a landing place where followers from other platforms could find their links. This sparked my interest, and I decided to download the app to see for myself. That’s exactly how I approached it at first.

Now, before anyone gets mad at me, I genuinely didn’t know how Substack was designed to be used. I had never come across a true writing platform that also functioned as a social network. Looking back, I’m sure I broke a few unspoken “writer rules” with those first affiliate posts, but they eventually led me to discover something I wasn’t expecting.

Within my first few days of being on Substack, I quickly realized that there was so much more to this platform than using it as a third-party self-promoter. I’m sure all of you reading this are rolling your eyes and saying, “Well, duh.” But I genuinely had no idea what a special place this platform was. After that realization, I completely changed the way I use this platform. Although writing wasn’t my initial reason for downloading the app, I have always loved the art of writing. Once I saw the many inspiring voices and topics on here, I wanted to be part of it, and I couldn’t believe it had taken me so long to find it.

From that point forward, my goals changed.

I am no longer chasing a certain subscriber count or trying to build the next big platform. I simply want a space where I can share honest reflections on motherhood, home, and the everyday moments that often get overlooked. It was relatively easy to find my niche because it is built around the topics I live every day and care deeply about.

When I look back to my first week where this perspective shift occurred, I don’t think I realized how much I needed a community like this. And I definitely didn’t know how quickly it would become one of my favorite corners of the internet.

Over the past month, every new subscriber has felt incredibly meaningful. The numbers are by no means extraordinary, but each person represents someone who chose to invite my writing into their inbox. That feels very different from a quick scroll or a passing view. It’s intentional, and that alone has made me approach writing with a much greater sense of purpose.

One of the biggest surprises over this past month has been learning that Substack isn’t really a platform driven by likes.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Recommendations and likes help our work reach new readers, and they certainly have their place. But after spending a month on here, I have realized that they’re not the metric that defines this community. Thoughtful engagement is.

One of the features that completely changed my perspective was Notes. When I first joined Substack, I assumed it was just another version of every other short-form feed on the internet. Instead, it’s become one of my favorite parts of the platform. Some of the most meaningful conversations I’ve had this month started with a simple Note, and I’ve discovered writers there whose work I now genuinely look forward to reading.

It feels less like trying to get someone’s attention and more like sitting down to have an actual conversation.

My favorite moments haven’t come from watching the analytics after publishing a post, but from my conversations on here. The numbers truly don’t capture the heart of this community. The interactions I’ve had over the past month have reminded me that writing online doesn’t have to feel transactional. People still gather around shared experiences, thoughtful ideas, and honest conversations. To me, that’s everything, and it’s something I never expected to find online.

Coming from social media platforms where success is often measured by views, likes, and constantly trying to stay visible, Substack feels refreshingly different. There isn’t the same pressure to create content simply for the sake of performing well. Instead, I’ve found myself writing because I have something I want to say. From all that I’ve read, I think most others here are doing the same. Ironically, that’s probably what has made this first month feel so rewarding. I have been reminded that people can still be genuine, even online, and that there are still spaces where people simply want to share what’s on their hearts and minds.

I’ve spent years hearing people say the internet isn’t what it used to be, but this past month has reminded me that genuine communities do still exist. I just had to find the right ones.

Another important lesson I have learned is that consistency matters far more than perfection. Not every article reaches the same number of people, and not every Note sparks a conversation. Some posts come and go, while others take on a life of their own. But each time I publish something, I become a little more confident in my own voice and even more confident in the kind of community I’m hoping to build here.

If I had to say my number one takeaway from this month, it’s that growth can’t be measured by numbers alone. Growth is truly reflected in becoming a better writer, finding your rhythm, and building relationships with people who genuinely care about what you’re creating. Those are the things I hope continue to grow over the next month just as much as the numbers do.

To everyone who has subscribed, left a comment, shared one of my articles, or stopped to chat with me in Notes: Thank you! You’ve made this experience more encouraging than I ever expected, and I’m genuinely excited to see where this journey leads next.

I’d love to hear from you: If you’ve been on Substack for a while, what’s one lesson you’ve learned that you wish someone had told you when you started?

When people hear the phrase “professional home organizer,” many immediately picture someone who creates Pinterest-perfect homes. People start imagining curated, labeled bins, perfectly styled storage solutions, and rows of matching kitchen jars with every label facing the same direction.

These might be part of someone’s dream organized home, but for most people, this version of organization doesn’t always hold up. For busy families, home organization is centered more around practical ways to minimize stress and adding valuable systems to help your home function more efficiently. The version of a perfectly curated home usually only works in moments when the house is quiet and everyone is cooperating. And for all the busy families reading this, you know this is the rarely the reality we are living in.

What actually works is something a little less based on aesthetics and far more focused on functionality. Organization, in its most useful form, is about making your home easier to live in when you are tired, distracted, and constantly interrupted. This looks like systems that continue to work even when no one has the energy to put extra effort into maintaining them.

One of the most important systems I’ve seen in homes is the idea of creating true “drop zones.” Clutter doesn’t always come from having too many things, but from items not having an obvious place to land when they’re not in use. Keys get set on counters, backpacks end up on chairs, mail gets shuffled from surface to surface. When there is no designated landing spot that is both convenient and obvious, the house slowly but surely fills with visual noise. A specific landing area changes that by giving everyday items a predictable home right where they naturally enter the space. A drop zone doesn’t need to be complicated. It simply needs to exist where real life is happening in your home.

Another system that makes a huge difference is organizing based on behavior rather than by categories. Traditional organization tends to group like items together: all toys together, all cleaning supplies together, all shoes in one place.

Families don’t interact with their homes by categories, but through routines. Mornings, bedtimes, school drop-offs, rushed exits, and end-of-day exhaustion all have their own rhythm. When we build storage solutions around those routines instead of groupings that “sound good”, everything becomes a lot easier to maintain. A bedtime basket that holds pajamas and books together or a morning station where shoes and backpacks live side by side works because it reflects how life actually unfolds day-to-day.

One trend I’ve noticed, especially among people trying to “get organized,” is overcomplicating organization systems. The more steps a system requires, the less likely it is to survive real life scenarios. Folding, sorting, labeling, and maintaining highly specific structures might look satisfying in the beginning, but they rarely hold up in a house with children or a busy schedule. The goal in organization should never be about perfection. If a system in place only works on your most structured days, it is not a system that will support your everyday, sometimes chaotic life.

Rather than perfection, what actually sustains a functional home is containment. Not everything needs to be minimized or decluttered right away, but everything does need a place where it can be contained quickly and without thought. Open bins, simple baskets, and easy-access storage tend to outperform more complex setups because they prioritize convenience over precision. We are not trying to create a home that never gets messy, but one that can quickly return to baseline without requiring a full reset project. Because, let’s be real. Our homes will never be fully mess free as long as we have kids in our homes, and that’s just part of it.

Ultimately, the most helpful question you can ask in any room in your home is what a five-minute reset would look like. If you only had a few minutes before someone comes over, what would you fix first? Usually, the answer is not deep cleaning or reorganizing, but focused on restoring enough order that the space feels manageable again. This might look like clearing surfaces, putting items back into their landing spots, or resetting the main visual areas of the room. If a space cannot be brought back to that baseline quickly, it often means the system supporting it is too complicated for your daily life.

A well-organized home does not mean that it is constantly in perfect order. A functional home is the goal and looks like one that can recover quickly. In busy seasons of life, that key difference is important to recognize. Organization should not feel like another task you are constantly behind on. We have more than enough of those already! What it should feel like is a simple structure in the background that helps your home keep working, even when you are not actively thinking about it.

Home organization is a huge passion of mine and something that I love to help others with. If you have any questions about your individual spaces or about this article, feel free to leave a comment or send me a message. I read them all!

And if you’re looking for more practical systems like these, I’m continuing to add digital guides and resources to my paid subscriber library. For the cost of one coffee each month, you’ll have access to every current resource, plus everything I release in the future. I’d love to have you there!

Welcome!

Thank you so much for supporting my work. ❤️

Your support allows me to keep writing, creating, and building this community.

As a paid subscriber, you’ll have access to every printable, planner, checklist, and digital resource I create. I’ll continue adding to this library over time, so be sure to check back for new additions.

I hope these resources help make home and motherhood feel just a little lighter.

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A few days ago, I posted a note asking other moms on Substack to tell me some of the wisdom they had gathered from their time as mothers. My hope in doing this was to combine the insight of these women in a way that helps reach other moms in all seasons of their motherhood journey. I ended the note with this:

In a world where “the village” is not always prioritized for mothers, let’s make our own.

In response to this note, five mothers took the time to thoughtfully share their answers. In reading the replies, I was struck by the fact that even though the advice was different, many of the answers pointed back to the same truths.

The details of motherhood may look different from family to family, but the lessons often echo one another.

Here is the wisdom these mothers wanted to pass on.

Everything Is a Season

If there was one message that appeared over and over again, it was this: the hard parts won’t last forever.

Maddy | Family in Flow reminds us that so many of the things we stress about eventually work themselves out.

“All the things you’re worried will never happen, they will. They will sleep through the night one day. They won’t need you holding them to fall asleep. You will use the bathroom alone again one day. Everything is a season.”

Now that her children are out of the toddler stage, she is able to reflect back and say that some things do get so much easier. Your children will become more independent as time goes on and one day you’ll look back and wonder how you managed to do so much.

Maddy also shared something I think every parent needs to hear: don’t put too much pressure on creating “bad habits.” A couple nights of extra snuggles or comfort don’t determine your child’s future. “It takes two days to make a habit and two days to break a habit.” Just because you allow your child a little extra comfort one day does not mean it will become a permanent expectation or that it will permanently alter their behavior. Life is more nuanced than that.

Karen Aguilar echoed that same perspective from a different stage of motherhood. Looking back now as a grandmother, her advice was simple: “Enjoy the season you’re in because it moves faster than you think.”

When we’re in the thick of it, the days can feel endless. Looking back, they’re often the years that feel shortest and the ones we will one day wish we could revisit.

You Matter Too

Several mothers shared a reminder that often gets lost in the constant giving that motherhood requires: you are a person too.

Karen Aguilar shared that one thing she wishes she understood earlier is that taking care of yourself isn’t selfish. “As moms, we spend so many years pouring into everyone else, but our energy, health, friendships, and little moments of joy matter too.”

Continuing the theme of caring for ourselves in motherhood, Cora H. shared a lesson that stopped me in my tracks:

“Emotions are not interruptions. They’re information.”

Motherhood often teaches us to push through exhaustion, overwhelm, frustration, and stress. But Cora’s advice is to pause long enough to ask, “What am I feeling?” and “What is it trying to tell me?”

These questions are so important to ask ourselves. We hear time and again of women feeling as though they have lost themselves in motherhood. I think a lot of this stems from the fact that we feel so much pressure to put everyone else first, that we neglect our own needs. One thing I have learned from motherhood is that when we do not take care of ourselves, we are not able to care for others as fully as we would like. We can only pour from an empty cup for so long.

Alethea Elgamiel built on the idea of emotional self-awareness through co-regulation with her toddler. She noticed that when her daughter became dysregulated, she often did too. But she also discovered something beautiful: the things that help children regulate often help us as well.

“Whether it’s getting outside, sharing a snack, or dancing it out, we often benefit from the same things.”

Sometimes we’re not only caring for our children, but also caring for ourselves right alongside them. This is such a great way to manage and model emotional regulation with our toddlers while also making fun memories.

Find Your People

Bethany Marks shared a difficult lesson she learned from being a mother.

“Sharing my struggles out loud didn’t make me a failure as a mom, it helped me find my people. I spent so much time pretending I was ok to save face that I lost several years of enjoying motherhood.”

It can be so hard not to play the comparison game when it seems like so many moms have it all figured out.

She realized that comparison was stealing her joy and that pretending everything was fine only left her feeling more isolated.

People often relate to our struggles far more than we think and opening up about them allows for so much more genuine connection. Sometimes the very thing we’re afraid to say out loud is the thing another mother desperately needs to hear. Many of the moms who seem to have it all together often don’t and are also struggling to voice their complex feelings.

Motherhood becomes lighter when we stop trying to prove we’re doing it perfectly and start being honest about how we’re actually doing.

The right people won’t judge your struggles and they will sit right beside you in them.

To Wrap It All Up

Reading these responses reminded me that motherhood advice is most powerful when it comes from women living it every day.

The most meaningful motherhood wisdom rarely comes from a perfect parenting strategy. There really is no such thing.

But it can be found in being reminded that this season won’t last forever, that you matter too, and that you’re not meant to do it all alone.

I’d love to continue making this a series and I have greatly enjoyed reading the perspectives of other mothers here.

If you’re a mom, what’s one piece of wisdom that has helped you through motherhood? Leave it in the comments and it may be featured in the next edition of Moms Help Moms. Let’s continue to build the village.🤍

The day I first saw those two little parallel lines on a stick changed my entire world. This is a similar reality to what most mothers experience when they find out they are expecting a baby for the first time. There is an immediate shock shortly followed by the realization that you will be forever changed by this new little being that will enter your world.

I felt all these realizations poignantly, but they were shortly followed by another overwhelming thought. The moment I saw that test turn positive, I was struck by the fact that I was going to become a mother before I had even discovered who I was as a person outside of it.

For a long time, I let that thought go by the wayside. I began to tell myself that this was simply the path my life took and I needed to get on board with it.

Now that my children are no longer babies, I am finding myself reflecting on this realization that hit me almost four years ago now. Almost the entirety of my adult life has been spent caring for others. I married young, I had children young, and I spent many of these years focusing on other people before I had spent much time figuring out who I was on my own. This is not a bad thing, but it can feel heavy nonetheless.

When I look back at my late teens and early twenties, there are entire seasons of my life that have been dedicated to survival. This is visible in both of my pregnancies, newborn stages, countless sleepless nights, endless college assignments, and more than what I can fit inside this article. Because of how quickly life events happened for me, I felt like I had to play catch-up and learn how to be a wife while simultaneously learning how to be a mother.

I didn’t have a clear line separating one stage of life from the next. Everything felt as though it was occurring all at once. I was overwhelmed, to say the least, and it’s no wonder why. I love the way my life has turned out, and I am so grateful for all the stages I have been through. But at the same time, I am able to now see more clearly the extent of how much I took on at such a young age.

While some people spend their twenties traveling to new cities, discovering new hobbies, and learning who they are outside of their families, I was learning how to install car seats, researching the best breastfeeding techniques, and functioning on broken sleep.

For a while, I wondered if I had missed out on something. Should I have waited to enter these chapters of my life and were there opportunities that I would never get back?

I questioned all of this, not because I regret becoming a mother. I don’t. At all. My children are the greatest joy of my life and they have made me into the woman I am today. But there were certainly moments when I felt behind in my own development and moments when I realized I wasn’t entirely sure who I was outside of the roles I occupied.

I knew what my children liked. I knew everyone’s schedules, favorite snacks, clothing sizes, and bedtime routines. But when someone asked what I enjoyed, what I wanted, or who I hoped to become, I didn’t always have an answer.

Motherhood required so much of me that there didn’t seem to be much left over to explore myself. But unexpectedly, motherhood also became the thing that forced me to do just that.

Over the last few years, I’ve realized that finding yourself doesn’t always happen before you have children. It might just happen because of them.

Sometimes becoming responsible for other people forces you to ask deeper questions about yourself. It reveals your strengths and insecurities. It exposes your patience as well as your fears, your values, and the parts of yourself that still need healing.

Motherhood didn’t pause my growth after all. Instead, it changed the environment where that growth happened.

It’s true that I didn’t discover myself through spontaneous adventures or through the classic ways people talk about finding themselves in. I discovered myself through ordinary days, through hard conversations, through building a family, and through finishing a degree with my two small children at home. One of my most major takeaways is that I am far more resilient than I ever thought I was prior to these life events.

As I get older, I am understanding more and more that there isn’t one correct timeline for self-discovery.

Some people find themselves and then become parents. Others become parents and find themselves along the way. I happen to fit in the second category, and that’s perfectly ok.

I would be lying if I said there weren’t still parts of myself that I’m uncovering. But I also think that is a part of normal life regardless of our age. I’m still discovering new interests, new ambitions, and new dreams that have emerged as my children have gotten older. The difference is that for the first time in a long time, I feel curious about who I am becoming, and not just what I have to do to survive.

Maybe that’s the gift hidden inside this season of my life.

It’s true that I didn’t become a mother after I found myself. But I have found pieces of myself because I became a mother, and I’m not sure I would have discovered some of them otherwise.

Perhaps motherhood and self-discovery were never meant to happen separately after all.

The infamous mental load.

We hear this term thrown around casually in day-to-day life and have grown accustomed to the fact that it’s a part of our lives as women and mothers.

The mental load is often described as remembering appointments, keeping track of grocery lists, scheduling doctor’s visits, signing permission slips, and knowing when the dog needs more food. These might be the physical ways in which the mental load presents itself, but items on a checklist are an incomplete story of what the mental load truly consists of.

If the mental load was only about completing a set of tasks, a planner or a shared calendar could easily solve the heaviness of the burden. And yet, we see that this is not the case.

The part that is most burdensome is not something that lives on a checklist. The mental load is heavy because it involves the responsibility of being the keeper of everyone else’s well-being.

It involves knowing which child hasn’t been sleeping well lately or noticing the shift in your husband’s mood before he says a word. It looks like remembering that your toddler suddenly hates the yogurt they loved last week and knowing you’re the only one that knows how they like their fruit cut. (Do they like bigger chunks now or is there a new shape not yet identified that I need to be up to date on?) It is found in keeping track of who needs encouragement, who needs discipline, who needs more attention, and who needs grace.

The mental load requires that we carry the emotional climate of an entire household in our minds at all times. This is something that no planner or aesthetic calendar could ever achieve.

The strangest part is that most of this work is completely unseen. People may notice that our kitchens are clean, that we showed up with a personalized birthday gift, or that everyone assembled for family photos at the same time with coordinating outfits.

But what people don’t tend to notice is the constant hypervigilance happening behind the scenes. There are endless calculations, backup plans, and then backup plans for the first set of backup plans. People don’t see the dozens of thoughts that never become conversations because we’ve already solved the problem before anyone else realized one existed.

I think that’s part of the reason that the mental load can also feel so lonely. We are rarely physically alone in motherhood, but it can still be incredibly isolating. This is because so much of what we carry is impossible to put a label on for others to see.

The mental load gives us a never-ending list to complete with very little evidence that we’ve completed any of it. It’s not as if we can hold up a list of all the things we remembered so that everyone else could forget them. And there’s no great way to quantify the energy it takes to constantly anticipate needs before they even arise.

So instead of having proof of meeting quotas, we move through our days feeling exhausted in a way that doesn’t make sense on paper.

There are times I find myself so overwhelmed when nothing physically happened to cause the feeling. I crave alone time and can feel resentful despite the fact that I love the people I’m caring for. On top of it all, guilt creeps in because the things I’m struggling with seem too small to justify the weight I feel from them.

But the burden of the mental load isn’t derived from any one responsibility or task to be completed. I think the heaviness sets in because we never fully set the mental load down.

Motherhood has this unique way of making our minds feel permanently open. It’s as if there are twenty tabs running in the background at all times, and each one demands a piece of our attention.

Even when we rest, part of us is still listening.

Is the baby crying?

Did someone just say my name?

Was that a door opening just now?

When we find the time to finally relax, we are still planning for what is inevitably next.

What snacks are we running low on?

Is one of my kids about to outgrow their current size in clothes?

Do I need to sign my kids up for swim lessons this summer? And if so, by what date?

Do we have something planned for Father’s Day where the kids are included and Dad feels celebrated?

When we finally go to sleep, part of us remains on call.

Did one of the kids forget their favorite blanket downstairs?

Is one of them going to wake up and call for me tonight?

I hear whining. Will they go back to sleep or is this about to be a 30 minute ordeal of snuggles and shushes?

There is no real clocking out from being the person everyone unconsciously relies on. I find so much beauty in being needed and wanted, but I also find immense grief.

I grieve the version of myself who could finish a thought uninterrupted and use the bathroom in privacy. The mental space I once had and took for granted, I now abundantly miss. I long for the simple experience of existing without constantly monitoring, anticipating, and carrying.

I don’t think mothers necessarily need more praise for doing it all. Most of us aren’t really looking for applause.

I think we’re looking for acknowledgment. To know that someone else sees it, even if they can’t always see it happening.

Acknowledgment that the exhaustion we feel isn’t always physical, that some of our hardest work leaves no visible evidence behind, and that carrying the emotional weight of a family can be just as taxing as carrying the practical responsibilities that everyone can see.

The mental load isn’t simply remembering everything. It’s the fact we have to care about everything. In order to keep our households afloat, we have to keep a running inventory of needs, emotions, schedules, preferences, fears, milestones, and future possibilities. We love our people so deeply that part of our minds remain devoted to them even when they’re not standing in front of us.

That burden is one that is rarely visible. But it shapes nearly every moment of our lives, and, in many ways, the lives of the people we love most.

We spend so much of our lives looking ahead to the next “big thing”. As exciting as life milestones can be, I’ve found that not many people talk about the stretch of road between where they’ve been and where they’re going. I’m talking about the season where one chapter has ended, the next hasn’t quite begun, and you’re left standing somewhere in the middle, desperately trying to make sense of both.

A few weeks ago, I graduated from college. For the years that I was attending school, earning my degree felt like the destination. This makes sense right? It was the goal I had worked toward through pregnancy, sleepless nights postpartum, toddler chaos, military moves, and every season in between. Whenever life felt too overwhelming, I told myself to just keep going. Eventually, there would be a moment when I could finally relax and say, “I made it.”

But then, graduation came and went. And the feelings I was so certain I would have; they didn’t end up arriving after all. Sure, I felt a sense of accomplishment. After all, I had finally reached a goal that I had been working towards with determination for years. But the realization that hit me harder was the fact that finishing something you’ve worked towards doesn’t mean you will automatically know what comes next.

We spend so much of our lives preparing for milestones that we rarely talk about what actually happens after the fact. We celebrate weddings, but not the years of learning how to be married. We celebrate having babies, but not the identity crisis that can come with becoming a mother. We celebrate the degree, the new job, the move, the promotion, and the business launch, then simultaneously expect people to know what they’re doing once they get there.

Major life milestones deserve celebration and praise, but there is so much life that is lived in the space between one chapter and the next. I’ve been finding myself thinking about that space in-between quite frequently.

For the first time in years, I don’t have another semester waiting for me. There isn’t another class to register for or out-standing assignments hanging over my head. School has been a constant presence throughout my adult life, and suddenly it’s gone. I thought it would feel liberating and in some ways, it does. In other ways, maybe stronger ones, it feels strangely disorienting.

For years, my identity has been tied to being a student, a mother, and someone working toward a future version of themself. Now that one of those roles has ended, I’m left with a question I don’t think enough people ask out loud: who are you when the thing you’ve been working toward is finally behind you?

The answer to this, at least for me, has been far less clear than I had previously expected.

I wish I had a picture-perfect story about stepping confidently into the next phase of my life. The somewhat uncomfortable truth is that I still feel like I’m figuring it out.

I’m building Framework Living, but it’s still in its early stages. I’m writing because I love writing, but I don’t know exactly where it will lead. I’m exploring career possibilities while also trying to juggle being present with my children. Some days I feel ambitious and excited. More often than not, I feel uncertain and impatient. On my most complex days, I feel it all at the same time.

We hear people say that growth is not linear. While this is true, I don’t think there is enough said about what that growth actually looks like. We imagine it as a series of arrivals when it’s really a series of transitions. Rather than the arrivals, I think the transitions deserve more of the discussion.

The most transformative periods of our lives rarely look transformative to others while we’re living them. These seasons often look ordinary and perfectly unremarkable. They’re filled with moments of taking small steps with zero guarantee what the outcome will be. As a person who likes to know the end result, this realization scares me.

Reflecting on the last few years of my own life, I can see how much has changed. I have become a mother to two children who somehow make time feel both impossibly fast and unbearably slow. I have started my own business where I have faced many moments of both frustration and gratification. What I have learned from all of it is that adulthood is far more complicated than I imagined when I was younger. It’s been a long process of discovering strengths I didn’t know I possessed and weaknesses I’d rather not admit to. One of my biggest realizations is that very few meaningful things happen perfectly according to plan.

Yet despite all of that supposed growth, I still find myself believing that certainty is right around the corner. I tell myself that once I have the career figured out, or the business figured out, or the next five years figured out, everything will feel the way I thought it was meant to.

The more time goes on, the less I believe that’s actually true.

Life isn’t a series of clearly defined milestones where one ends and the next begins with total confidence and clarity. Realistically for a lot of us, we stand with one foot in a chapter we have outgrown and one foot in the future that we can’t fully conceptualize yet.

In case it wasn’t clear, that’s exactly the stage of life I’m in right now. I’m finding that that’s also where more people are than we realize.

I wonder if there are other people reading this who have recently left something behind, whether it’s a job, a relationship, a version of themselves, a dream they had, or a season of life they never expected to miss. If this is you, maybe you’re also waiting for the clarity that everyone promised would come and wondering why you still feel so uncertain.

If you identify with these feelings, I hope you know that uncertainty isn’t necessarily a sign that you’re lost. It might just mean that you’re in a phase of growth.

The in-between is uncomfortable because it asks us to keep pushing forwards without any guarantees of “success”. This season forces us to trust ourselves before we’ve seen the outcome or even before we know what that outcome will be.

We don’t hear that much about the in-between because it isn’t glamorous or something that, as a culture, we feel like celebrating. The in-between doesn’t make for dramatic before-and-after photos or perfectly curated success stories. It’s messy, unfinished, and can be extremely frustrating.

But I’m starting to think it may also be where the most important parts of our lives are formed. Growth doesn’t arrive in the times when everything finally comes together, but in the seasons where we are still desperately trying to figure it all out and learning who we are.

If you are in an in-between season right now, what’s one thing you’re learning about yourself and one thing you’re working towards?

Is anyone else exhausted by the influx of unsolicited advice we receive as mothers? From the moment someone announces a pregnancy or brings home their baby for the first time, it seems that everyone suddenly becomes an expert on the topic. Not an expert on motherhood itself, of course. On your motherhood.

We hear it from social media influencers filming perfectly curated mornings. We hear it from well-meaning family members. We hear it from friends. We even hear it from strangers in grocery store checkout lines who somehow feel qualified to comment on the way we raise our children based on a thirty-second interaction.

It has become clear that everyone feels entitled to tell us what kind of mom we should be.

Here are a few:

You should breastfeed. You should formula feed.

You should make all of your baby’s food from scratch.

You should buy organic. You should never buy organic because it’s a waste of money.

You should vaccinate. You shouldn’t vaccinate.

You should stay home. You should work.

You should send your kids to daycare so they learn social skills. You should keep them home because nobody can care for them like you can.

You should limit screen time. You should stop feeling guilty about screen time.

You should be doing sensory bins. You should be doing crafts. You should be reading twenty books a day.

You should have a spotless house. You should stop caring about a spotless house.

You should.

You shouldn’t.

The noise is endless and I personally have had enough of it.

The heartbreaking part is that when we hear these voices often enough, we start to believe that motherhood is a test that we are somehow failing.

Maybe if we can just find the right routine, the right products, the right philosophy, the right parenting expert, everything will finally click into place.

But motherhood was never meant to be lived through someone else’s checklist. Becoming a mother is not a black-and-white reality. Everything about our experiences as mothers is nuanced and deeply personal.

This looks like waking up one day and realizing the thing that worked beautifully last week suddenly doesn’t work anymore. It means making decisions with incomplete information and doing the best we can with what we know at the time.

It is as if we have forgotten that we are not all meant to live lives that are identical to everyone else’s. Every child, every family, and every mother is different. We have acknowledged the fact that we all come from different upbringings and that we all have different world views. But when it comes to motherhood, those differences are supposed to suddenly stop and our decisions are meant to be unanimous.

The advice that helps one family may completely overwhelm another. The choices that work perfectly for your neighbor may be the wrong choices for you. That isn’t to say that any party is wrong. It just means that each family unit is unique, as we are all meant to be.

What people often forget when they hand out parenting advice is that they aren’t living your reality. Outsiders of any kind don’t know your child’s temperament, your financial situation, your support system, or your background that influences the decisions you make.

There is no way for people on the outside to understand the mental load we are carrying, the sacrifices we’ve made, or the impossible calculations we’re constantly performing behind the scenes.

People see a snapshot of our journey and feel entitled to give their opinion accordingly. In reality, we are the ones living the story. That’s why motherhood requires something that no parenting book, influencer, or stranger can fully teach us.

We have become disconnected from trusting ourselves and relying on our own intuition.

Trust in your ability to know your child, your ability to adapt, your ability to make decisions from a place of love rather than fear.

Some of the most meaningful moments in motherhood happen when we stop outsourcing every decision and start listening to ourselves.

Advice, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. The reality is that we don’t know everything and we will make mistakes. There is room for wisdom from those who have gone through the journey we are just beginning. But taking advice should come secondary to listening to our gut on how to raise our children. Because no one else is raising our children but us. That realization matters.

The older my children get, the more I realize that motherhood isn’t about following a perfect formula. It’s about showing up consistently for our children. We are good mothers when we apologize when we get it wrong, when we love our children fiercely, when we give ourselves grace in the process, and when we understand that there are a hundred different ways to be a good mother.

Maybe your home isn’t spotless. Maybe your child ate chicken nuggets for dinner. Maybe you forgot spirit day at school. Maybe you send your children to daycare. Maybe you stay home. Maybe you do crafts every afternoon. Maybe you don’t.

Here’s your reminder that none of those things determine your worth as a mother.

At the end of the day, our children won’t remember whether we bought the trendy developmental toy or followed the latest parenting philosophy. They will, however, remember when we made them feel safe, loved, understood, and wanted.

If you’re already providing those things, you’re doing far better than you think.

If the world has been making you feel like you’re doing motherhood all wrong, let me challenge that belief. The people with the loudest opinions are often carrying little to none of the responsibility.

We are the ones who show up every single day and make the hard decisions. We are the ones who love our children through the countless little moments that nobody else will ever witness.

Despite what the internet, your relatives, your friends, or random strangers might have to say about it, you’re probably doing just fine. In fact, you’re probably already an amazing mom. Focus on that instead of all the outside noise begging for your time and attention. Motherhood is not about doing everything “right” by everyone else’s standards. It’s about doing what’s right for you and your children no matter what anyone else has to say.

I have begun to notice that some of the most significant changes in my life have started completely by accident. Many of my major transition phases did not happen because I had a detailed plan or because I knew exactly where they would lead. More often than not, my biggest changes have grown from times when I simply said yes to something small.

Tangibly, this looked like deciding to have a conversation, seizing small opportunities, or in the case of starting my business; responding to a random Facebook post.

Back in 2023, while scrolling through Facebook, I came across a post from a woman looking for help organizing her home. At the time, I was only a few months postpartum and staying home with my son. I wasn’t actively in the job market and by no means was I intending on becoming an entrepreneur.

The post I saw had been sitting there for a while without any responses. The way it was worded made me think that the woman behind the screen was someone who was desperate for clarity in her home and was overwhelmed by the thought of tackling her spaces alone.

I remember reading it and thinking, “I could probably help her.” So, I reached out and sent her a message offering my help.

As simple and common as that sounds, that was it. That’s the story behind what is now a full-fledged professional home organization business.

I didn’t have a business plan tucked away in a notebook somewhere. There was no vision board or grand ambition to become a business owner. There was just a woman who needed help and another woman (myself) who thought she might be able to provide it.

What I couldn’t have known at the time was that one message would eventually turn into the business I have today. After going to that woman’s house the first time, I felt a part of myself come back to life. In becoming a mother, I had started to forget about some of the things that were individual to me outside of all the prepped bottles, diaper changes, and sleep schedules. That small step helped another person, but it also reintroduced me to a part of myself I didn’t realize I had lost.

What was originally intended to be a one-off organizing service, ended up becoming months of organizing for this family. In the months of work and the affirmation of my abilities that came with them, I started thinking there could be something to this. Maybe this wasn’t a one off service and it could actually be something so much bigger. Maybe there was something here worth building.

I have been told for as long as I can remember that I have an eye for organization and design, but it took a stranger and a social media post for me to actually see it for myself.

One piece of business advice I’ve never fully agreed with is the idea that you should only build a business around something you’re passionate about. More important than passion are ability and quality. Your service/products will not sell off of passion alone. They need substance for them to be in demand and in order for sales to grow. It is ideal to also be passionate about what you do. But I wouldn’t base an entire business model off of a hobby if it means that there isn’t also a sellable quality to it or if it risks ruining the enjoyment you currently derive from it. Not every hobby is in demand, and not every hobby aligns with what you’re naturally good at.

Looking back, I think that’s why I’ve always struggled a little when people have asked about my business strategy. They’re usually expecting some elaborate answer, but the truth is much less exciting. Most of what has helped me grow has been remarkably ordinary.

I’ve learned that opportunities tend to find the people who make themselves visible. Not once, but consistently and with intention.

Over the years, that has looked like introducing myself to people, sharing my work, posting before-and-after photos, asking for referrals, following up when it would have been easier not to, and continuing to talk about what I do even when it has felt repetitive.

None of those actions are particularly revolutionary on their own. But together, they’ve built the business that now serves clients across multiple states.

I think we often underestimate the power of simply staying in the room. We’re drawn to stories about breakthrough moments because they’re more exciting than stories about consistency. But when I look at my own experience, I don’t see one defining moment that changed everything. I see a long chain of small decisions that compounded over time.

I sent a message. I showed up for the first job. I posted my work. I focused on outreach. Then I repeated these steps all over again.

The irony of the situation is that organizing itself has taught me a similar lesson. People often assume their home transformations happen when a room is finally finished. In reality, it happens much earlier. It happens when someone decides to start. When they pick up the first item, clear the first surface, or make the first small bit of progress.

The same has been true for my business. I didn’t become an entrepreneur because I had everything figured out. It happened because I kept taking the next step that was in front of me.

It all started with a Facebook post from a stranger. Not exactly the story I would have predicted. But then again, the things that shape our lives rarely are.

As I’m arriving at the end of my first week here on Substack, I wanted to take a moment to share about my history with loving the written word.

When I think back to my childhood, my memories are flooded with countless images of my head buried in a book. In fact, I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t love to read. I am an only child, so naturally I spent hours upon hours in my prepubescent years getting lost in the pages of Magic Treehouse, Nancy Drew, and any other chapter book I could get my hands on.

Now, before you feel bad about the fact that I am an only child, this is not meant to be an ode to the plight of only children. Instead, I share that detail to bring to light just how deep I could get into the world of fantasy without the distractions of siblings to pull me out of it.

As I got a little older, I started to become fascinated with the ways in which writers could make a point so artistically. Call me a nerd if you’d like, but there was something so distinct and beautiful about the way a well-crafted story could suck you in and even leave you changed after the fact. I know I’m not alone in this experience.

Once I had my own library card, I was basically unstoppable. I treated that little piece of plastic like a credit card to treat myself to any author, title, or cover that sparked intrigue. I remember times when the librarians would see me coming and roll their eyes (in delight or in fear, I’m still not sure) at the fact that I had stacked books a mile high in both my arms as well as in my mother’s.

I quickly found the beauty in the vastness of genres. I would dive deep into Jane Austen one day, John Grisham the next, and Mark Twain the day after. I came to appreciate that no matter the topic, the range of authors I consumed all had a gift so vibrant that they couldn’t help but to share it with the world.

In high school, I wrote for my school magazine and became the executive editor by the end of my time there. This fueled an additional aspect of my love for the written word, as I experienced and learned the other unique parts that go into creating a quality publication.

Throughout college and my entry into motherhood, I maintained my love for reading. But, writing became a distant friend and one that I deeply missed.

This brings me to now. When I first heard of Substack, I wasn’t sure what to think. I have never been in a blog space that also performs as a social media platform. The idea of joining the app and dusting off my writing skills felt daunting.

I eventually decided to see what it was all about on Substack, despite my reservations. I’m here to say that I couldn’t be more thankful that I did. I have rediscovered a part of myself that has remained hidden for some time and have found a community of other writers who are kind, passionate, and talented.

Thank you to everyone that has followed or subscribed so far and I can’t wait to meet all the rest of you out there who I have yet to find.

Long before I became a mom myself, I was well aquatinted with hearing the famous mantra: it takes a village. In fact, I heard this phrase repeated so frequently that I never thought to question it. From my perspective, it seemed less like advice and more like some universal truth. I believed this saying must have been based upon something generations of women before us had already agreed upon as a collective. The phrase paints this picture of motherhood being surrounded by support and active community. For me, I assumed this looked like a network of family members, friends, neighbors, and fellow mothers helping one another through the various complexities of raising children.

I began to hear this phrase even more when I became a mom myself at 19. From the moment I found out I was pregnant until the day came for me to give birth, I was flooded with voices all saying the same thing: it takes a village. Naturally, when I held my new baby for the first time, I felt confident that I would soon be surrounded by the village everyone spoke so highly of. But even in the first hours and days after becoming a mother, I found myself questioning where exactly that village was supposed to be.

Similarly to many other young mothers, I entered parenthood with equal parts excitement and uncertainty. I knew to expect sleepless nights and a steep learning curve. I understood that motherhood would be full of unique challenges. What I didn’t expect was how often I would feel alone in figuring all of it out. At the time, I lived across the country from all of my family and friends. This meant that the majority of the people who loved and cared for me were hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Their support was still present, but it was not always able to translate into the kind of practical help that many new moms want or need.

As I settled into motherhood, I began to notice a disconnect between the way we talk about support versus what that support actually looks like. People are quick to remind mothers that they are not meant to walk the journey alone. And yet, many women carry the weight of parenting with very little tangible help. We are quick to celebrate the idea of community while simultaneously living in a culture that often leaves parents isolated from it. Worse than that, parents are often the ones that need community the most.

I believe part of that disconnect stems from the way support is offered. The majority of mothers have heard some variation of, “Let me know if you need anything.” The offer is kind and usually meant with good intent. However, it places additional responsibility back on the person who is already overwhelmed or struggling. This offer asks an already exhausted mother to identify exactly what she needs, determine whether that need is important enough to ask for help, and then muster up the courage to make the request. More often than not, it feels easier to simply handle the need ourselves than jump through the mental hoops.

On the other hand, real support often looks much different. It could look like someone dropping off dinner without being asked. Maybe it’s a friend folding a basket of laundry while stopping by to visit a new baby. Or maybe it looks like a neighbor taking the kids to the park for an hour so a new parent can rest and recharge. The difference between these styles of support isn’t necessarily the size of the effort. Instead, it’s the willingness to act rather than leave the burden of asking on someone else’s shoulders.

Modern day motherhood can be especially challenging because we often compare ourselves to standards that were never designed for the lives we live today. Historically, women rarely raised children in isolation. For the greater part of human history, childrearing had a designated place in community life. Grandparents, siblings, cousins, neighbors, and friends shared responsibilities in ways that made parenting feel less like an individual undertaking and more like a community-wide investment. Mothers were not expected to be everything to everyone because there were other people stepping in to help fill the gaps.

Since then, many of those traditions have changed. Families now are often much more geographically spread out. Careers have pulled people across the country. Neighborhoods have became less connected, and our “communities” have increasingly moved online. While technology has made it easier than ever to stay in touch, it has not necessarily made it easier to build the type of relationships where we show up for others in times of need.

This is not meant to be a criticism of modern life. Many people live far from family for good reasons. Many pursue opportunities, build careers, serve in the military, attend school, or simply desire to create lives in places that feel like home. But acknowledging these realities does not change the fact that many parents are now navigating one of life’s most demanding responsibilities without the kind of support previous generations often took for granted.

For a long time, I took this as evidence that I didn’t have a village. However, I eventually changed my perspective. The absence of a community did not have to mean that one was impossible to create. It simply meant that building one required intention.

Some of the most meaningful support I’ve received has come from people who weren’t lifelong friends or relatives. Support was derived from other mothers who could relate to what I was experiencing because they were living it out as well. It also came from neighbors, acquaintances, and relationships that started small but grew into some of my most treasured ones. I came to realize that villages are rarely handed to us fully formed. Instead, they are often formed one relationship at a time.

This shift in perspective opened my eyes to a new way of viewing community. Rather than solely focusing on the support I wished I had, I began to pay attention to the ways I could contribute to the lives of others. Sometimes that looked like checking in on another mother, offering encouragement, or simply making space for the honest conversations about how hard parenting can be. These actions and the reciprocation of them helped to create the kind of connections that made motherhood feel way less isolating.

I have started to realize that many of us are searching for the same thing. We all desire relationships that go further than likes, comments, or the occasional check-in. We want people who notice when we’re struggling and celebrate when we’re thriving. Ultimately, we all want a group of people willing to show up in the ordinary seasons as much as they do in the difficult ones.

It does take a village to raise a child, but my perspective on what that looks like has greatly changed. A village does not always have to be a large network of relatives living nearby. Sometimes it’s simply a handful of people who consistently show up and who you know are in your corner.

The village that many of us long for may not show up overnight. It may have to be built slowly, with small acts of care and intention. In a world that can often feel disconnected, every act of showing up for another person becomes an opportunity to create the kind of community we are all longing to find.