And now I’m in it. Mid-September closing in, the manuscript open in front of me most days, and a particular kind of pressure sitting on my chest that I didn’t fully understand until I was actually inside it.

This is my first book.

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I wrote about that here — the deflation of watching a publisher deadline pass, the decision to get on the plane anyway instead of trying to squeeze the remaining chapters into the edges of a family holiday.

My vision was to deliver my final manuscript from a better position than had I left it and that meant leaving it for two weeks.

And I did it. Two weeks. Not one word.

Back in February, I wrote about the year of the Fire Horse and picked freedom as my word for 2026. My fortune teller had said something that stuck with me all year: “Make plans, but don’t be a stickler for them. Have a back up plan and be willing to go with the flow.”

Back in London now I feel like I actually lived that this trip. We had Kuala Lumpur and Langkawi locked in when we boarded the flight, but I did something only a fire horse year could provide. I booked the entire Singapore leg — flights, hotel, our 10 year wedding anniversary dinner — from my seat on the plane, somewhere over the middle of the ocean. No months of planning. Just deciding, in the moment, that this was the trip to celebrate it.

Kuala Lumpur first. Then Langkawi. Then Singapore.

City, island, city again. A rhythm that gave us exactly what we needed at each stage — the energy and the food and the friends in KL, the total stillness of the island in between, and then Singapore to close it out, familiar in a way that felt like home all over again.

I got a massage on every island we touched. Not because I needed convincing to rest — I think, this time, I actually did need it, in my body, not just in theory.

And the food.

Kolomee. Durian. Laksa.

I don’t think I can fully explain to anyone who didn’t grow up eating these what it does to come back to them. It’s not just taste. It’s a kind of time travel. One bite and I’m younger again, at a hawker stall, before any of this — the children, the book, the version of me writing about all of it — existed yet.

There’s a version of me that only fully exists near this food, in this heat, in the two homes that shaped me and my husband and somehow made us into people who could find each other.

But the food wasn’t even the best part.

The best part was watching our children play with our closest friends’ children.

Friends we’ve known long enough that the friendship has its own history, its own shorthand, its own comfortable silences. And now there’s a whole new layer to it — our kids, running around together, building something of their own.

I watched them and thought: this is how it starts. This is how a friendship becomes something that outlives us. Not because we told them to be close. Just because we gave them enough time in the same room, again and again, for it to happen on its own.

That felt like a gift I didn’t fully understand I was giving until I watched it happen in real time. With the kids swimming together for hours, enjoying hot pot, and karaoke.

This was my favourite parts of childhood playing out for them to enjoy.

I think that’s what this whole trip actually was, underneath the massages, the food and the beach.

Not an escape from my life.

A return to the parts of it that made me who I am before any of the rest of it started.

I came home from two weeks away lighter than I’ve felt in longer than I want to admit. Not because I did nothing — plenty happened, plenty was full — but because none of it asked anything of me except to actually be there for it.

The manuscript stayed exactly where I left it.

And somehow, nothing fell apart.

I think I needed to learn that on my body, not just believe it in theory. That the book would still be there, waiting, unresentful, exactly as unfinished as I’d left it — and that two weeks of actually living instead of writing about living was not a delay. It was research I didn’t know I still needed.

The evening of our anniversary dinner the confirmation came in. Full submission that was August is now mid-September, with the book set to land in the world in March 2027 — timed for UK Mother’s Day. Which feels right, somehow. A book about mothers, arriving on the one day built to honour them.

Ten years of marriage, celebrated properly that night. Until 3 am we toasted with our closest friends to the version of us that started this, young and unaware of everything it would ask of us, and to the version sitting there now, still choosing each other, two children and a life across continents later.

Now back in London and musing six months into the year of the Fire Horse — the one my fortune teller warned me about back in February. Don’t ride the horse, or you’ll burn. Position yourself where you can let it trailblaze.

I didn’t fully understand what that meant when I wrote it down. It sounded like a nice idea. A theme for the year, the kind of line you nod at and then forget the moment life gets busy again.

But I think I understand it now.

Riding the horse would have looked like forcing the deadline. Pushing the manuscript across the finish line on August 3rd no matter what it cost me, because I’d decided months ago that was the date and I wasn’t going to let go of it.

Positioning myself looked like something else entirely. It looked like accepting the extension without shame. Getting on the plane instead of opening the laptop. Booking half the trip from my seat mid-flight because the plan I’d made wasn’t the plan the trip actually wanted to be. Coming home revived instead of hollowed out, with a new deadline that actually fits the book I’m trying to write instead of the one I was racing to finish.

All of it was exactly what the year told me it would ask of me, if I let it.

This is what a year of positioning yourself actually looks like from the inside. Not one big dramatic leap of faith. A hundred small refusals to force things that weren’t ready — a deadline, a trip itinerary, a version of rest I used to think had to be earned first.

I am feeling free, I am feeling whole, I am feeling like this was the plan all along.

Even if I didn’t know it then I am right where I am meant to be.

Always, Liv x

August 3rd. The date my publisher and I agreed on the better part of a year ago, back when the book still felt like something I could will across the finish line through sheer effort if I just gave it enough of myself.

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Just the two of them.

Which left me with the other one. Just us!

Almost immediately, my whole body exhaled.

Not the tired kind of relief. The other kind. The kind where your shoulders drop somewhere you didn’t know they’d been sitting all this time.

I assumed it was simple maths. One child instead of two. Less to hold, less to track, less noise in the house.

But it wasn’t that.

It wasn’t about the number.

It was about which energy had left the room.

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We talk about “mom brain” like it only takes things away. I wrote about that already, the fog, the forgotten word, the walking into a room and losing the thread. All real. But it’s only half the story, and it’s the half that made for an easier joke.

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This is something that I don’t think anyone speaks about.. How you obtain this superpower when you become a mother. I’m not talking about this from a lens of wanting to overhype things but there’s actual proof that pregnancy sharpens threat recognition measurably. Did you know that studies tracking women through pregnancy have found heightened accuracy at reading anger, fear, and distress on faces, a skill that gets sharper as pregnancy progresses, not duller? Mothers show stronger neural responses to a child’s facial expressions than non-mothers do, and that response scales with how distressed the child actually looks. This isn’t vague maternal instinct dressed up as science. It’s measurable attentional bias, present before the baby is even born, tuning a brain toward exactly the signals that keep a small person alive.

Some of the research on cognitive flexibility after birth tells a similar story, adaptability, faster recalibration when circumstances change, systems built for managing shifting, competing demands in real time. That’s not a poetic description of motherhood. That’s a description of what a mother’s brain is actually doing, mechanically, underneath the everyday chaos.

To put this into relatable terms it’s something I think about when I’m holding a phone call, watching a toddler out of the corner of my eye, and somehow also remembering that we’re out of milk. That’s not me being scattered, that’s not spread too thin or too many tabs open. That’s four systems running in parallel that didn’t used to exist in the same head.

As mothers, we truly got an upgrade. And then, almost immediately, the culture found a use for it that had nothing to do with us. Somehow, once we become a mother we’re viewed as lesser than but at the same time the assumption that we can do more is placed upon us too - am I right? Our capacity to hold things has increased yet we are perceived to be less reliable, more scattered, too distracted.

Because here’s the part that actually makes me angry. The same expanded capacity that should have been treated as remarkable got quietly repurposed into a new baseline expectation. You can hold more, so now you’re expected to. You can track five things at once, so five things at once becomes the job description, unpaid, assumed, invisible the moment it’s working correctly and only noticed the second it isn’t.

Nobody handed us a superpower and then asked what we wanted to do with it. They just started billing us for it.

I don’t think the answer is doing less with what we’ve got. I think the answer is deciding, deliberately, where that capacity actually goes. Not toward absorbing every default task nobody else remembered to pick up. Toward the things worth that kind of attention. The people worth reading that closely. The moments worth noticing at that resolution.

We didn’t lose sharpness becoming mothers. We gained an entire extra layer of it, one most of us never asked for and got anyway. The least we can do is stop letting that gift get treated as an obligation instead of what it actually is.

A superpower. Ours to spend on purpose, not just on everyone else’s behalf by default.

I would love to know your thoughts on this one, or if you feel like someone you know has an experience that leans into this please share this with them.

I love welcoming more of you into my community, here I’m holding a different type of space for you all.

Let’s really connect on all the things that matter.

Always

Liv x

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How many times have we laughed about it? “It’s just Mom brain” , like it’s something cute, a bit ditzy. There were people who warned me about mom brain before I’d even given birth. “Say goodbye to your memory” like it was a type of rite of passage. Like the deal was simple. You get the baby, you lose the sharp version of yourself.

I believed it for a while. I assumed the fog, the missing word, the walking into a room and forgetting why, meant something in me had gone soft or slow. That motherhood had taken a piece of my mind and just never given it back. A quiet kind of acceptance that this was a part of the new version of me (even though I didn’t particularly like it).

But here’s what nobody told me, and they probably never told you either, but the brain isn’t declining during that stretch. It’s rebuilding. Read that again.

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With Florence, something had already started to shift. I was more willing to say the sentence out loud. The reach was small at first, “Can you take her for an hour”. And then it stretched further, “Can you have the girls for the night”.

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It was a conscious break from an unconscious thought pattern that was threatening to become second nature. I decided that I’m not going to manage this one on my own the way I tried to manage the first.

Nobody told me that was allowed to ask for help. I worked it out by exhaustion and it went against everything that I thought I knew about motherhood.

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Two days of fever. Two days of a small body curled into mine, needing nothing from me except to be held.

And somewhere in the middle of the second day, lying next to her while she slept, I found myself somewhere else entirely.

Back before her sister existed.

Back when it was just the two of us.

My husband works abroad. Has for years. Sometimes for months at a time.

So in those first years, when she was sick, there was no one else to hand her to. No one else to hold her through the night while I slept for an hour. No one else in the house at all.

It was just me.

A new mother, learning as I went.

And her. My first baby. Learning the world for the first time, with me as the only guide she had.

When she got sick back then, I got sick too.

Almost every time.

I would nurse her through the night, hold her when the fever climbed, stay close enough that she never had to reach for me and find nothing there.

And a few days later, without fail, I’d feel it start in my own body.

I used to think of that as bad luck.

A body run down. An immune system with nothing left to give.

I don’t think that anymore.

I think my body was simply telling the truth about what was happening.

I was giving everything I had, with no one to hand any of it back to me.

There was no version of those years where I got to rest while she recovered.

I was the only resource in the house. So I gave until there was nothing left, and then my body found its own way of asking for what it was owed.

This week, watching my five-year-old sleep off her fever, I felt something I didn’t expect.

Not just tenderness for her.

Tenderness for who I was back then.

For the woman up at 3am with a baby who couldn’t tell her what hurt. For the woman doing it entirely alone, night after night, because there was no one else awake in the house to take a turn.

I didn’t fully see her at the time. I was too inside it.

But I see her now.

And here is the complicated part, because I don’t think this is a simple story.

Those years were some of the hardest of my life.

They were also, somehow, some of the sweetest.

Just the two of us, learning each other. No one else’s needs in the room. No dividing my attention between two small people who both needed me at once.

I don’t know how to hold both of those things without one cancelling the other out.

That it was lonely, and exhausting, and sometimes frightening.

And that some part of me misses it so much it aches.

I don’t think I’m supposed to choose which one is true.

I think they both are.

My youngest is almost three now. My eldest is five. The house is fuller, louder, more complicated in the way two children instead of one makes everything more complicated.

And when my eldest got sick this week, I noticed something else too.

I didn’t get sick this time.

Because this time, there was a version of help. A husband home for a stretch. A younger sister occupying herself just long enough for me to actually rest between the hours I spent with my eldest.

It wasn’t just me carrying all of it alone.

And some part of me was grateful for that.

And another part of me, quietly, missed the version of motherhood where it was only ever the two of us.

I don’t think I’ll ever fully resolve that.

I think I’ll just keep holding both. The gratitude for how much easier it is now. The ache for a season that will never happen again in exactly that shape.

She’s five now. Not a baby anymore. Steady on her feet, full of opinions, already becoming someone entirely her own.

But for two days this week, fever-warm and needing only me, she was mine again in that old, uncomplicated way.

And I let myself have it.

I didn’t rush her back to school. I didn’t try to make the days productive.

I just lay beside her, and let myself remember.

Is there a season of your motherhood you find yourself romanticising, even the hard parts of it?

I’d love to hear which one, and why. Leave it in the comments.

Always, Liv x

If this kind of reflection is something you want more of — the parts of motherhood we don’t usually let ourselves sit with, the seasons we’re grieving even as we’re grateful to have left them — that’s the work I do inside the Member Circle. Paid subscribers get weekly deep-dive essays, private prompts, and a monthly live space to talk through exactly this. If you’re ready to give these feelings somewhere honest to land, upgrade to join us.

The school texted at dawn — don’t bring them in, it’s too hot, the classrooms are unbearable. So that’s the week, then. Florence has responded to the news by taking off all her clothes and lying face-down on the kitchen tiles like a tiny starfish who has given up on the concept of being alive. Honestly? Fair. I thought about joining her.

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To a forehead, in the dark, reading for heat. To a back, finding the rhythm of the breathing. I tend to them before I think for myself. By the time my eyes open I’ve already assessed, decided, adjusted to figure out who needs what, in what order, how bad it is. The day has started without me, like it usually does..

People call this instinct. Recently I’ve begun to flinch at the word.

It feels animalistic and if there’s something we love to do as a society, it’s to make mothers into animals.

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And I feel the gears start to grind.

Because the kind of attention I had thirty seconds ago is the wrong kind entirely. And I cannot find the other one fast enough.

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A foot in my back. A whisper an inch from my face. A small body that has crossed the hallway at some hour I never feel coming and is now in my bed, awake, warm, and full of questions I am in no state to answer. I swear I saw Henry come to bed at some point but there’s no time for sweet good mornings any more..

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The last piece I wrote here was about depletion.

About the gap between what the mother gives and what she is given back.

About the word *cherish* — and how far most of us are from actually living inside it.

The conversations that are being had about this tell me something.

Not just that this topic resonates. But *where* it resonates — in the place where women know something is true and have been carrying that knowledge quietly, without quite letting it surface.

So I want to go a layer deeper...

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Forty got all the attention.

It’s the number people talk about, mark, celebrate, mourn. The threshold. The chapter heading. The year everyone asks you how it feels and you’re supposed to have something profound to say.

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On Mother’s Day I opened Instagram, wrote a post and then deleted it.

It didn’t sit right with me.

Because the reality was, in that moment I really didn’t feel like I wanted to be one.

I want to sit with that sentence for a moment before I say anything else.

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There is a phrase I wrote down years ago that I keep coming back to.

*My partner nourished me so I could nourish our baby.*

I wrote it in an essay about the early days of motherhood — the physical reality of it, the demands, the learning curve of feeding another human being from your own body. At the time I meant it literally. The logistical, physical truth of those weeks.

But the more I’ve sat with it, the more I think it points to something much larger.

Something we are not talking about honestly enough.

The mother is the source.

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Social media has been in interesting place for me lately, I’ve come to realise that there is a story we tell about motherhood.

It goes like this: a woman becomes a mother, and in doing so, she is transformed. The person she was before — her ambitions, her edges, her particular way of occupying the world — softens, recedes, makes room. And this is framed, almost universally, as the point.

The transformation is the gift.

What she releases is what makes her a good mother.

I want to challenge that story.

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There is a question I’ve been sitting with for years.

I said it out loud in an interview once and the journalist pulled quote it immediately. Which told me something. It told me that it landed because too many of us have thought it and not said it.

*You’re still a woman. But who are you other than a mother?*

Not as a crisis. Not as a complaint.

As a genuine, necessary question.

One that the world around us is remarkably good at making us feel we shouldn’t ask.

Here’s what I’ve noticed.

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Japan has been holding a lot for me this week.

Not just in the obvious ways — the travel, the movement, the beauty of being somewhere different.

But in what it’s been showing me about time.

We’ve moved through a few places now.

Different streets.

Different rhythms.

Different versions of the same country.

And somewhere in between trains, birthdays, Easter, and seeing old friends, I’ve found myself thinking about something I didn’t expect.

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My daughter just turned five.

And I’ve been sitting with that number all day.

Five years of being someone’s mother.

Five years of loving her.

Holding her.

Growing alongside her.

Five years of becoming a version of myself I never could have imagined before she arrived.

There’s so much focus on the child in moments like this.

The birthday.

The milestones.

The growth.

And rightly so.

But quietly, in the background of it all, something else has been happening too.

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