And then some ordinary Wednesday night you’re lying there wired and flat at the same time, thinking…is this all worth it? Feeling a resentment you can’t quite point at, because nothing is actually wrong…and that’s almost the worst part: that there’s nothing to blame it on, just a low hum of “Is this really it?” that you turn the light off on and promise yourself you’ll deal with later.

On the night of the 27th into the 28th of August, there’s a partial lunar eclipse of a full moon in Pisces. And the thing to understand about a lunar eclipse—the thing that makes it different from the new-moon “light a candle and write your intentions” energy everyone posts about—is that it isn’t a beginning.

It’s a release. Which I KNOW you need.

And this particular chapter has been open for almost two years. This eclipse is the last in a run that started back in September 2024, on the same Virgo–Pisces line, which means whatever has been slowly wearing on you since around then (the thing you keep circling back to, the pull you keep talking yourself out of), this is the door closing on the version of you that just kept putting it off. (Hello to me getting chickens!)

You have been treating your own healing, your own change, the actual turning-toward-yourself, as something you’ll get to once things calm down. Once the baby sleeps through, once the team’s sorted, once you’ve got a bit more room to breathe. And I understand the logic completely, because I used to run my whole life like this too.

The idea that rest, softness, and looking at the hard stuff are rewards you unlock after you’ve earned them, once the “more important work” is done. As though looking after yourself isn’t costing you your success anyway.

But things do not calm down on their own. That “later” list has never once finished itself, and it never will, because turning toward yourself is the ONE thing your whole body has learnt to keep pushing to the bottom of the pile.

The August 27th eclipse (a full moon in Pisces, squaring Uranus, AKA the planet of sudden change) is your permission from God/The Universe to stop waiting for a better time that was never actually coming.

Your body learned, a long time ago, that staying switched on was how you stayed safe, and that being in your masculine was the way that you were listened to. And you’ve been running on this operating system for so long that THIS is what is causing the bone-deep exhaustion.

The healing of this won’t be fixed by a moon; I’d be lying if I told you otherwise, but it’s the start. I’m not one to use the moon as a reason, because you could start this ANYTIME. But if it helps you, then it helps you.

How many more weeks do you want to spend waiting for a better time that was never coming?

Sometime before August 27th, sit down and finish this sentence: the thing I keep telling myself I’ll get to once things settle down is ____.

Don’t overthink it—your hand usually knows before your head catches up. And then sit with the more uncomfortable one: what has it already cost me to keep waiting?

Not in a beat-yourself-up way. Just an honest look at what’s really happening when you say to yourself, “I’m getting to it later.”

Then, do one small thing that tells your nervous system the waiting is over, and watch how loud the part of you that wants to stay in your old programming gets!

And if you’re reading this at 11pm thinking, “She’s describing my actual life,” I want you to know you’re not the only one. There are thousands of women who look completely put together from the outside and are lying awake having this precise conversation with the ceiling, none of them saying a word of it to anyone, because who exactly do you tell when your life looks like the thing other people are wishing for????

So I’ll say it here… You’re not ungrateful, you’re not lost, and you’re not broken. You’re a woman whose body has been in a survival response, operating in a masculine state (of misalignment) for decades. And you are desperate to let go of this weight.

So use the energy of August 27th to close this chapter. Decide to do something different and FINALLY put yourself first.

Nothing changes if nothing changes.

xx Monica

P.S. If this resonated with you and you want to work with me, check out Soft & Ambitious, my 9-month application-only container to become your healthiest and wealthiest self.

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I’m on a mission to create more of my European energy, lifestyle, and spaciousness whilst at home.​

Because why is it that when you go to Europe you can literally eat 5 tonnes of bread (gluten-free of course, except when someone gave me gluten bread and I’m STILL getting over the illness that came after that), sleep less, eat a tonne of dairy, and look hot as f*ck!? ☀️

So, I’m on a mission to re-create this at home, which I shared on my latest HER Year masterclass recently—they’re doing an experiment this month, as am I.

Because whilst I LOVEEEEE the sh*t out of Europe, I also love living in the US for the ease, the Amazon overnight delivery, and the airport that has a wayyyy better system than most European airports.

BUT let’s be real. The food quality in the US is beyond terrible, and it’s why every year, I’ve gotten better and better at creating our veggie garden. My goal for myself is to actually get to a point where during summer, we’ll barely have to buy ANY veggies at the supermarket.

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So ANYWAY… on our recent trip to the south of France, I had this realisation as I was lying by the pool whilst Tripp was napping (Hal was in the room with him)...

There are so many women I work with who, at the beginning of working together, have been working their arse off to build an amazing life for themselves—to make a lot of money, have an amazing career, and be able to stay at hotels like this.

But then when they get to luxury hotels like this, they can’t even switch off and relax.​

They can’t enjoy it, because there’s still this unhealed trauma of:

• it’s not safe to slow down,

• it’s not safe to rest,

• and it’s not safe to ask for help.

In fact, they have an “enough wound,” and they’re not achieving from full, as I call it.

What this tells me is that they’re not understanding the power of trauma healing to make more money and have more success.

Now ask yourself, “Am I achieving from empty or achieving from full?”​

None of what I’m saying is about getting rid of your ambition and baking sourdough all day (although that does sound nice from time to time lol); it’s about changing where the ambition is fed from.

And if you want to experience more joy and inner peace, it doesn’t mean you have to stop working. It just means that working like a man isn’t going to get you there.

Working with feminine leadership doesn’t mean you’re not getting any work done and you’re just floating around like a fairy. It actually means that you’ll find success, achievement, and making money easier, because you’re working with your magical nature as a woman—rather than still subconsciously thinking that the more you push, the harder you work, and the more productive you are, the more successful you’re going to be.

Because sure, that creates success. But it doesn’t create deep joy and peace.

So if you find yourself achieving from empty and wondering at 3am, “Is this really it???” and struggling with chronic health issues, reply in the comments below letting me know how this is showing up for you so I can write another Substack article and speak to exactly what you’re struggling with. ♥️

xx Monica

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I know I’m not the only one who has struggled with our dogs as a new mum, so I wanted to share this with other mums who are struggling as well.

Also an important note… We had 4 dogs when Tripp was born, and now we have 3 (RIP sweet Phoebe). Nonetheless, it’s a lot, and no, I still would not recommend a dog with a new baby because boy, oh boy, have they gotten on my nerves.

When Tripp was a baby, the rage was more because they’d bark JUST as I’d finally gotten him to sleep (cue the internal thought of “I WANT TO FUCKING KILL THEM!”), or they’d want to lick his face nonstop.

Now, it’s more been the fact that they will:

• Knock him over whilst he’s playing on the floor

• Bring a half-eaten dead bird into his room (cute, guys)

• Bark and wake him up when I’ve spent 90 minutes getting him down

• Somehow open the fully closed back door and then proceed to pull one of my loaded pizzas (that I spent 90 minutes making, BTW) off the kitchen bench. After again spending AGES getting our son to sleep, I walked down to them tracking tomato paste all through the rug. (Wow, the RAGE was real in that moment!)

Oh, and then the real breaking point for me was when I thought our older dog had her bladder leak in a patch on the really expensive rug in our bedroom, and I thought I had cleaned it up in the early morning light (I couldn’t see well)…then forgot all day to finish it off…only to get into bed late at 9:30pm (again, putting our son to sleep; we’re working on things, but also holding compassion for the fact that he’s still a baby), to see FLUORESCENT yellow on the carpet. It wasn’t pee; IT WAS F*CKING BILE.

No words.

My husband, of course, proceeded to call our carpet cleaner to ask if he could make an emergency visit the next morning because our dogs were about to be slaughtered by his wife.

Good news: after a few visits, he was able to get it out.

Bad news: I still hated the dogs.

So I then posted about my dog mum rage on IG, and 90% of the comments were mums saying thank you for voicing this because they’ve struggled so much with this as well.

But one woman’s comment made me start to change my perspective and act differently, which is how I’ve healed my rage (for the most part anyway; I’m still human).

She reminded me that whilst my whole world has changed and my priorities have shifted, theirs haven’t. I am still their whole world, and they just want to be included. They have nowhere else to go.

Okay, cue the guilt.

But it made me think… How could I change the way I show up with them to help them show up in a better way for me? So I’ve changed our routines with them, and it’s helped me a lot.

Now, they don’t sleep in our bedroom anymore. They’re in the basement, and it means when I wake up, I’m not overstimulated and rushing around. When the dogs were in our room, I was immediately rushing because they were desperate to be taken outside, jumping all over, etc. ANNOYING.

Now, our son is my focus in the morning, so when I wake up, I’m straight away with him. He’s in our bed, and we have a little cuddle (I don’t want the dogs yet), then he has a little play with random stuff in our room whilst I’m getting my gym clothes on, peeing, etc.

So we do our thing and then go downstairs, and I change his diaper, etc. I can literally decide to have 30 minutes before I even see the dogs.

Once I’m ready, I go down to the basement, and we let them outside to the bottom section of our lawn so I’m not smelling dog poo in the upper part whilst I’m sitting outside with our son or trying to work (thank god).

I’ve also been much better about taking the boys (our two toy poodles) for walks in the mornings with us, as much as I want less stimulation on our walk. And by doing so, they are better behaved during the day, and they’re not all over me.

I’m also more disciplined about thinking ahead with them.

If they’re starting to annoy me, I put them behind the baby gate so they can’t get in and under my feet in the kitchen/living room. I put them out there when I’m feeding Tripp, and I do not let any dog in the kitchen when there is food on the bench and I’m not in the kitchen.

I know it might sound simple, but I feel like, as mums, because we have such a huge mental load to start with, we don’t want to add these things to our plate of MORE things to think of. But then the next minute, we’re in a fucking RAGE because the dogs have done something that we probably could have prevented.

Something else I did for a bit when Tripp was younger and doing more contact naps in the living room was that I would have a bark collar remote on me so that when the dogs would start to bark or I knew they were about to bark, I would click this button, a beep sound came off their collar, and it stopped them from barking.

Does anyone really enjoy yelling at their dogs? I don’t. This has helped me get them to stop barking, but also, I don’t have to yell at them, whether or not Tripp is napping.

If you have any tips to add, please add them below as a comment to help other mums!

And if you want to know what we’ve done for our son’s sleep (without sleep training), you can listen to this podcast episode where I shared a bit of our hybrid approach.

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And for whatever reason, you feel ashamed about sharing this with other people because your life looks so good from the outside… What do you have to complain about?

But I understand what it’s like to have your life look so good from the outside, but on the inside, you feel like it’s just not your dream life. Well, right now is the perfect time to do something about it since we’re in the 8/8 Lion’s Gate Portal.

I was leading a group of my clients through an epic Lion’s Gate Portal practice the other day, and I was sharing some of the things that I am sharing with you in this post because it was too important not to!

This year has been so different than last year, and I feel like it has been exactly what I’ve been asking for (and probably what you’ve been asking for as well).

If your last year was anything like mine… It absolutely was the Year of the Snake, and you were shedding like a motherfucker.

Before I fully dive in, I’ll preface this by saying that I’m by no means a spiritual or astrological guru. But I’ve done some Googling on the Lion’s Gate Portal and combined the information I found with my deep understanding of the four bodies, manifestation as an embodied experience, and the nervous system. I’m here to give you some guidance on how to use this year to really manifest not just the private yacht, but also deep happiness on a Saturday at 2 PM.

Every year around this time, the sun moves through Leo and the star Sirius rises alongside it, and for thousands of years now, people have treated this window as a portal/doorway, with August 8th as its peak. 8 is the number of abundance, infinity, and receiving without obligation.

The first thing to understand is that Jupiter, which is the planet of expansion, of more, of “let’s go bigger,” moved into Leo (Leo is visibility, radiance, and the self that refuses to stay small) on June 30th, and will stay there for about a year; this only happens roughly once every 12 years. So, the opening of this year’s 8/8 portal is happening while the planet of “yes, bigger, bolder” is sitting right in the sign the portal runs on.

Then on August 12th, there will be a total solar eclipse in Leo. And eclipses are resets; they’re not gentle nudges, so this year’s 8/8 peak is then followed by an EPIC clearing of the old chapter.

Basically, know this: the 2025 Lion’s Gate portal was about hearing what you actually want for yourself and your life. The 2026 Lion’s Gate portal is about being seen wanting it, claiming it out loud, and actually allowing yourself to choose it through embodiment, visibility, radiance, and, of course, taking action on it without any guilt. This is your chance to be unapologetic.

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Up until now, you probably have been treating your dream life as some kind of trade in which you think that to have more success, it means that you have to have less rest. Or in order to have more desire in your relationship, it means you have to be passive. Basically, you think that to embody the kind of softness and relaxation that your body is screaming for, you have to have this trade with your ambition and the success that you’ve built for yourself.

Well, the 8/8 + Jupiter-in-Leo + eclipse situation is your permission from god/the universe to stop with this trade-off BS.

Do you know a single Leo woman who thinks that she has to shrink one part of her life to light up the other? Leos are the kind of women who go to the grocery store wearing a fucking ballgown (although my dad is a Leo and he absolutely doesn’t look like this going to the grocery store LOL).

I have a podcast episode coming out soon in which I give you a blueprint on what alignment actually is, but let me just put a bit of a synopsis here…

For you to be in alignment with your life and actually feel like you can go out and take action on everything I’ve just shared, you need to make sure any trauma, dysfunctional patterns, or blockages in your body are actually cleared at the root.

Mindset work alone does not work for this because awareness isn’t healing. 80% of signals run from your body to your brain; only 20% of signals run from your brain down to your body. So whilst the mindset work here is really important, I don’t want you to be discouraged if you find it hard to actually act on these things. You find it hard to act on these things because it doesn’t feel safe to go and do this. It doesn’t feel safe to be loud, to be expressed, to feel seen, or to claim more money for yourself because of trauma in your past (whether it’s from your family or whether it’s from society) that you haven’t healed.

The thing about manifestation is that you cannot manifest what you want whilst simultaneously acting in a way that goes against that very manifestation. So if you are saying that you want to receive money with more ease, but then the minute that you sit down and try to rest and relax, you literally feel like there are 200 other things that you should be doing and that you’re doing something wrong by resting, you aren’t going to then manifest what you want because you manifest from the body.

So whilst this portal is an epic start to you actually going out and claiming your dream life, if you don’t get what you want in this portal, please do not think that you somehow are not deserving of it. It’s actually an invitation for you to realise that wishing is not enough if you don’t feel safe to actually hold that thing.

Just like it’s all well and good to say that you want an emotionally available man, but for many of us, an emotionally available man does not actually feel safe to our nervous system, so we blow that shit up the minute that we get close to it.

If something feels unfamiliar to your body, you will reject it. You will self-sabotage, push it away, and not feel safe to hold it, no matter how badly you tell me that you want it.

Sometime before August 8th, sit down and write the sentence, “The thing I’ve decided I have to trade away to keep this life is _____“ and then just watch what your hand writes.

Really try not to THINK but instead, just let your unconscious/body do the writing.

And then, answer these questions that I gave my clients before I took them through my channelled Lion’s Gate Portal exercise:

• What do I desire that I’ve been afraid to fully claim?

• I am calling in… (free write for 3-5 minutes, no filter—go big)

• I no longer identify as…

• The woman I’m becoming leads herself by…

I’d love it if you’d hit reply or drop a comment and tell me the one thing you’re done feeling like you have to “trade.”

I know, it’s “so bad of me to say.” Women bitch a lot when I do, but if you’re jealous or if this triggers you—let it be a doorway for your growth.

I’ve sat with this a lot… Why don’t I feel the mum guilt?

I mean, I was running my industry-leading 3-day event in Paris recently, and I’m not joking when I say that I kinda forgot (not kinda, actually forgot) I had a kid when I was leading those days. I didn’t miss him.

Why? Because I’m PRESENT with all that I do. I fully choose, own, and claim that I LOVE MY JOB. I loved leading those women for 3 days. Of course, once the day was over, I was excited to see him, and as soon as he saw me, his face lit up, and my heart melted.

But I didn’t spend the day feeling guilty.

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When he’s crying because I hand him to my mum as I walk out the door, yeah, my heart hurts, but I don’t feel GUILTY. I hate seeing my child sad (duh), but I’m not eaten up with guilt because of this ONE THING…

I give myself FULL PERMISSION to do what makes me happy.

Now, that doesn’t mean that every moment of the day I’m selfish and just do whatever I want to do. That’s not being a present and good mother, in my opinion.

But when my cup is empty, I will own it and give myself permission to go fill it. To ask for a babysitter to come over or for my husband to take him.

I fully own that I love my job and love working. I CHOOSE everything I do in my life.

Even if you do a job you hate, you are CHOOSING to go out and make a living for your family. You’re not bad or wrong for doing that.

But can you OWN your choices instead of being victim to them?

That’s the key here.

I know I’m a better mother when I’m happy. My job makes me happy. Working out makes me happy. Time by myself makes me happy. Calling a babysitter for 2 hours on the weekend so I can unpack our suitcases in peace makes me happy.

And the happiness flows outward to him.

He deserves caregivers who are present, regulated, and giving him attention. That’s my definition of a “good mum.”

Hanging on by a thread just to be able to say that you do it all yourself and that “no one else is raising my kid” is weird.

You do realise that literally, for as long as we’ve been around, there have been MANY people raising our kids. It’s actually a New Age “conscious parenting” BS standard now being thrown at crunchy mums, with this expectation that they should be the only ones raising their child.

I don’t want to create a mini me. I want him to be raised by a variety of people so he forms his OWN person. He steps into HIMSELF—not just follows me.

But for that to happen, he needs to know about other people, beliefs, values, opinions, and ways of doing things.

xx Monica

Everyone told me before I had Tripp that everything changes when you become a mum—women I knew had changed their entire businesses; things went up in flames; their whole identity shifted.

I didn’t want that!!!!

I loved who I was.
How my business was run.
Who I was serving.
The offers that we had.

I thought things might shift a bit, because DUH. And I knew the death and rebirth of birth itself would surely change me.

But I didn’t want things to be FULLY different. Especially because most women I knew who had gone through this didn’t already have a really strong idea of who they were prior to becoming a mother.

Then I had my baby…

And nothing really shifted. I still launched a round of my signature program that I had been doing since 2019. I still ran my renowned event, which I’ve been hosting since 2019. Things were flowing, and I loved it all!

Then, further into that first year of motherhood, things started to shift…
And I thought to myself, “Wait, I thought I avoided this.”

But it wasn’t that things shifted in this huge way where shit blew up. I could’ve kept pushing through, which is probably what a lot of women do… but my intuition was screaming at me.

I felt so lost yet had so much clarity at the same time.

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One of the incredible superpowers that you get when you become a mum is immense clarity, discernment, and intuition.

I already had an extremely strong intuition and developed psychic abilities prior to becoming a mother, but that shit just got ramped up.

It was so incredibly hard to describe to people what was happening, though… all I could say to them was “we aren’t doing it like that anymore.”

“No, I don’t want to.” was a full sentence.

And seriously—do you know how hard that is when you’re the breadwinner, and you’re trying to communicate this to your husband?? A MAN who is also your CFO/COO and the concept of “a feeling” isn’t something a man logically understands.

To a man, a feeling isn’t something that you make decisions off of. It’s not FACT.

We even had some heated meetings about it (me, Hal, and my CPO, Olivia) that ended in tears because every part of my body was screaming NO to re-launching my signature program that was literally the SOUL of my business.

Like, how could I not want to launch her again? She’s gotten results that are UNMATCHED in this industry. She’s changed nearly 1000 lives. Women have this program on their vision board. I LOVE QUEEN ALCHEMY. I cried just the other week when we officially said goodbye to even using her name for my new signature program.

(See her memorial here.)

But when Hal suggested we do another launch of her whilst I figure out our next steps because “why not?” every cell in my body was hot, burning with anger.

Because in that moment, I could have gone for the money. For what was expected of me. For what “makes sense” and for what would be safe. But my intuition was screaming no. And I wasn’t going to betray myself.

Luckily for me, I have a husband who has a hell of a lot of trust in my intuition and has seen how it never leads us astray. I have also worked my arse off, so we are sitting on a huge amount of savings that gives me the ability to be “lost” for a while until the new thing comes in. I don’t have to chase quick money or short-term cash injections.

And I want to make something really clear for you… It wasn’t that I felt lost in that I was like “who am I anymore”—it was more this feeling of confusion and lack of clarity.

Because when you experience this feeling of “being lost,” you’ve felt this before. You felt this when you were building the current version of you that is sitting in front of the screen reading this post.

All this “lost” feeling is, is you becoming the next version of yourself. You are changing your identity. You are uplevelling. You are IN the growth.

And it could’ve been so easy to reject this feeling of being lost and just keep running the business the way I always have, but I knew all that would do was suck my soul out of me and not give us the results that are possible.

So instead, I let everything slow down.

We opened up my calendar to ensure I had a lot of white space, and slowly, but surely, that deep feeling of direction and clarity came with the downloads of the new offerings and what we’re moving into.

And now I feel like we are on a fucking rocket ship. I feel so alive, so invigorated, so creative, and so excited about what we are building. And to be really honest with you, I did not have that excitement right before the feeling of feeling lost came in.

So, if you’re in the thick of your identity crisis, it’s not actually a crisis—it’s a recalibration, it’s an upgrade, it’s a shift. Do not run away from it; run into it.

P.S. I get into this more in a new podcast episode that’s coming out soon... make sure you’re subscribed on Apple/Spotify/YouTube to be notified when it’s live!

And thankfully I know that it’s not normal, and what to do about it.

I literally texted Hal, my husband, yesterday (at the time of writing this) saying ↓

He had been in NYC, and I needed to warn him that I’m FRAGILEEEE when he comes home. To the point where one of the dogs (Ma’am) peed in the basement this morning whilst I was in the gym and I cried.

I got my period back just 11 weeks postpartum, but in the last 4ish months (Tripp just turned one) my cycle has actually started to be regular. I’ve also noticed that it’s been shorter than usual for me.

I’m still ovulating around day 18, but instead of bleeding on day 30/31, I’ve been bleeding on day 26ish. That’s a cycle that’s much too short, and given my mood this week, I know that my progesterone is low.

And whilst I’m already loading up on vitamin C, zinc (both help boost your progesterone), and magnesium glycinate (which helps buffer stress responses in your brain... and progesterone gets depleted when your body is needed to make extra cortisol), I need a bit more.

Problem is, I’m still breastfeeding, and many herbs are a no-go whilst you're still a milk machine.

And so I just gotta say... Postpartum is a TRIP. Motherhood requires serious patience, nervous system awareness, a stable husband and FLEXIBILITY.

If your child is a sleeping angel, then you might not know what I’m talking about at 10 months PP... but for the rest of us... offtttttt!!!!!

I’m not as sleep-deprived as other mums, and I’ve drawn a line in the sand about his sleep recently because I cannot sacrifice myself, thinking that makes me a better mum. Reality is, when I put myself last, Tripp gets a moodier mum that doesn’t have as much patience when her nipple is getting bitten and hair being tugged harder than humanly possible.

Throw in there a huge business change BTS and the creation of an entirely new offer suite that’s being worked on, and it’s like… I mean no words—just HARD.

But also, as I’ve talked about, the ratio of hard to bliss is like 1:10. For every 10 moments of joy, there is 1 hard moment.

And still... running a business whilst it fuelled my cup is also harder than being a mother, in my experience. Because that business ratio of hard-to-bliss is like 10:1. 🤣 BUT.... I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Motherhood is the most incredible experience I’ve ever had in my life. It’s fueled my purpose in bigger, better ways and given me clarity I wouldn’t have found otherwise, I don’t believe.

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Anyway, back to my PMS... my husband, God bless him, went to our herbalist whilst he was in NYC on business and picked up an herb used in Traditional Chinese Medicine to “anchor the heart.”

“Yep, I need 1 liter of this pls, sir.”

It’s called “albizia bark and flower,” and you can get it from Paul (our herbalist) online using the code MONICA20 for 20% off.

Chasteberry, otherwise known as Vitex, is AMAZING for bad PMS; however, it can reduce milk supply, so I’m staying away from that for the time being. If my mood isn’t better next luteal phase, I’ll try a small amount of it in tincture form (Paul also has this on his website) and just monitor my milk supply. I wouldn’t recommend it though if you’re early in PP or trying to increase your supply.

Also through all this, I’m just so grateful for a husband like Hal. After Tripp went down for his morning nap, I literally crawled back into bed because, even though he slept great last night, I’m also extra tired with being in my luteal phase. And what did Hal do? Didn’t rush into his work; he crawled over and cuddled me, and then he fixed my mood. 😉💦 (I still also had a 20-min nap, which made a huge difference).

All of this to say... Breadwinner/Working Mummas... a 20-min nap isn’t you being unproductive. It’s you 10xing your time. It’s you quantum leaping time.

Because you trying to drag your feet through the day means that whilst you “save time” by not having a nap, you also take 15x as long to get through your tasks.

VERSUS, you have the nap or do slow Pilates instead of a kill-yourself workout (also me this morning), and you’ll find yourself productive and sharp for the day.

Rest IS productive.

I know we’ve been told as women that we can do anything and be anything, which is true. But we also need to be told that we’re allowed to stop.

Until next time...

xx Monica

I officially have a one-year-old, and I am not okay.

Last Friday, Tripp turned one, and I’ve never felt more sure that time is an illusion, because I’m pretty sure I gave birth approximately three days ago.

I feel like the hardest thing about all of this is the thinking that I haven’t soaked it in enough, because I wish that I could go back and spend more time with the little version of him, and soak it in more. But I actually have to give myself a bit of kudos, because I was aware this would go by so quickly. And so I made sure that I was really present with him over the last year.

And yeah, sure, some of you might think (though most of us are in the same boat) that if I wasn’t working, I would obviously be able to spend more time with him.

But you and I both know that work, in a sense, fills our cup. And I’m a better mother when I get to have my work time, because it is my creative outlet. It is my happy place, and it brings me so much joy.

For those of you who have been with me for a while, you might remember when I talked about it on my podcast: how that first week back at work, after maternity leave, I was so energised, so inspired, so lit up. Even though I was sleep-deprived, I had more energy juggling him and work than towards the end of my maternity leave.

Because, no offense to him, I was getting really bored of the “goo goo gaga” talk. I enjoy using my brain, having adult conversations, and feeling stimulated for a few hours of the day. So I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that being a working mother makes me a better mother.

I actually spent the night before his birthday at the Hilary Duff concert, which was therapeutic, to say the least. And that meant that I wasn’t spending his “birthday eve” sobbing on the couch. But I did spend Friday night sobbing on the couch after our big dog, Ma’am, decided to jump on the counter and pull off one of the pizzas that I had put blood, sweat, and tears into for dinner that night. Thank God she didn’t pull off the three carrot cakes that I had made for the birthday party. Oh, and on that same night, there was a half-eaten dead bird in Tripp’s room. So, you know, if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. But I did bawl my eyes out on Friday night, as I was scrolling through pictures on my phone from the last year.

If you don’t know my birth story, it’s definitely worth a listen, especially because there is often a lot of negativity around the birth conversation, especially in the US. The prevalence of c-sections has been rapidly increasing, and the fear-mongering around birth itself is often rooted in a lot of fear. And I get it; it’s a very intense experience.

So, if you’re wanting to have a dreamy birth, whatever that looks like for you, I would highly recommend listening to my podcast episode, especially if you are wanting to have a home birth or a fully natural birth.

Anyway, I had this epiphany that even though I feel like, “oh my gosh, was I present enough? I should have been more present with him… did I soak in enough this last year?”

I also had this realisation that with the love you feel for your child, and how obsessed you are with your child as a mother, it doesn’t matter whether you spend every second of every day staring at them and soaking them in—it will still never feel like enough.

Because how could it? The love that you feel for your child is infinite. I love my husband dearly, but that love is nothing compared to the love that I feel for my child.

I didn’t fully understand this until one of the early days of him being here, when I was freshly postpartum, where I had his poo all over me, but I wasn’t grossed out by it. Because I had this aha moment that “his poo is my poo.” In the sense that he is me. And look, I’d be grossed out if my own poo was on my hand, but the best way that I can describe it is that you’re less grossed out when a bodily fluid is your own.

That’s how I feel when I am dealing with an objectively gross bodily fluid of Tripp’s. It’s, for some reason, not gross because it’s, in a sense, mine.

So, back to this conversation of, “Did I spend enough time with him? Was I present enough?”…

What I want to share with you, if you’re a mum as well or planning to be one, is a reminder that it will never feel like enough. Even if your motherhood and work experience, juggle/dance, is actually feeling like your ideal situation.

I say this also as someone who doesn’t experience mum guilt (which I talked about in this podcast episode that I recently did). I don’t experience mum guilt because I give myself full permission to own that I love to work.

And yeah, I like to work out, and yeah, I like to have some me time. Yes, I love having our nanny so I can get a little break. I own all of that, and I love being with my child. A huge reason I’m able to be so present with him, at least in my experience, is BECAUSE of the way I am supporting myself.

When I’m with him, I’m not wishing that I could be somewhere else. I’m not stressed out about work. My brain isn’t somewhere else. I’m not split-focus. I’m not feeling resentful about not working out during the week.

I don’t feel like Hal (my husband) and I are on separate teams. Of course, our relationship looks different from what it did before we had a baby. But we are so aligned and on the same team, and all of that allows me to fully own what I want to do on a given day.

That also means owning that, for example, right now I've been going to bed really early because Tripp’s still not sleeping super well and he’s been a bit sick. So I haven’t been pushing or forcing him to get back into his sleep routine that we got really, really good at before we left for our last trip to Europe. And to do this, I’m having to sacrifice the time Hal and I would have at night because I want to go to bed early.

But by fully owning that THIS is what I need, I’m not feeling guilty about it.

Mum guilt really is just people pleasing—pleasing somebody else, somebody else’s expectations, society’s expectations, or your parents’ expectations. It leaves you fragmented and disconnected from your true self, creating internal resentment towards yourself that you project onto somebody else.

I would feel resentment, projected onto Hal, if he made me feel like we had to be doing X, Y, and Z at night together to stay strong in our relationship. I know, though, that what I need to stay strong in our relationship is good sleep.

We had this whole conversation last week about how right now, my top priority is sleep. So that means, for this little season of life—which could literally just be two weeks—it means us spending a little bit less time together one-on-one.

It means not doing the things I usually like to do at nighttime, whether it’s reading my book, watching a show, or catching up on a little bit of work. I’m not doing that at night because if I don’t have that good sleep, then I’m not functional or happy; the day is ruined, I can’t be a present mother, I can’t be a present wife for those moments that Hal and I have together throughout the day, I can’t be as regulated, etc.

I know YOU GET ITTTT.

And I hope this gives you permission, ladies, to really own your motherhood experience, to stop blaming external factors, and start to actually sit down with yourself, your family, your husband, even your kids if you have older kids, and really outline what it is that Mum needs in order to be the best mum.

Remove the shame that you have associated with that, and identify where the shame is coming from, or who it is coming from. Because it’s not yours.

So, to sum this up… motherhood has been the most incredible experience of my life so far. I’m saying this as I am about to burst into tears. This truly has been the best year of my life. Of course, there have been challenging moments, and the sleep deprivation, and feeling like sometimes you’re pulled in a million directions.

And of course it’s challenging when, especially as a business owner, you want to go into an 18-hour workflow because you have a new idea, and you physically can’t.

But it’s also been the greatest year of my life.

And through every challenge, there is a breakthrough. Through every challenge, there is an uplevel. There is a lesson, there is expansion. It’s in those moments that I remind myself my child chose me, and that we get the children we need to learn the most valuable lessons from.

I fully believe, and have experienced, how motherhood is not a setback. It is only a quantum leap.

This last year has unleashed a new part of my purpose and mission: To change the narrative of motherhood and bring in this positive conversation. Plus helping mothers feel more supported in their relationships with their men, reducing their mental load, and feeling aligned whilst also having to hold so much in their minds, shoulders, and emotions.

And for any woman out there that is worried about how “hard this is”… the best way that I can put it is that the ratio of hard to joyful is 1:3000. Those little moments of hard can be obliterated so quickly by your baby’s smile or giggle or them reaching out for you. That experience literally doesn’t exist in any other area of life. In business, the ratio of hard to joy is like 2:5.

So, just to put it into perspective, we’re all out there killing it and continuing to show up day after day in our careers, and there is way less reward found in that than there is in motherhood.

xx Monica