I was nervous to write this because of that conversation and the standard that we’ve set for women: a mom proves how much she cares by how much of it she did on her own, without extra help. Think of those who write off a mom who has several nannies… yeah, caught you there. A postpartum doula said this to a reporter this spring what people say to her: “It’s supposed to be hard and it’s supposed to be grueling. If you’re doing something for yourself to make it not hard or grueling, well, you’re not a good mom.” If you become efficient in motherhood, people can see it as a corner cut, yet a man who finds a way to apply that in business is a forward thinker.

Depending on whether it’s a man or a woman, we’re going to provide a different verdict. Even if it is for doing the exact same thing.

So here is my AI journey and what I’ve learned. For about three years, my banana bread sank in the center. I thought it was because I pulled it out too early, but even when I left it in to the point that it got deep dark brown on top (where I debated whether it was burnt), it still sank. Then I fixed it in about four minutes. I pasted the recipe into ChatGPT and asked it to adjust based on the sinking and where I was located (Boulder, Colorado, high altitude). The updated recipe created the perfect loaf with a top that stayed flat.

AI only recently became more heavily integrated into my life because I started with the small stuff, the kind of task where being wrong is pretty low stakes and you can get a quick fix and move on.

Then this past May I went to a conference where a session focused on one question: “How can mothers actually use AI to make their lives lighter?”

We talk a lot about mental load and the invisible list that a mother carries continually, one that never resolves itself. It is the administrative work that comes with mothering, and truthfully, a lot of it can come off your plate. The clearest example for me is a chef that I built using Claude. I call him Marco and his entire job is to decide what my family eats each week, because meal planning became the bane of my existence after two kids. He builds the meal plan, compiles the grocery list, cross-checks all the ingredients on all the recipes so I am not overbuying any one ingredient, and then programs it directly into my Instacart order from Sprouts so I can order immediately, or provides me with a bulleted shopping list complete with quantities.

Why does this work so well for me? I programmed him with very specific parameters. I added in exact ages for my kids, our location and that we have access to local fish, what type of meat we like, and the diversity of protein per week. I added that none of us have allergies, that I limit processed food and only buy organic, and which brands I like. I need leftovers for at least two additional meals after we eat. And while I love spicy food, my husband and kids need the heat level reduced to a “below mild” (and it tells me when to pull my portion out for cooking in case I want something with more spice). Marco also has a list of my toddler’s favorite snacks, so the list either reminds me to check what we are low on or adds them automatically.

Is every recipe that I get going to earn a Michelin star? No, but they are good enough that we enjoy eating them. But I love to cook, and the admin work before starting to cook was slowly wearing me down. I hate the planning, cross-referencing, and grocery list making. I was able to hand off that chore and get the activity that I loved back. And the best thing: Marco helps me aggregate cooking instructions so when I am batch cooking, I can have an order of operations for the entire cooking process versus one meal. It prevents me from repeating tasks that could have been grouped together.

Once I saw how I could implement it for dinner, I started noticing where else I could take the weight off.

One fun thing I did was use AI to audit my postpartum closet. I uploaded photos of my closet and described what I wanted to evolve my style to. It helped me find the pieces that I was missing and where it was worth investing. Just having the direction helped me find my style postpartum again and made me feel like a human. I sent a photo of the length of my jeans and it sent back the exact length that I needed to hem to get the most flattering cut. All of this may sound vain, but for me, postpartum was largely about finding my body again and feeling at home in it. A lot of that included owning clothes that I felt good in instead of holding on to items that were never going to fit my expanded ribcage again. From this project, I donated or sold about 45% of my closet. This was about me finding myself rather than vanity.

I’ve since connected Claude to my Gmail, and every morning it reviews emails and tells me what is on our family calendar for that day. It helps surface the important items that can get lost in the subscriptions, such as school reminders and priority emails. It provides me one summary of everything, so I don’t have to spend my morning parsing through a full inbox after my nanny comes.I also have it draft the morning text to my husband with the reminders that I would otherwise be verbalizing across the kitchen before he’s fully awake enough to remember.

I have so many more examples, but maybe I’ll save those for another edit where I teach you how to do it, if that is something you are interested in. Let me give you one more thing. I use it for my business too.

I just had my last day in corporate after more than ten years working at some of the biggest companies out there: Facebook, Amazon, TikTok. It was an amazing experience, but now, with two kids, I want to be present more and to dedicate any time away from them to something I feel passionate about. Claude helped me with LLC setup end to end. We started with a business plan. It walked me through legal docs on filing an LLC, and when I moved it told me what I needed to bring my business with me to North Carolina, so I wasn’t spending hours combing through state agency websites. As I head into coaching, it is auditing my contracts to ensure that I’m legally sound with my practice.

Here’s the difference between where I started and where I am now. At the beginning, AI was a mindless tool for me and a quick fix. I would copy and paste and just take the answer. Now it’s become my teacher, and I’m learning and getting fluent in the things I want to be expert in much more quickly than if I were alone. The learning curve that it takes to master something has stopped being a blocker for me.

There is something bigger here that I think is worth mentioning, and it especially matters for you (since women are my audience on here). Many women do not have mentors or built-in access that help a lot of men-owned businesses take off quickly. For the first time, we have something that can help level the playing field and give us a shot at what we set out to do, but only if we start embracing and taking advantage of it. But we’re not there yet. Across a study of more than 318,000 people, men’s use of AI tools surpasses women’s at 47.8% (women at 39.3%). Women are not leaning in nearly as much, and I wonder if the sophistication of use is another place where we would see even clearer divergence.

But I don’t think it’s because we as women are less curious. We’re nervous about being judged. Here’s another study that I found interesting: researchers had 1,026 software engineers review the same piece of code. They split the group and told half of them that AI had helped write it. Those who heard that said the engineer was less competent by 9%. That 9% was the average, and the drop was greater when the engineer was a woman. The code wasn’t rated any differently). So for many of us, and this is validated by research, there is a price for saying we use AI as a woman. It’s greater than what men face.

And one more, because I’ve seen these exact comments here on Substack and I’m sure I’ll get an eye-roll. I use it for nap schedules. Why? Many of us pay for programs built around infant sleep: Taking Cara Babies, Moms on Call, etc. Why not? They are wonderful guidance for a lot of us who don’t know anything about infant sleep. What AI helps me do is aggregate the research behind all of these approaches into one place where I can actually read and compare when I have my 20 minutes of freedom. I’m not handing my baby’s schedule to a machine and following it to a T. I use the aggregation to learn quickly, and then I save the rest of my energy for paying attention to my baby and reading their cues to figure out what’s going to work best for them based on the aggregation.

So, to sum everything up: do I hand off tasks so I never have to think about them again? Some, yes. But I don’t think they were costing me intelligence, which is what many studies about AI claim. These tasks were costing me capacity, and taking them off my plate cleared room in my head for the things I actually cared about giving my attention to.

It’s summer, and my kids are going to bed at 8:30 because the sun is still up and we don’t go to sleep when the sun isn’t even sleeping. Half the time I’m too exhausted for the fight, and I let them stay up. The window that I used to have to clean the house and get ready for the next day is gone by the time they are asleep.

I’ll clean what I can, but usually I just brush my teeth, do a small skincare routine, and try to fall asleep before my 11-month-old wakes me up from teething. The administrative to-dos used to continually circulate in my head, adding their own hum of stress before bed. So before you reach for easy judgment on me because of what I use, know this. I did not lean into something new to cut corners. I did it because I was able to find my way back to being more present for my family.

Send this to a mother who would recognize herself in it.

The Receipts:

Acar, O. A., Gai, P. J., Tu, Y., & Hou, J. (2025, August). Research: The hidden penalty of using AI at work. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2025/08/research-the-hidden-penalty-of-using-ai-at-work

Cranney, K., Delecourt, S., & Koning, R. (2026). Global evidence on gender gaps and generative AI over time (Working Paper No. 25-023). Harvard Business School. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=66548

Gai, P. J., Hou, J., & Tu, Y. (2025). Competence penalty is a barrier to the adoption of new technology [Working paper]. SSRN. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5255039

Latifi, F. (2026, April 13). Are good mothers allowed to sleep (train?). What’s the Vibe.

My labor had gone more than twenty-four hours before her heart rate began to drop, and then everything moved very fast. What I remember is not the surgery but what came after. I walked bent forward with one hand against the wall. I wasn’t able to carry her and walk at the same time, because carrying her meant standing tall. Yet standing tall was the one thing my body refused to do. Once I was already in a chair, I had to have someone lower her into my arms if I wanted to hold her.

There is one particular morning that I keep going back to. I woke up and the first thing I wanted, before the nurse, before coffee, before anything else, was for my mother to walk in and hold me. Not the baby. Me. I wanted someone to hold me the exact careful way I was holding my daughter, in the two-arm way you hold something you are afraid of dropping. I wanted someone to see me bent over and split open, and to tell me she believed I could still hold my head high.

My mother has been gone for more than ten years. I was twenty-four when I lost her to colon cancer, a health struggle that she battled for 5+ years. I reach for her constantly since becoming a mother but then realize that she’s gone, and I don’t have anyone in that space that I can reach for instead. My want has no destination, it points at any empty space and because of that my longing continues to circulate with nowhere to go.

This is the part all new mothers are warned about. Everyone will come to see and hold your baby and you get told to prepare for no one to hold you.. I had heard it, seen it, and watched videos about it on Instagram. I had probably said it myself, nodding along with women who were further in it than I currently was. Yet I did not comprehend what it actually meant until I was the one bent over in that bed, because that is how nearly all of it has worked with me. You are told, and told, and told something but it will stay just a sentence until the morning you wake up and experience it in your own body.

Under the sentence there is an older arrangement, the one where a woman’s own mother steps in and mothers her while she learns to mother. She is the one who remembers you as the small baby. She held you the way you are holding yours right now. When she is not there, you see the whole shape of it for the first time, because you are standing in the exact place she was meant to stand.

Underneath all of that though is something deeper that I think many of you have likely experienced. A woman’s own mother is supposed to mother her while she learns to be a mother. Your mother is the one who remembers you as a baby. She held you the way you are holding yours right now and rocked you on those long and lonely night. You do not realize how much you were counting on her being there until she is gone, and you are looking at the spot she should be and feeling her loss.

That feeling came back in full force when Scarlett was born, two years later. This birth was a VBAC, the birth I had dreamed of after the unplanned c-section and I was so proud to have advocated enough to make it happen.Yet again there was a complication with retained placenta that no one caught at the time. And even without that, there were particular vaginal wounds that I had never experienced yet, and all I wanted (again) was my mother to tell me what to do to make it all better. To tell me if that pain I felt when sitting was normal, or the pressure in my uterus when walking was normal or something I should get checked out.

My husband was, and is, wonderful. He tried to be everything to take care of me. But here’s the thing. He can’t fill the place of a mom. I wanted the person who knew me as a baby, the one who held me first. The one who wouldn’t see me as an adult (the only way he knew me), but would see me and take care of me the way that I needed.

Majority of my friends can call their parents on an ordinary Tuesday with the small ask of “can you take the girls for an hour?” Their mothers get in the car and show up.

Early in my first pregnancy a doctor asked me about my mother’s own pregnancies, getting the history to see if there was anything that may show up in mine. I did not have a single answer to give him. I was born in post-Soviet Russia in 1991, and my father was at home while my mother labored in the hospital. Taht’s the way it was. I had to build my own medical history out of a man’s secondhand memory from a day he was not in the room for.

I keep a running list of what I would ask her, and it never gets shorter. Did she ever feel split in half by two small children, the way I do most days with feeling guilty that loving one feels like not loving the other enough? How did she come back into herself and her own body after birth?

We moved into a new house last week, and she was a gifted interior designer. All I want is for her to walk through it one time and tell me what goes where so I can stop guessing. So she can even take that load off.

I want to know if she knew for certain she was done having babies after she had three of us, because I still do not know if I am finished yet and it hangs over my head. She is the one I want to call to ask.

I cannot call her. I can only listen to a voicemail from February 4, 2015 that says “I love you, love momma”.

Here’s the other thing. Before I became the traditional mother - the one who had the babies, I voluntarily stepped into that role. I am the oldest child in my family by a wide margin. My sister is thirteen years younger and my brother 5 years. My sister was 12 when our mom died, without the ability to really understand what that would mean as she grew into womanhood. Meanwhile, I had our mother for over twenty years. She watched me graduate, carried boxes up the stairs of my first apartment in New York. My sister had homecoming, and prom, and the long drive to University of Arizona with the passenger seat filled by a dad who tried so hard to fill the shoes. But a dad can’t do it the same, so I also climbed in. I answered the phone during the 2 am call and learned the boys’ names and the friends who were not really friends. For a long time I was less her sister than the stand-in mom, and truthfully I think it cost us both something. A stand-in is not the older sister you need, and she needed me to be that too. I was trying to fill a hole that could not actually be filled, and trying to do that changed what we meant to one another. I have spent years finding my way back to being someone she can just call to complain to about a bad day, instead of the one who swoops in to fix whatever is going wrong.

She is moving into her first real apartment now, in Los Angeles, and I am getting on a plane a month later to make sure she has enough in it to call it home. My mother did that for me once, in a walk-up in New York yet she cannot do it for my sister. So I will, I’ll take her place and know the whole time that I am not the person my sister is actually missing.

There is a daydream I keep on replay. My mother at our front door, coming to take the girls to the park. The squeals my girls make as they run down the hallway yelling “grandma’s here”, the way they still do when my dad pulls up. She is that second pair of hands the girls trust as much as they trust mine, which I need because right now the hands are only mine, and I carry the whole load on my own.

I have a book in our house with photographs of my mother, Karina, and my husband’s mother, Corrine, who is also passed before we had our girls. My two-year-old knows them both by name. She’ll turn the pages and say “Grandma Karina, grandma Corrine” the same way she knows the names of most things around her now, and as through they are simply people who happen to be elsewhere. She is at the age where she is starting to notice how families are shaped, and she points them out on her shows. I know the questions are coming, and I already know I will be the one to tell her that the two women in her favorite book are the two she will never get to know in person.

So here is where all the wanting I’m writing about goes. I answer before my sister has finished the sentence. I learn where my daughters hurt before they know how to say it, so I can fix it before they even know. I become the second pair of hands, because the second pair of hands for me is not coming. Some of it, I know, is for the woman in that hospital bed who needed someone desperately the day her first babys cries transformed her into a mother.

Scarlett is almost 11 months old now, and yet I still want all the time. I’ve given that want a direction, and while it will not fill the hole - not for me, not for my sister or my two girls, who will only ever know their grandmothers by name, I have also stopped pretending that it will. One day, a long way from here, I will be the one in that hospital room, who will lower a granddaughter into my daughter’s outstretched arms, the same way I ached for my mother to lower mine. That is what the healing turned out to be. It’s not the hole closing, it me understanding the pain can soften, even if it never full heals.

If this read true, send it to another mother who would recognize herself in it.

If I’m honest, we were kind of insufferable back then. Young and all over each other, and I'm fairly sure you blushed. You definitely rolled your eyes the night I set off the smoke alarm trying to sear a steak I had no business searing. And you watched the two of us bicker about things I could not tell you a single detail of now, because we were too new to know what was actually worth it. That's the year I turned into a wife. You were patient with me throughout that entire life stage.

Then you watched me become a mother. You sat with me while I waited for him to get off a work call with my hands shaking,try to tie bandanas on the dogs so they could be the ones to tell him they were about to be big brothers. You watched me as I held the pregnancy test like it might change its mind.

It was through your door that I became someone’s mother. I was so terrified while at the same time the happiest I’ve ever been. All those long quiet nights nursing her, and I claimed her out loud as mine. And here's the one I need you to keep for me. The nights I woke up in the dark and put my hand flat on her chest just to feel it go up. You waited with me for it, every single time. And I know you let the breath out when I did.

You've still got her first steps stored inside you somewhere. The living room, both hands out, and that wobble that isn't quite walking and isn't crawling either. I think you kept it on purpose, like a memory receipt. Which is honestly why I'm not as scared this time, with the second one still deciding whether she's even going to bother, because you already showed me the proof once. And because of that I know she'll get there.

The second time around, you heard me rock a baby at 3 am with a lot less patience. I was so confused on why the 3 am wakeup was even allowed to exist.The first time I did it with wonder. The second time I’m doing it like a woman who has somehwere to be early the next morning.

You held the hard things too, and I don’t say that lightly. You were thre when we lost two grandparents, and you held our grief while we learned how to feel safe inside our own walls again.

And you were so full. The original backyard blowouts with all our friends that turned into water tables and picnic blankets filled with watermelon and Colorado peaches in July. The memory of a toddler pulling fruit off plants, especially those tomatoes, she loved those. Your soil was generous for us every single year.

You watched my toddler become the sassy two year old she is now. You laughed, I’m sure, the first time I called her name and she marched over and said “what do you need, Mom.” That sass at two. You shook your head with me.

Which brings me to the biggest lesson I learned: the fire pit.

We talked about the fire pit for four years and we built it two months before we left. I keep thinking about this . The whole time we lived inside you, the biggest lesson was the one saved for the very end. Stop talking about the thing and just go do the thing. We finally did, and then we handed it to whoever is coming after us. But the lesson comes with me, packed in suitecase and to the next house: the fire pit gets built in the first month.

Saying goodbye to you means two things at once. One is how much I am going to miss everything we built inside you: every ordinary milestone that came with every year. The other is that our life is getting bigger. Our family is growing, and it is time for something new.

So keep our memories inside your walls. I hope you cherish them the way we do. I hope the next family understands what you are. That you are not just where things happen, but the thing that holds all the memories when they do.

We’ll load the car, and we’ll look back at you the way you look back at a first-day-of-school photo, at how big everyone got when you weren’t counting. And then we’ll say it out loud, because you taught us to stop saving the important things for later. We love you, house. Thank you for all of it

If you’re reading this, whoever you are, just build the next fire pit early. Don’t wait four years and miss your shot.

My shirt is soaked through on the right side, where my little girl has been sweating against me for hours. Her hair is done up in French braid in her damp hair, because braiding it was the one thing I could do with my hands that felt like helping in an effort to prevent her hair from sticking to the combination of mucus, tears, and medicine coating her cheeks. She ends up taking the medicine, but she cries. I wipe the sleep out of my own eyes and tell her she is so brave, and I mean it more than I have meant anything in my life.

This is the part I want to tell you about. Not the diagnosis, though I will give you that too.

It started so small that the people who love her most missed it. Our nanny thought her eyes looked a little red on Monday. Daycare noticed some puffiness on Thursday that we didn’t even catch. By Friday though I saw it and called our pediatrician who said allergies and sent us home with children’s Zyrtec. On Saturday I thought it may be good to get her into fresh air and took her to get a popsicle at the farmers market. When we got back the swelling got worse and a fever hit at 102.2. The nurses hotline said a virus and to give tylenol. She slept in my bed that night and in the morning she could barely open her eyes.

There was no question or hesitation after that. I packed the diaper bag for the baby, changed into leggings, and we drove the fifty minutes to the children’s emergency room. We walked in around eight on a Sunday and they put us in a room right away. A room with no windows that was sterile even for a children’s hospital. The kind of room where cabin fever sets in within a few hours, where you are keeping a fussing baby quiet while doctors talk and your sick girl cries and asks to go home, and where you trade off who holds whom based on what your toddler wants. Except mostly she wants you, and so it is you.

I stayed the nights, because I am the one she calls out for in the dark. So I was the one there for the vital checks every three hours, the IV replacements, the doctors asking me for updates while I was barely awake. I tried singing “Baby Shark” and “You Are My Sunshine” while fighting down tears to keep her calm (it came out broken and barely audible). My husband and I harmonized these songs while she was in the CT machine so she would hold still. I combed sweat out of her hair and braided it again so she would look like a princess. This is what my nights were made of these last few days.

By the second day it was the worst it would get. Her face, her hands, and her feet had all swollen up. I looked down at her and did not recognize my own child. Her eyes had narrowed almost shut, and I begged them for something, anything, to bring the swelling down, because if her eyes closed all the way, that was it. She would lose the last of the courage she had left. I knew that if she couldn’t see the screen, then Daniel Tiger and Elmo couldn’t reach her either, and at this point they were holding her together nearly as much as I was.

At the very end of that second day, they finally had a name for it, and it was almost funny. Epstein-Barr or Mono. Famously known by all as “the kissing disease”.

Here it is, the part where I know a lot of you just relaxed.

And I hope that is the only version you ever meet. But here is what “just mono” looks like in my two-year-old. It is a high fever that does not always come down when you medicate it. It is tonsils swollen so large that breathing gets hard and loud, with an alarm going off in the night because her oxygen saturation drops to 86. It is a child who will not eat or drink because it hurts too much to swallow. It my ten-month-old baby at home who is probably going to catch it next because her sister shares everything with her. It is missing the morning your baby’s first tooth comes through, because your other baby needs you in a hospital an hour away. None of that is “just mono”.

Mono is supposed to be the mild one, especially in someone this small. That is exactly why the phrase exists. It is also why the version that isn’t mild makes you take a step back and really wonder if ‘just mono’ exists.

For the first two days, before they landed on Epstein-Barr, they kept saying a different word. Kawasaki. If you watch Grey’s Anatomy, you may know what I mean and you may hear Meredith Grey’s voice saying they caught it in time. If you don’t know what it is, your first instinct as a mother is to Google it in a very uncomfortable vinyl chair, and the words that pop out at you and stay are ‘myocarditis’, and ‘inflammation of the heart valves’, and ‘coronary artery aneurysms’, and ‘lifelong’.

So I asked everyone, about ten times a day, every round, every new face at the door:“Do you know yet?” “Is it that?” “Have you ruled it out?”Why are you handing me this word if it is only a dart you are throwing at a wall.

And the other thing - big children’s hospitals are teaching hospitals, which is great becasue someone has to learn, and I want there to be a next generation of people who know how to help a child. But honestly, not on my kid, and not this week. I aimed every question at the most senior person in the room. I did not want to watch the residents whisper in the back and try things out. I am not an MD and my instinct is not a medical degree. I am also not someone who takes things at face value, and I wanted confirmation from every person in that room, because my daughter’s health was the thing on the line.

In this instance the word ‘motherhood’ really changed for me. It went beyond just the meals and the school pickup and the playing on the floor. It is sitting in a windowless room advocating for your child to people trained to know more than you, and being right anyway.

And then there is the other had pill, that became a very easy one to take: there are no rules in a hospital. Screen time was the only thing that gave her any peace, so she had as much Daniel Tiger, Sesame Street, and Moana as she wanted. Ice cream for dinner was the only thing she would swallow, therefore ice cream became dinner. A cookie was what made her smile, so I brought the best cookies from the best bakery in town. In these hard moments, you take the wins you can find. That doesn’t mean I fully relented, I still carried homemade food up there every day, and on the days I couldn’t I doordashed from the couple of places I trust to source things well, and then I watched most of it go uneaten and I did not let myself care, which if you know me at all is its own small miracle. I am usually all the way inside what goes into my kids.

I want to name the people who made it survivable, because I will never see most of them again but they deserve to be recognized for what they did.

• The nurse who found a toy doctor kit so my daughter could pretend like she was also in charge by checking mom’s heart.

• The nurse who peeled off the arm tape holding the IV that was cutting into her skin and replaced it with a soft mesh sleeve so it stopped hurting.

• The nurse who fought for IV Tylenol after the oral medicine turned traumatic on day two.

• The nurse who thought to blow lidocaine onto her skin so the IV needle went into something already numb.

• The radiology tech who figured out how to strap her reindeer stuffie into the velcro panel of the CT machine so she never once had to let go of it.

• The nurse who came back with a whole stack of stickers and helped her cover her hospital gown in them.

You have my forever blessing, each of you because you made me feel like my baby feel was the most important patient you had.

They sent us home and you would think that is the happy ending and mostly it is. For me, getting sent home is its own kind of fear. I start to question ‘what if they missed something? What if the diagnosis is wrong? What if she gets worse again in the middle of the night and we are fifty minutes away now instead of one hallway from the alarm that would have caught it?’

I can write this as I sit next to her while she sleeps, which even tonight is still in my bed. I saw her come back to herself today before we were allowed to come home. I saw her smiles that I missed the past few days, along with her silliness as she pointed to the red light on her toe monitor and said ‘My pink light is working’. That doesnt’ mean that I’m not worried at all. I’m still putting my hand on her forehead as she sleeps next to me to make sure the fever is still under check, because some part of me has not entirely left that room, and I may not for a while.

So when someone reads this and says, “oh, just mono, I had that”, I am not going to argue. I really truly hope you did have the easy one. I hope it was two weeks on the couch and nothing worse. But I need you to know the other version exists. The bad version of any illness or infection can exist and the mother sitting in that room singing “Baby Shark” with her face wet is not overreacting. That mom is fighting and advocating for her child while also handing over control of her child to someone else.

If you say “just mono” to me I will nod. And then I will go check that my daughter is breathing normally.

If this read true, send it to another mother who would recognize herself in it.

Would I, could I, hold your hand?

I would not, could not, hold your hand.

Not in the kitchen. Not on the stair.

Not because I don't want you.

Because I have nothing left to spare.

At nine o’clock, my husband becomes Sam-I-Am. Not because he is relentless. He isn’t, and not because the thing he is offering is unwanted. It isn’t. He is a good man offering something I have always loved. But after a day of being climbed on, latched to, tugged at, cried for, and followed into the bathroom, I am the exhausted creature moving through her own life with a plate she cannot take one more bite from.

It is nine o’clock and the house is finally quiet. I have just come off a two-hour bedtime relay. First my daughter, who needs me to rock her and hold her hand until she closes her eyes and I can sneak away. Then the baby, who will only fall asleep on me, latched and half-dreaming, one small fist knotted into my hair and the other gripping the collar of my shirt like she owns it.

I lie down in the dark and feel my husband move toward me. The hand on the small of my back, the comment about my butt, the kiss that goes a beat too long, the arm that comes around to pull me closer. And every cell in my body says: not now, I cannot do one more.

It happens in smaller ways too, and in ways that make me feel crueler than I am. I pull away from a kiss one beat early. When he hugs me, I put my arms around him but do not quite sink in, performing the correct shape of a hug while some part of me stays standing outside it. Sometimes I hear myself saying no before he has even asked a question. I change clothes away from him now, because I cannot absorb one more comment about my body and my breasts. And the thing is, I’m not ashamed of my body and I still want him to find me attractive. The problem is that he still sees my breasts as part of the woman he desires while I currently experience them as a food source and a pair of body parts that have been on call through the night and will be needed again in the morning (or in just a few hours). It is a strange thing to experience the same part of yourself as both sustenance and invitation.

Then, because guilt likes evidence, I catalog every small withdrawal: the unfinished kiss, the rigid hug, and the shirt changed behind a closed door. I watch myself pull away from a man I still want and wonder what kind of wife does that.

My husband notices, even when he pretends not to. He makes a joke, does the butt pat and the too-long hug and the “well, maybe tonight,” and when I say not tonight he lets it go with grace. Every time he takes the rejection gracefully and I feel both relieved and worse. He misses his wife and I miss being her too.

For a long time I thought this meant something was wrong with my marriage. It did not. My marriage was simply where I noticed it and motherhood was where it began.

I have been pregnant, then nursing, then pregnant while nursing, then giving birth and going straight back to nursing. By the second baby I could not remember the last stretch when my body belonged only to me. It has been on call with no appointment necessary, around the clock, for years. At some point it began protecting itself from the next hand before checking whose hand it was. My skin would recoil before my heart and my mind could make sense of touch.

This is not low libido. My Kindle would like to enter evidence. I still read romantasy, and desire finds me perfectly well on the page. My imagination works and my body works. I can become interested, aroused, entirely myself. But a book waits for me. It does not reach for me before I am ready, does not turn a kiss into a question I have to answer, does not make an ordinary moment feel as though it might become one more decision about what my body is willing to give. I decide when to open it, how far to follow the wanting, and when to close it. That control matters more than I understood.

After years of my body answering other people’s hunger and comfort and schedules and needs, I want to be the one who decides when it becomes available again. I want to turn toward my husband because I felt the wanting arrive. I just do not want it to be because my body was drafted into one more need before I had found my way back inside it.

I came across and idea that helped make sense of what I was feeling. Sex researcher, Emily Nagoski, has a model that explains desire as an accelerator and a brake. The accelerator notices things that turn you on. The brake notices everything that tells your body, "Not now." The surprising part is that both can be working at the same time. A person can retain the capacity for fantasy, arousal, and desire while something about the context engages the brakes. This was the first explanation that sounded like my actual life. The accelerator was not broken and I can prove it becasue I was reading five-hundred-page books about winged men to prove it (hello Rhysand). In my case, the brakes seemed to be responding to exhaustion, anticipated pressure, and the feeling that the moment had not begun with me.

There is also a name for one particularly sharp form of physical aversion some mothers feel while nursing: breastfeeding aversion and agitation. A few of my friends went through this and couldn’t explain it. Women describe an intense urge to unlatch and get away, even while loving the child they are feeding. In one of the few substantial studies on it, around 700 breastfeeding women described the aversion and the guilt that came with those feeling. That research was about nursing, not husbands, and breastfeeding aversion is not the same thing as pulling back when your partner reaches for you. But it helped me understand something I hadn’t had words for before: the body can reject touch without rejecting the person attached to it.

You can love the baby and your husband and still want their touch away from you. This is what is so confusing.

What struck me most when I started reading was how little there was to read. We have language for when a mother does not make enough milk. We measure when women resume intercourse after birth. We ask whether libido has come back. We have far less language for what it feels like to spend years with a body that is almost never off duty from being needed by someone.

The story we are handed is that a mother’s body is endlessly available, to the baby, to the toddler, to the partner, to everyone, and that a good mother gives and gives and the giving costs her nothing. Nobody mentions that touch has a budget, that a body can be spent, that a nervous system pressed on all day without a single break may start guarding itself against the next hand, no matter whose hand it is. And nobody warns you how guilty you will feel when the hand you avoid belongs to the person you chose.

This is where Green Eggs and Ham fails me. The whole point of the book is that the creature finally tries the thing and discovers he loves it. He becomes the happy convert. But I already love it. I already know I love my husband’s hands. I remember the version of us that could not keep them off each other. I remember being the woman who changed clothes in front of him slowly because I wanted him to look. There is no plot twist waiting in which I discover I wanted him all along. I never forgot. I am simply so far past full that the wanting and the being-able-to-have have moved into separate rooms.

This is not a marriage problem. My husband is just the last person to reach for a body that has already been claimed all day. He gets what remains after the nursing and the rocking and the carrying and the climbing, after the hands pulling my hair and the feet in my ribs, after the toddler has used my body as a car and the baby has used it as food. Then he reaches for me because he misses me..

So this is my ode to my husband. Not please stop touching me forever. Please understand what the flinch is and what it is not. It is not the end of us, not a verdict on you, not evidence that I have stopped wanting you, not a body that has forgotten pleasure.

It is a body that has been generous past the edge of its reserves. I do not want you to stop desiring me. I want the room to feel desire begin inside me before it becomes something I am being asked to return. I want to come back to you because there is finally a me available to come back.

I still want the version of us with our hands all over each other. I do not believe she is gone. I think she is waiting on the far side of this season, when my body finally clocks out of a job that currently runs no set hours. Until then, the most romantic thing you can do is give me the undistrubed side of the bed, and let me miss you a little from it. The missing is the proof that we’re still there.

If this read true, send it to another mother who would recognize herself in it.

References

Bancroft, J., Graham, C. A., Janssen, E., & Sanders, S. A. (2009). The dual control model: Current status and future directions. The Journal of Sex Research, 46(2–3), 121–142. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224490902747222

Graham, C. A., Sanders, S. A., & Milhausen, R. R. (2006). The sexual excitation/sexual inhibition inventory for women: Psychometric properties. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 35(4), 397–409. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-006-9041-7

Nagoski, E. (2015). Come as you are: The surprising new science that will transform your sex life. Simon & Schuster.

Yate, Z. M. (2017). A qualitative study on negative emotions triggered by breastfeeding: Describing the phenomenon of breastfeeding/nursing aversion and agitation in breastfeeding mothers. Iranian Journal of Nursing and Midwifery Research, 22(6), 449–454. https://doi.org/10.4103/ijnmr.IJNMR_235_16

The first stretch was exactly what you want. The high school dance team. The Rotary Club. Restored cars with their hoods gleaming. An ambulance, a police cruiser, and then the fire trucks, which my toddler received like a religious experience. Candy arcing into the street. This is small-town Americana at its most wholesome, and I love it without a trace of irony.

Then, behind one of the floats, a sign. Behind the next one, another. Anti-Trump. Anti-RFK, one of them a cartoon with a worm crawling out of it, the kind of image I would not choose to put in front of a two-year-old if I had any say. I did not notice the first sign so much as I noticed the pattern. Float, cause. Float, cause. By the third or fourth one, it stopped reading as a coincidence and started reading as the theme.

I know it was not just me, because within a few minutes my husband walked back from the front with a look on his face and asked, “Have you noticed all of these?” The family we came with said the same thing, almost word for word. Three adults arriving at the same discomfort separately, at a children’s parade.

I am not talking about the guy running for mayor with his family waving from a decorated car. That is wholesome. That is small-town democracy, and I appreciate it. My kids can watch that all day. I am talking about adult political statements staged inside one of the few community traditions still organized largely around children’s delight, an event families attend precisely because it promises fire trucks, candy and uncomplicated joy.

The thing I object to is not politics. It is political combat, and the reflex that turns every shared surface into a site of persuasion. There are places built for argument: rallies, town halls, campaign events, the ballot box. A children’s parade does not have to be one of them.

This is not a complaint about one side. It happened to be anti-Trump and anti-RFK signage that day because of where we lived. In another town, the signs might point in the opposite political direction. I have seen graphic anti-abortion signs held along parade routes and outside schools, images no small child should have to process. Calgary eventually restricted the size of advocacy signs displayed on public property within 150 metres of schools during school days. It is not a ban on advocacy. It is a recognition that proximity and audience matter. The cause on the sign changes. The problem does not.

A few places have started drawing the line on paper. This year, Juneau’s Fourth of July parade committee added a rule telling participants that the parade was not the place for political opposition, picketing signs or language intended to incite. Organizers asked instead for what they called a “Patriotic, Positive and Fun experience for all.” I do not think a parade should need a rule like that. I understand why they wrote one.

We are already saturated. Turn on the television, open Instagram, and there is a polarizing message waiting before your coffee. The quiet assumption seems to be that every surface is a fair place to make the argument, that no square of ordinary life gets to be left alone anymore.

My children will learn about politics. They should. School elections, mock votes for president, the history of how any of it works. That is real education. It belongs in a setting where an adult can provide context and children can ask questions. They will have their entire lives to become citizens. What I object to is the version that arrives before the context can: volatile adult language and imagery dropped in front of a toddler who cannot yet ask what it means, in a setting that promised candy and fire trucks. The images are far too young for them to hold.

For the Fourth of July this year, we chose the little neighborhood parade instead. It is essentially four-wheelers dressed in balloons and streamers and a pack of kids flinging candy at each other. No cause. No message. Just noise and sugar and a toddler completely undone by a decorated ATV. It was everything the big parade used to be.

Kids get a handful of years when a fire truck is the biggest thing that has ever happened to them. A few short years before the world hands them everything else, the arguments and the sides and the full weight of it, whether we guard the interval or not.

The parade is one of the last rooms built entirely for them. The least we can do is not walk in and start rearranging the furniture.

If this felt familiar, share it with another parent who has been searching for the same boundary.

Sources: Calgary advocacy-sign bylaw near schools (CBC) · Juneau 2026 Fourth of July parade rule (Juneau Empire) · additional Juneau coverage (Juneau Independent)

Her dad passed me the basket. “Oh, I probably shouldn’t have that,” I said. I do not remember deciding to say it. It came out the way so many comments about food and bodies come out: automatically, almost lightly. A small performance of restraint that I did not think anyone was paying attention to.

Then her dad passed the basket to her. “Oh,” she said, in my exact rhythm. “I probably shouldn’t have that.”

I felt something in me stop. She loves bread. Why shouldn’t she have it? She had not looked at the basket and wondered whether she had earned it. She had not considered what else she had eaten that day or whether bread was the kind of thing she should resist. She was repeating me. I had not been talking to her. But she had been listening.

I would never think to comment on my daughters’ bodies. I would not point out their size or suggest that one shape would be preferable to another. I am not going to tell a two-year-old she has eaten too much, or make her finish one food before she is permitted another. At this age, I want her to learn that hunger means something. Fullness means something. Food is not a test of whether she has been good. That part feels obvious to me.

I grew up in the nineties and early two-thousands, when women’s bodies were treated as public conversation. A celebrity gained weight and it became a headline. A stomach folded over a waistband and it became evidence. Women were not only expected to be thin. They were expected to demonstrate that they were constantly working at it.

But the language did not disappear just because we disagree with it now. A lot of it became internal. It comes out when the bread arrives.

I probably shouldn’t have that. I definitely shouldn’t be eating this. I’m feeling a little chunky today. You can see my fat rolls hanging over these pants, even though I finally fit into them.

They are the kinds of sentences women say so casually that they barely register as sentences. Sometimes they are jokes. Sometimes they are apologies. Sometimes they are a way to say the cruel thing first, before anyone else has the chance. They are not things I would ever say about her. I had not fully considered what it meant to keep saying them about myself in front of her.

She may not yet understand everything those sentences mean. She does not know the years of scrutiny underneath them or the difference between physical fullness and the fear of looking as though you have eaten. But the language is becoming familiar. She is learning that when food arrives, women sometimes announce that they should not want it. That when their bodies change, women narrate what has gone wrong. That declining something you love can sound like the responsible choice.

I thought these were private thoughts that happened to leave my mouth. Then she repeated one back to me.

Children do not need to understand the entire meaning of a sentence to recognize when it belongs. My daughter does not know what chunky means when I use it about my body. She does not understand why fitting into a pair of pants might still leave me inspecting what hangs over them. She cannot place my words inside postpartum body changes, beauty standards, old habits, or the particular self-consciousness of getting dressed after having two babies. She only knows that Mommy wanted the bread and said she probably should not have it.

That is the part I cannot stop thinking about, because the sentences are rarely only about food. I shouldn’t have that can make wanting something sound suspect. I have already eaten a lot can make appetite sound like something that requires permission. I feel fat today turns a body type into a feeling women are expected to fear or confess. My rolls are hanging over my pants teaches everyone in the room where to look and what to consider a problem.

I am not saying that one comment over dinner determines how a child will eventually feel about food or her body. It does not. Children are shaped by more than one sentence and more than one person. My daughters will grow up inside a much larger culture with plenty to say about which bodies deserve admiration, which foods require guilt, and how much space a woman is allowed to occupy. But our language becomes part of that culture too. It becomes part of the atmosphere at the table.

Researchers sometimes call this kind of running commentary fat talk: conversations that criticize weight or shape, discuss dieting, or announce that someone should not eat something. Studies of families have found associations between weight-focused conversations and body dissatisfaction, harmful weight-control behaviors, and disordered eating, particularly in older children and adolescents. The evidence does not tell me that one overheard sentence will become my daughter’s future. Research on parents criticizing their own bodies in front of children is also less conclusive than the evidence on comments directed at a child. But the way families speak about weight, food, and bodies is not meaningless.

I know that from more than research. I do not remember one precise sentence from my childhood that taught me to monitor what I ate. What I remember is the accumulation, and that is enough.

I do not believe it was necessarily intended to hurt me. But I also know that I later struggled significantly with an eating disorder. I became very good at overriding hunger, distrusting desire, and treating restraint as evidence that I was doing well. I cannot trace that struggle to one person or one sentence. There was simply a language I became fluent in. And now, without intending to, I sometimes hear myself speaking it in front of my daughters.

That realization could easily become another way to punish myself. Now I am not only a woman who has difficult thoughts about her body. I am a mother who is supposed to resolve them before her daughters notice. But I do not think the answer is to perform perfect body acceptance for them. I do not need to stand in front of the mirror every morning and announce that I love every part of myself. Some days I would not believe it. Turning body positivity into another required script would still keep my body at the center of the room.

What I am trying to do is quieter. I am trying to stop making every thought about my body audible. I am trying not to connect what I eat with what my body looks like. And when I hear myself beginning with I probably shouldn’t, I am trying to pause long enough to ask whether anything needs to be said at all.

Sometimes there is an honest thing to name. I’m full. I don’t want any right now. I do want some. That looks good. Those statements describe what I am experiencing without making the food virtuous or dangerous. They do not ask the rest of the table to evaluate my appetite or my body along with me. But sometimes the correction is simply silence. Letting the bread pass without turning the moment into commentary about what I have eaten or how my body looks. Not every thought needs to become the atmosphere of the room.

This is the strange work of raising daughters as a millennial mother. We are trying to give them a language we were not always given, while still speaking fluently in the one we inherited. We are teaching them to listen to their bodies while relearning how to listen to our own. We are telling them that food is not a moral test while still catching ourselves trying to pass it.

I cannot make sure my daughters never question their bodies. I cannot keep every outside voice from reaching them. And I cannot promise that they will never struggle with food simply because I choose my words carefully. But I can pay attention to the voice they hear at our table. I can stop assuming that because I am talking about myself, the lesson belongs only to me.

The next time the bread basket comes around, my daughter may take a piece. She may eat three bites and leave the rest. She may ask for another. She may decide she does not want any. I want all of those choices to remain available to her. I do not want her declining something she loves because she has already learned that this is what women say when the bread reaches them.

If this felt familiar, send it to a mother who has ever heard her own words come back in a smaller voice.

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Research note

“Fat talk” is an established research term for negative conversation about body weight or shape, including criticism directed toward oneself, one’s child, or other people.

Berge, J. M., MacLehose, R., Loth, K. A., Eisenberg, M., Bucchianeri, M. M., & Neumark-Sztainer, D. (2013). Parent conversations about healthful eating and weight: Associations with adolescent disordered eating behaviors. JAMA Pediatrics, 167(8), 746–753. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/1700514

Lydecker, J. A., Riley, E. N., & Grilo, C. M. (2018). Associations of parents’ self, child, and other “fat talk” with child eating behaviors and weight. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 51(6), 527–534. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/eat.22858

Neumark-Sztainer, D., Bauer, K. W., Friend, S., Hannan, P. J., Story, M., & Berge, J. M. (2010). Family weight talk and dieting: How much do they matter for body dissatisfaction and disordered eating behaviors in adolescent girls? Journal of Adolescent Health, 47(3), 270–276. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1054139X10000881

American Psychological Association, Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. (2007). Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/girls/report-full.pdf

My hair is fine at the strand but dense overall. I have a lot of it, even if each individual hair is relatively thin, and that distinction has always worked in my favor. I could lose more than usual without immediately seeing scalp or an obvious bald patch. This time, the hair made itself difficult to ignore. My brush was ridiculously full after every use. After I blow-dried, there would be a small pile on the bathroom floor that looked disproportionate to the amount still attached to my head. When I pulled it into a ponytail, it no longer had the same weight in my hand.

Then came the regrowth. The tiny sideburns that stood straight out from the sides of my face, the short forehead wisps that pasted themselves to my skin in the heat, the micro bangs that made me look like a cartoon character who had just stuck a fork in an outlet. I was relieved to see them. Those short hairs were frustrating, but they were also evidence that the cycle had restarted. Regrowth can be visible around the hairline long before your ponytail feels full again, because those new strands still need time to become part of the length. I was also eight or nine months postpartum, still shedding more than I expected, and beginning to wonder whether “normal postpartum hair loss” explained the whole story.

It did not.

Underneath the question of whether it was normal was a quieter one I did not say out loud: what was I doing wrong? I had started auditing myself, the shampoo, the tight ponytails, the postpartum vitamins I had let lapse. My feed had an answer for every version of that question, and every answer came attached to a product.

First: you cannot buy someone else’s hair

Before we talk about hormones, ferritin, or the products I use, there is one slightly inconvenient truth I wish the hair industry acknowledged more often. Some of the people selling you hair products were born with exceptionally good hair. They may have thicker individual strands, more follicles producing hair across their scalp, or a naturally longer growth cycle that lets their hair reach the waist before it sheds. Their ponytail may have been the circumference of a rope before they ever opened the bottle they are now holding in an Instagram ad.

This does not mean their product is necessarily bad. It does mean the product did not give them their starting point.

A serum can support the condition of your scalp. A bond treatment can reduce breakage. A volumizing spray can coat the strands you already have and make them look fuller. An evidence-based treatment may help active follicles stay in their growth phase longer. But a cosmetic product cannot give you someone else’s natural follicle density, rewrite the baseline diameter of every hair on your head, or make your hair genetically identical to the creator whose before-and-after persuaded you to buy it.

I know this because I have done exactly that. I bought a hair-care line repeatedly promoted by a creator with objectively beautiful hair, and it did not work well for me. Her hair was still beautiful. It just became obvious that I could not replicate her hair by replicating what was in her shower.

Your hair is not a product testimonial.

What postpartum shedding actually is

Postpartum shedding has a name: telogen effluvium. During pregnancy, elevated estrogen keeps more of your hair in its growing phase for longer. You shed less, which is why pregnancy hair often feels so unusually full. After delivery, estrogen falls, and a large group of hairs that had been held in the growth phase moves through the cycle and begins shedding at roughly the same time.

It commonly becomes noticeable a few months after birth, peaks around month four, and for most women gradually resolves as the normal hair cycle restarts. Most regain their usual fullness by around their baby’s first birthday.[1]

That timing matters, because the hairs falling today began moving toward the shedding phase months ago. They are already committed. This is why a shampoo cannot stop normal postpartum shedding, and neither can a scalp oil, a collagen gummy, or a beautifully branded bottle with “postpartum” across the front. A shampoo cannot reach back into the follicle and reverse a hormonal instruction that happened months earlier.

No shampoo on earth can out-argue your hormones.

But for me, “normal postpartum shedding” was not the whole story. The missing piece was ferritin, a marker no one had repeated after a nearly three-liter hemorrhage.

Below: the exact phrase I would use with a clinician, what iron can and cannot do, and the products I still use now that I have stopped asking them to change my biology.

When it isn’t just hormones.

My second delivery came with a severe postpartum hemorrhage. I lost nearly three liters of blood and needed a transfusion. The acute emergency was treated. What did not happen afterward was a plan to make sure my iron stores recovered.

I had a serum iron check about two weeks postpartum. No one ordered ferritin or recommended that I repeat a complete blood count and ferritin later. No one said, “You lost a major amount of blood, we should confirm that the reserves in your body have been rebuilt.” At four months postpartum, I had comprehensive bloodwork done because I subscribe to Function Health, a service that runs comprehensive labs on me twice a year. Most of my results looked normal.

My ferritin was 10.

Ferritin reflects stored iron, the reserve in the tank, and a ferritin of 10 falls below even conservative thresholds for iron deficiency.[2] You can deplete those stores before your hemoglobin becomes low enough to qualify as anemia, which means a limited or routine blood check can look reassuring while the deeper reserve sits nearly empty.

I cannot tell you what percentage of my shedding came from the normal postpartum estrogen shift and what percentage came from iron deficiency. No blood test can reconstruct that division after the fact. But I was still noticing significant shedding at eight or nine months postpartum, my ponytail felt smaller, and my ferritin was 10 after a major hemorrhage. I no longer felt comfortable dismissing all of it as a hormone reset that simply needed more time. Iron deficiency was a real, correctable finding, and it deserved to be treated whether or not I could prove exactly how many hairs it had cost me.

Over the following weeks, my energy improved and I felt less cold. Hair moved on a slower clock. The shedding did not stop the moment I began rebuilding my iron, and correcting a deficiency cannot retrieve the hairs already committed to falling. Continued shedding in those first weeks was the timeline doing what it does, not necessarily a sign that nothing was changing.

The lab I wish someone had ordered

Comprehensive postpartum bloodwork was not ordered for me. Even when iron is checked, it matters what was actually measured, because serum iron, hemoglobin, and ferritin are related but not interchangeable.

What I wish had happened after my hemorrhage was simple: confirm that I was medically stable, then repeat my CBC and ferritin later to make sure my stores had actually recovered.

If your shedding follows the usual postpartum timeline and is starting to improve, you may not need an enormous investigation. But if it feels extreme, continues heavily toward or beyond one year, or comes with symptoms like fatigue, feeling unusually cold, shortness of breath, dizziness, restless legs, or reduced exercise tolerance, ask your clinician whether testing is appropriate.

The most useful phrase I can give you is this:

“Can we check my ferritin, not only my serum iron or hemoglobin?”

Depending on your history and symptoms, a clinician may also consider a CBC, broader iron studies, and thyroid testing, usually starting with TSH. Vitamin D, B12, zinc, or other tests may make sense in individual cases, but that should be guided by your actual history rather than a wellness checklist that orders everything for everyone.

Also see a dermatologist if the pattern does not look like diffuse shedding, especially if you develop defined bald patches, significant scalp inflammation, eyebrow loss, a progressively widening part, or no return toward your normal fullness by around one year postpartum. Hair loss has more than one cause, and the right treatment depends on identifying which one you are actually dealing with.

Before this becomes an advertisement for iron

Do not start iron because your hair is falling out. Iron is not a general hair supplement, and it is not something to take “just in case.” More is not better. If your stores are already adequate, extra iron will not give you thicker hair, and excess iron can be harmful. Test first, treat what is actually there, and retest rather than assuming you should continue indefinitely.

If you are deficient and your clinician agrees that oral iron is appropriate, the form, dose, and schedule matter more than most people realize. A few things I learned:

• Ferrous bisglycinate is often used because it tends to be easier on the stomach than some traditional forms.

• Check the label before adding a separate vitamin C, since many combination iron supplements already include it.

• Keep it away from coffee, tea, calcium, and dairy, which can all interfere with absorption. I do not take mine with my morning coffee or a calcium-heavy meal.

• Ask about alternate-day dosing. An oral iron dose can temporarily raise hepcidin, a hormone that regulates iron absorption, which may reduce how much is absorbed from a subsequent dose. Some clinicians therefore use alternate-day dosing, depending on the product, dose, and severity of the deficiency.[3]

• There is no universal schedule. The right one depends on the elemental iron in your product, how depleted you are, and how well you tolerate it.

None of this is medical advice, and I am not a doctor. It is what I learned treating my own deficiency, and every piece of it is a conversation for your clinician.

If you are breastfeeding, say so when you ask. It does not rule iron out, but it shapes what is appropriate.

For many people, iron is a rebuild rather than a forever supplement. You take it, give the body time to replenish its stores, and then check the number again.

Postpartum hair products have a built-in before-and-after problem

My Instagram feed knew exactly what to do with me postpartum. It served me products that promised to stop shedding: postpartum vitamins, biotin gummies, collagen, hair oils, scalp drops, and one product from Switzerland that appeared to be sold through a website assembled five minutes before I landed on it. The language that pulled me in was always some version of “stop postpartum thinning, stop shedding, grow it back.”

Here is the problem with using postpartum before-and-after photos as proof: postpartum shedding usually improves with time. A woman can start a serum near peak shedding at four months postpartum, take a photo five months later, and have visible baby hairs around her hairline. That regrowth might be helped by the product. It might also be the hair cycle doing exactly what it was always going to do. Usually there is no way to separate the two from an Instagram testimonial.

That does not make every product fraudulent. It means postpartum hair marketing has a confounder built directly into it: the untreated condition often gets better on its own. The timeline is doing some of the work, and the advertisement rarely mentions that. This is the part that should make you angry. The marketing finds you at the exact moment you are most ready to blame yourself, and sells you a fix for something your body was already going to do on its own.

Where I land on Nutrafol, biotin, and hair vitamins

I have taken Nutrafol Postpartum. I do not think every hair supplement is useless, and I am not saying Nutrafol is a bad product. A well-formulated supplement may help support growth when someone has an actual nutritional gap, or when it is used as part of a broader plan. What it cannot do is cancel the normal estrogen-driven postpartum shed.

In my case, Nutrafol also overlapped substantially with the postpartum prenatal I was already taking, and I did not want to stack two broad vitamin formulas and assume that more ingredients meant more hair. So I stopped.

The same applies to biotin gummies, collagen powders, and the many “hair vitamins” sold online. Some contain nutrients that matter to healthy hair. That does not mean everyone is deficient in them, that larger amounts work better, or that the product will stop hormonally programmed shedding. I have bought the gummies. In retrospect, I mostly bought vitamins in a prettier and more persuasive form. The expectation is what needs resetting: a supplement may support new growth, but it is not necessarily a brake on the shed.

One practical note before you get bloodwork: check every supplement you take for biotin, and tell your clinician and the lab if it is there. Biotin appears in many hair supplements, prenatals, and multivitamins, sometimes at high doses. It can interfere with certain laboratory assays, including some thyroid tests, and make results appear falsely high or low.[4] Which tests are affected depends on the laboratory platform, so do not guess at how long to stop it. Ask the clinician or laboratory performing your tests. It is its own small irony: a product marketed for your hair can muddy the testing meant to explain why your hair is changing.

I still believe scalp products can have a place

This is where my position is more nuanced than “all hair products are marketing.” I do believe the scalp matters. If you have inflammation, significant dryness, dandruff, irritation, or buildup, addressing that condition is part of caring for the environment the follicles work in. Some nonprescription scalp serums also contain ingredients like caffeine and peptides that have plausible or early evidence for supporting active follicles. But the evidence behind most cosmetic scalp serums is not as strong as the marketing language around them.[5]

Maya Chia’s Power Fol, the scalp spray I use, contains caffeine, peptides, and several botanical ingredients, and the brand reports positive results from an eight-week consumer-use study of 39 people.[6] That is interesting. It is not the same as a large, independent, placebo-controlled clinical trial proving the product regrows postpartum hair.

I have used it for about nine months. I spray it around my face frame after washing, roughly three times a week, because that is where my shedding and regrowth are most visible, and I think those areas look fuller. I had also begun rebuilding my depleted iron stores, moved farther from the peak postpartum-shedding window, and naturally began growing the shed hairs back during the same period. So I cannot prove the spray caused the regrowth.

I would still repurchase it. I like using it, it does not make my fine hair feel heavy, and its ingredients give it a reasonable argument for supporting scalp and follicle health, even if the size of that effect is impossible for me to measure. That is my honest endorsement: I use it, I like it, I think it may help, and I cannot tell you it created the baby hairs. A scalp product can support the regrowth already trying to happen. It cannot stop a hormonal shed, correct a ferritin of 10, or give you the natural density of the woman advertising it.

What I use now, and the job I expect each product to do

My routine is not designed to make my hair genetically different. It is designed to keep my scalp comfortable, reduce avoidable breakage, and make the hair I currently have look good.

• Maya Chia shampoo and conditioner: clean without stripping. I tried other “clean” hair-care brands that left my roots greasy even after washing while somehow making the lengths feel dry and brittle. This has been a better fit for my fine-but-dense hair. It cleans well enough without leaving the lengths stripped. That is the job: clean hair that still feels like hair.

• Maya Chia Power Fol: scalp support. This is the scalp product discussed above. I use it around my hairline after washing, and I would repurchase it, while being honest that I cannot separate its effect from the iron I was rebuilding, time, and natural postpartum regrowth.

• Maya Chia The Mane Agent: detangle and protect the lengths. This is the leave-in spray, not the scalp serum. I apply it to damp lengths for detangling, heat protection, and breakage support. Because I highlight my hair, reducing damage along the existing shaft matters if I want to keep it long. It cannot affect a hair shedding from the root, but it can help me avoid snapping the hair that remains.

• Epres bond repair: fewer breaks in colored hair. About once every two weeks, to support my highlighted hair and reduce breakage from chemical and heat damage. Breakage and shedding are different problems: a strand that snaps midway down the shaft needs different care from a whole hair releasing from the follicle.

• Innersense heat protectant: because I blow-dry. I use heat protectant because I blow-dry every time I wash. Less heat would be the most technically virtuous answer, but I also like having at least one day where my hair looks finished before day two and day three turn it into a ponytail. I wash about three times a week, I blow-dry it, and I protect it as well as I reasonably can. That is my actual life.

• LolaVie volumizing spray: lift, nothing more. This is for lift. It does not grow hair. It makes the hair I have look a little fuller at the root, which is a perfectly valid job for a product. Cosmetic improvement is not a scam when the product is honest about being cosmetic.

• Kérastase hair oil: shine, and I enjoy it. My small exception to my usual fragrance rules. It makes the lengths look shiny and I enjoy using it. There is no deeper health thesis. Sometimes hair oil is allowed to be hair oil.

Products mentioned in this Edit: [Maya Chia Power Fol] · [Maya Chia shampoo + conditioner] · [The Mane Agent] · [Epres] · [Innersense heat protectant] · [LolaVie] · [Kérastase oil] Some of these are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. I only list products I actually use and reach for. Nothing here is sponsored, and no brand paid to be included. Iron is deliberately not on this list, because that one starts with a blood test, not a shopping cart.

The unglamorous things matter too

Once I realized I was working with fragile, highlighted hair and a halo of postpartum regrowth, I became gentler with it. Not perfectly gentle, because motherhood does not always allow for a waist-length loose braid and an unhurried detangling ritual, but gentler. I use a wide-tooth comb instead of pulling through knots, I avoid tight ponytails when I can, I sleep on a silk pillowcase, I put it in a loose braid at night, and I try not to keep it pulled back under tension all day.

I still color it, I still blow-dry it, and I still want it long. The goal is not purity. The goal is to stop adding unnecessary breakage to a shedding problem I cannot fully control.

Why I care this much

Hair has always mattered to me. I think long, flowing, healthy-looking hair is beautiful, and there is something about it that reads as vitality to me, even though I know intellectually that hair length is not a medical report card.

For years I wore extensions, because I could never seem to grow my highlighted hair as long as I wanted it. Eventually the maintenance became impractical with children, and the tension at the root felt counterproductive when what I actually wanted was healthier hair of my own. So I stopped. I focused on growing and protecting the hair I naturally had, and I have finally been able to grow it long without extensions, which made watching it come out postpartum feel like one more bodily surrender after a period already full of them.

I was not embarrassed that I cared. I was relieved when the regrowth appeared, and I was also mildly horrified by the short sideburns and sticky forehead wisps that announced it. Both can be true.

What I know now

Postpartum shedding can be normal and still deserve your attention when it does not follow the expected pattern. A deficiency can sit underneath normal-looking labs if the right marker was never ordered. A scalp serum may have a useful place without being able to reverse a hormonal event. A supplement may support growth without stopping shedding. A bond treatment may preserve length without changing what is happening at the root. And the woman selling you a bottle may simply have more hair than you naturally do.

That is not a failure of your routine.

Treat what is happening inside the body. Protect the hair shaft from damage. Support the scalp if it needs support. Use styling products for the appearance they can honestly create. But do not ask a shampoo to correct your ferritin. Do not ask a gummy to overrule estrogen. And do not ask someone else’s hair to prove what a product will do to yours.

No shampoo on earth can out-argue your hormones. It should not be asked to.

If this read true, send it to another mother who would recognize herself in it.

P.S. If you want the bigger picture on why your body can still feel unfamiliar long after the six-week visit, I wrote about what postpartum recovery actually looks like underneath here: The Quiet, Enormous Thing Your Body Is Still Doing. It points to the same labs worth asking for.

The service I use for that twice-a-year comprehensive bloodwork is Function Health. That is a referral link, so I may receive a credit if you join. I use it myself, but you do not need this service to request the labs discussed above; you can begin by asking your own clinician. The point holds either way: with this kind of thing, the labs come before the shopping cart.

I write about this as a trained health coach and a mother of two, and postpartum is the area I spend the most time researching. What is here comes from my own bloodwork and the reading behind it, not anyone’s marketing.

The Research

The Edits carry their receipts. Sources are listed below in APA format; the superscripts in the essay map to the numbered references.

1. American Academy of Dermatology. (n.d.). Hair loss in new moms. Retrieved June 24, 2026, from https://www.aad.org/public/diseases/hair-loss/insider/new-moms

2. World Health Organization. (2020). WHO guideline on use of ferritin concentrations to assess iron status in individuals and populations. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240000124

3. Stoffel, N. U., Cercamondi, C. I., Brittenham, G., Zeder, C., Geurts-Moespot, A. J., Swinkels, D. W., Moretti, D., & Zimmermann, M. B. (2017). Iron absorption from oral iron supplements given on consecutive versus alternate days and as single morning doses versus twice-daily split dosing in iron-depleted women: Two open-label, randomised controlled trials. The Lancet Haematology, 4(11), e524–e533. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2352-3026(17)30182-5

4. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. (2019, November 5). Update: The FDA warns that biotin may interfere with lab tests: FDA safety communication. https://downloads.regulations.gov/FDA-2019-D-1876-0015/content.pdf

5. Szendzielorz, E., & Spiewak, R. (2025). Caffeine as an active ingredient in cosmetic preparations against hair loss: A systematic review of available clinical evidence. Healthcare, 13(4), 395. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare13040395

6. Maya Chia. (n.d.). The Power Fol advanced multi-correctional scalp & hair treatment [Product webpage]. Retrieved June 24, 2026, from https://mayachia.com/products/powerfol-multi-correctional-scalp-and-hair-treatment

A note on the ferritin number: a ferritin of 10 establishes depleted iron stores, but no single lab value can prove how much of any individual’s shedding came from iron deficiency versus postpartum hormones or another contributor. The reference threshold above is the WHO population cutoff; some clinicians use a higher number for symptomatic deficiency.

I was a sophomore when that record came out, and after that I did not so much listen to her albums as age inside them. “Tim McGraw” was high school. “Fifteen” showed up for the first real heartbreak, right on schedule. “The Best Day” became my mom and me before I had words for what we were. By college, “Long Live” and “Enchanted” felt like permission. “Red” carried the breakups. “1989” arrived the same year I moved to New York. Looking back, the whole catalog plays like a timeline of being young.

Researchers have a name for part of this: music-evoked autobiographical memory. A song can return you not just to a place, but to an earlier version of yourself. For a few minutes, the person you were and the person you are feel like they still belong to the same life.

She released a new song this month, a return to country inspired by Jessie, the cowgirl toy whose story has always been tangled up with what happens when a child grows up. It cut me in a way it wouldn’t have a few years ago, because now I am the one watching a child get bigger.

And the thought arrived fully formed. I want my girls to have a Taylor Swift childhood.

Not because I want them to become her. I mean the childhood the early songs are about. Friday night football under the lights, where the whole town showed up because that was the Midwest and that was the week. First crushes held secret like contraband. Summer nights that ran too long. Parents who showed up. The ordinary, unimportant-feeling middle of a regular day.

I know exactly what I’m nostalgic for, because I grew up on a street with a kid in every house. We spent whole evenings out there, parents dragging fold-out chairs into the driveway, the rest of us biking in loops until the streetlights came on. We snuck out the downstairs window to lie on the trampoline and trade secrets under the stars. We posed with a guitar pretending to be Avril. We held hands at recess and thought it was the most scandalous thing that had ever happened.

Here is the part I have to be honest about.

I am not actually homesick for the 1990s. I am homesick for being the kid.

Childhood felt light because somebody else was holding what was heavy. The money. The schedules. The worry. They carried it where I couldn’t see it, which is why the ordinary felt like freedom. I am the one carrying it now. So “a Taylor Swift childhood” is not a thing I can hand my daughters. It is a job I do off-camera so the ordinary stays ordinary for them.

And nostalgia edits. I wasn’t always the kid in the middle of the picture. Sometimes I was outside it. A small town could feel like a haven, but it could also feel like the whole world with the doors painted shut. The internet I complain about now might have been the lifeline that kid needed.

So I can’t give them the decade. What I can give them is the thing underneath the nostalgia. Unstructured time. Boredom they have to solve themselves. Adults who show up. A childhood that isn’t optimized within an inch of its life. One that isn’t performed for an audience or run like a research project.

Researchers have found that we are especially bad at predicting the future value of ordinary life. Across four studies, people underestimated how much they would later enjoy rediscovering mundane records of the present (ordinary conversations, routine days), especially compared with extraordinary experiences.

The research was about documenting the present, but I don’t think the answer is to record more of childhood. Maybe it is simply to stop treating the ordinary as the part before the real memory begins.

The trap is that the moment you try to engineer a magical childhood, you have already lost it. Those evenings on my street felt magical precisely because nobody was trying to make them magical.

The work is not to produce the memory. It is to leave enough room for one to happen.

The moments they ache for later will probably look completely unremarkable while we’re living them.

Some of those moments will happen on days I’m counting down to bedtime.

If this made you think of someone who aged inside the same songs, send it to her.

P.S. What song can still return you to an earlier version of yourself?

Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff wrote and produced “I Knew It, I Knew You” for Disney and Pixar’s Toy Story 5. Inspired by Jessie’s ongoing journey and described as a return to Swift’s country roots, the song was released June 5, 2026; the film opened June 19.

On music and memory: Janata, Tomic, and Rakowski, “Characterisation of Music-Evoked Autobiographical Memories,” Memory 15, no. 8 (2007), 845–860, which found that roughly a third of songs surfaced a personal memory and that nostalgia was among the emotions they most often stirred.

On the future value of ordinary days: Zhang, Kim, Brooks, Gino, and Norton, “A ‘Present’ for the Future: The Unexpected Value of Rediscovery,” Psychological Science 25, no. 10 (2014), 1851–1860.

Not a cup. The cup. The blue one, no lid, the one that decides whether breakfast is calm or ends with water across the floor. He knows it without being told. He knows which bunny is the bunny, the one that cannot be swapped for a lookalike at bedtime. He knows the one way the toddler wants the bunny to be swaddled, the exact way, the only way that settles her and gets her ready for bed. It’s not mom’s way. It’s his. He knows the order the bedtime books go in. He knows the late afternoon comes apart if no one steps in, so he steps in. None of this was in a manual and most of it, he never saw done up close.

Our kids are being raised by a different kind of father than most of us were. He is not a perfect one. Not one who always reads the load correctly or carries his full half of it. He is the one who is inside the daily work of his children’s lives in a way that would have looked unusual, maybe even a little suspect, a generation ago.

The numbers are not subtle. In 1965, fathers spent about two and a half hours a week caring for their kids. By 2016 it was about eight, close to triple. Their hours of housework more than doubled over the same span. Fifty years ago, the husband was the primary or sole earner in about 85 percent of marriages. Today it is closer to 55 percent.

Yet it’s not only time. When researchers ask fathers who they are, 85 percent say being a parent is one of the most important parts of their identity. Part of who they are, not just a thing they do on weekends. And when they are asked what they would change, the most common answer is not less. It is more. Nearly two-thirds of fathers say they spend too little time with their children, and the most common reason they give is work, not lack of interest.

The change is recent enough to fit inside a family’s memory. Two generations ago, fathers were often kept outside the room while their children were born. Today, being present for the first breath is expected. The man raising your children was likely there when they took theirs.

What does not show up in any of these numbers is the harder part. He is building a version of fatherhood many men never watched anyone do. The 2:30 a.m. shift, the nights holding a small hand across the gap between the bed and the crib, or getting up in the dark to rock someone back down. He is at the pediatrician’s office on a Tuesday and he has learned the hair bows that take four tries. He’s apologizes after losing his patience, and the tries again the next morning. There isn’t a survey that measures what it’s like to learn a job no one ever taught you while acting like you always knew how.

Yet he does not always get it right. But I need to say that neither do I. He is willing to be changed by the work, to hear what he missed, to repair what went wrong, and to return the next morning rather than retreat from the discomfort of having failed.

So I want to be honest about both things, because I don't want to pretend—as a writer or as a wife and mother—that only one side of this story is true.

The load we deal with is still not even. Mothers carry roughly 67 percent more of the household’s mental to-do list, the invisible anticipating and remembering and managing, and that gap has barely moved. That is the truth and it deserves to be said, and you’ll see it as a recurring theme in what I write.

But it is worth recognizing that fatherhood has changed more in two generations than in the ten before them, and that the man taking the 2:30 a.m. shift in your house is doing something his own father was never asked to do.

Both can be true. The load is not always equal, and the change is still real. One of those is the work of the years ahead and the other is worth saying out loud today.

And that presence is doing something you can actually measure, not just something sweet to witness. When researchers follow children over years instead of asking once, the ones with involved fathers tend to come out steadier. Better at handling frustration, stronger in language and early thinking. The effect even sorts the way you might expect:

One review of two dozen long-term studies found that nearly all of them pointed the same way, and the pattern held even after the researchers accounted for income, so it is not simply that involved fathers tend to have more money in the house. None of this proves his presence is the single cause. Involvement is measured differently from one study to another, and a child is shaped by a hundred things no study can separate cleanly. However the direction is consistent, and it is worth knowing.

A boy who grows up watching his father do the daily work does not have to imagine the job when it is his turn. He has already seen it done and he sees it as the norm. A girl who learns to use the drill beside her dad, or looks up and finds him in the audience, grows up taking for granted that he would be there. The next generation of fathers is being raised right now, in our homes, by men doing the night shift in front of our children.

So today we say it. To the fathers who know which cup, and which bunny, who get up in the dark, and who learned the bows and the ponies.

Happy Father’s Day to the ones doing it differently.

If this read true, send it to a father who should hear it. Or to the mother raising kids alongside him.

The research for those who want it:

• Pew Research Center, “Key facts about dads in the U.S.,” 2023. Source for fathers’ childcare time rising from about 2.5 hours per week in 1965 to about 8 in 2016, housework hours more than doubling over the same period, and the finding that 85 percent of fathers say being a parent is one of the most important parts of their identity.

• Pew Research Center, “Husbands and Wives Earn Similar Wages in a Growing Share of Marriages,” 2023. Source for the husband being the primary or sole earner in about 85 percent of marriages 50 years ago, falling to about 55 percent today. (This figure measures who earns more, not whether the mother is employed.)

• Pew Research Center, “Modern Parenthood: Roles of Moms and Dads Converge as They Balance Work and Family,” 2013. Historical time-diary basis for the 1965-to-present shift in fathers’ childcare and housework hours.

• Pew Research Center, “Most dads say they spend too little time with their children,” 2018. Source for the finding that most fathers feel they spend too little time with their kids, with work obligations, not lack of interest, the most-cited reason.

• NPR, “This Father’s Day, Remembering A Time When Dads Weren’t Welcome In Delivery Rooms,” 2017, and Social History of Medicine (Oxford University Press), documenting U.S. fathers’ presence at births rising from roughly 39 percent in 1970 to 1974 to about 69 percent by 1975 to 1979. Basis for the shift from the waiting room to the delivery room.

• Weeks, Kowalewska and Ruppanner, “Take a Load Off? Not for Mothers: Gender, Cognitive Labor, and the Limits of Time and Money,” Socius, 2025. Study of 2,133 US parents; basis for mothers carrying about 67 percent more of the household’s mental to-do list. Figure matches the live Jun 9 carousel and the Performance Review letter.

• Sarkadi, Kristiansson, Oberklaid and Bremberg, “Fathers’ Involvement and Children’s Developmental Outcomes: A Systematic Review of Longitudinal Studies,” Acta Paediatrica, 2008;97(2):153-158. Reviewed 24 long-term studies; 22 found father involvement positively associated with children’s development, with most controlling for family income. The authors reported father engagement linked to reduced behavioural problems in boys and fewer psychological problems in young women, alongside enhanced cognitive development. Basis for the “two dozen long-term studies” line and the boys-and-girls split.

• On the specific outcome domains: a 2019 systematic review, “Father Involvement and Cognitive Development in Early and Middle Childhood” (Frontiers in Psychology), links father involvement to children’s language and cognitive development; a 2025 meta-analysis, “Father’s Involvement Is Critical in Social-Emotional Development in Early Childhood” (Early Childhood Research Quarterly), finds paternal warmth and responsiveness most strongly associated with children’s social-emotional competence. These are correlational findings, not proof of cause.

You feel it in the small moments. The pediatrician asks how solids are going, and you hear a question with a right answer. Another mother mentions her kid’s sleep schedule, and you do quiet math against your own. You scroll past someone’s color-coded summer and feel something tighten.

None of these people are grading you. But somewhere in you, a score is being kept anyway, and it is never quite passing.

We call this mom guilt, as though it is a character flaw. A little too much feeling. A little not enough confidence. Something we should be able to reason our way out of if we were more secure, more grateful, less online.

I don’t think that is what it is.

I think a lot of us are walking around feeling permanently mid-review. Evaluated all day against a standard nobody actually wrote down, by a reviewer we can’t quite name.

There is no manager. No quarterly meeting. No rubric you can ask to see. Just the steady sense of being assessed, and the guilt that arrives each time you decide you have come up short.

So I started asking myself who, exactly, was holding the clipboard.

At first, the candidates seemed obvious.

My best mom friend. The aunt who always has a comment. The other mothers at drop-off. The internet, which has an opinion about all of it. The version of me who used to answer emails by 8 a.m. and finish a thought without being interrupted.

But every time I tried to hand one of them the clipboard, it didn’t fit.

My best friend is not watching me reheat the same dinner. The other mothers are busy conducting their own reviews, on themselves, inside their own heads. The internet does not know I exist.

The clipboard, it turns out, was in my own hands the whole time.

No one ever promoted me to reviewer. I just picked it up and assumed it belonged to me. I was the reviewer and the reviewed, evaluating myself all day against a job description nobody had ever issued.

There is a name for that job description, even if no one hands you a copy.

Sociologist Sharon Hays called it “intensive mothering”: the idea that a good mother is the essential parent, that her child should come first always, and that the work of raising that child should be all-consuming, emotionally absorbing, and largely her responsibility.

Later researchers tried to measure what happens when mothers hold themselves tightly to that standard. They found that stronger beliefs in intensive mothering were associated with lower life satisfaction and greater stress.

So the rubric is not entirely imaginary. It is a real set of expectations many of us absorbed without consciously agreeing to them.

Here is the part I want to be careful about, because it is where the relief actually is.

Putting down the clipboard does not mean pretending the work is easy.

The exhaustion is real. The labor is real. Even the guilt is real, a true response to a load that can be difficult to see and almost impossible to finish.

The only thing invented is the score.

Because the clipboard is not the only thing making mothers tired. Underneath the performance review is a second job, and almost nobody counts it.

Researchers have been naming this work for decades.

In the 1990s, sociologist Susan Walzer studied how mothers and fathers thought about caring for a baby. She described an invisible form of labor that extended far beyond feeding, changing, and soothing. It included worrying, researching, anticipating, remembering, and monitoring.

The mother was not only caring for the baby. She was thinking about the baby.

More recently, sociologist Allison Daminger gave this work a clearer structure. She described cognitive labor as a process with multiple stages: anticipating that something will need to be done, identifying the available options, deciding what should happen, and monitoring whether the decision worked.

Not simply doing the task.

Holding the task.

Knowing the shoes are about to be outgrown. Researching the three replacements. Choosing a pair. Ordering the right size. Remembering to check whether they fit when they arrive.

Knowing the pediatrician appointment needs to be booked. Finding a time that works around naps and work and childcare. Writing down the questions. Remembering the advice afterward. Following up if something still does not seem right.

Someone else may complete one part of the task. That does not necessarily transfer responsibility for noticing it, planning it, or remembering what comes next.

And that layer of labor is not divided evenly.

A study of 322 mothers of young children found that mothers carried about 73 percent of the cognitively demanding household work. Their share of the physical household labor was also unequal, but somewhat lower, at approximately 64 percent.

The same study found that the greater a mother’s share of the cognitive labor, the more it was associated with stress, burnout, depressive symptoms, and poorer mental health.

So it is not only tiring.

It is costing something.

A larger study of more than two thousand parents in the United States found a similarly uneven division. Mothers reported primary responsibility for substantially more of the household’s mental-load tasks than fathers, about 67 percent more.

The researchers also found that employment and higher earnings could reduce some of the physical work mothers performed. But they did not meaningfully reduce the number of things mothers remained responsible for thinking about.

You can pay someone to complete a task. You can ask a partner to handle one. You can outsource the groceries, the cleaning, the laundry, the calendar.

All of that can help.

But handing off the doing is not always the same as handing off the remembering.

The labor is measurable.

The grading system isn’t.

You are running a real, complex, largely invisible operation, and the feedback you receive for it is often the feeling that you should be doing more.

There is no one waiting to hand you a passing grade. There is no point at which every need has been anticipated, every decision has been correct, every appointment has been booked, every meal has been balanced, and every child has been made perfectly happy.

The review cannot end because the job description has no boundaries.

That is why working harder does not make the guilt disappear.

You cannot earn a passing grade on an exam that was never scheduled.

But you can name what is actually happening.

Not: “I should be doing better.”

But: “I am holding a second job nobody can see, and the tiredness makes complete sense.”

That sentence does not make the work disappear. It does not redistribute the labor or finish the list. It does not make the appointment, buy the shoes, or remember what needs to go in the preschool bag tomorrow.

It simply takes the clipboard out of your hands.

It moves the load from something you are failing at to something you are carrying.

And those are not the same thing.

There is no score. There is just you, doing real work in the dark, work that counts whether or not anyone marks it down.

You can put the clipboard down.

The work was always going to count anyway.

If this read true, send it to another mother who would recognize herself in it.

Research:

• Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, Yale University Press, 1996. Introduced the concept of “intensive mothering.”

• Rizzo, Schiffrin and Liss, “Insight into the Parenthood Paradox: Mental Health Outcomes of Intensive Mothering,” Journal of Child and Family Studies, 2013. Study of 181 mothers examining intensive-mothering beliefs and maternal well-being.

• Susan Walzer, “Thinking About the Baby: Gender and Divisions of Infant Care,” Social Problems, 1996. Examined the gendered mental and emotional work involved in caring for an infant.

• Allison Daminger, “The Cognitive Dimension of Household Labor,” American Sociological Review, 2019. Identified four components of cognitive labor: anticipating needs, identifying options, making decisions, and monitoring outcomes.

• Aviv, Waizman, Kim, Liu, Rodsky and Saxbe, “Cognitive Household Labor: Gender Disparities and Consequences for Maternal Mental Health and Wellbeing,” Archives of Women’s Mental Health, 2025; published online in 2024. Study of 322 mothers of young children.

• Weeks, Kowalewska and Ruppanner, “Take a Load Off? Not for Mothers: Gender, Cognitive Labor, and the Limits of Time and Money,” Socius, 2025. Study of 2,133 US parents.

So I did the only thing that has ever reliably worked. I put both of them in motion and took them outside.

This was not a workout. I want to be clear about that. I was not exercising. I was managing a small domestic emergency with the one tool that has never once failed me, which is leaving the building.

We walked the long block, the one with the hill. The toddler narrated. The baby went quiet against my chest the way she only does when the world is moving past her. By the time we came back, everyone could be in the same room again, including me.

Nobody would count that as movement.

I almost didn’t.

The walk is the thing you do until you have time for the real thing.

That is how it gets filed. The walk costs nothing, which the wellness internet reads as worthless. It needs no reservation, no equipment, no childcare, no version of you with forty uninterrupted minutes. You can do it with a baby strapped to your chest and a toddler who stops to examine every rock between your door and the corner. And because it asks for almost nothing, it gets treated as almost nothing. A placeholder. The movement you settle for until the season opens up and you can get back to whatever counts.

I want to make the case that you have it backwards.

The walk is not the placeholder. It is one of the most studied interventions we have, and you have been taking it the whole time. At 4:47 on a Tuesday, with a baby on your chest, you were not killing time until the real movement could start.

You were already doing the real thing. Nobody called it that. Nobody measured it. Nobody handed you the proof.

That is what this letter is for.

Act I. What the walk is doing to your body

Start with how long it lets you live, because that is the part that has been measured the most.

You do not need ten thousand steps. The number everyone chases was never the target. Most of what walking does for how long you live is banked below it, and it starts from the first steps, not some cutoff you have to reach. The walk that gets you halfway counts for half.

The research: the ten thousand step goal is not a medical finding. It traces to a 1965 Japanese pedometer ad. The largest analysis we have, fifteen pooled studies, measured death from any cause and found the risk fell as daily steps rose, flattening out well before ten thousand and starting from low step counts, with no threshold. A separate analysis found the same shape for heart disease specifically: more steps, a lower risk of developing it. Both are observational, so “associated with,” not “causes,” but among the most consistent findings we have.

It is not only your body. The walk changes your head, and the dose is smaller than you would guess. A short, regular walk sharpens the focus you have been missing, the clear thinking that goes first when you are this tired.

The research: in trials where the only thing being tested was walking, twenty-five minutes three times a week was enough to measurably sharpen attention and processing speed, the two things that blur first when you are not sleeping. Not an hour, not every day. Roughly the loop you already take when the house needs to empty out.

Then there is the part you can see in the mirror.

There is a reason your face looks different after a walk. Moving sends blood to the surface of your skin, which is why you come home looking brighter than you left. The glow is not a marketing word. It is physiology. And it may be more than a one-day thing.

The research: in a sixteen-week trial, previously sedentary women who added regular aerobic exercise ended up with more elastic skin, a denser upper layer, and more activity in the genes that produce collagen, compared with the women who did not. It measured skin structure and gene activity, not wrinkles, so this is the layer underneath improving, not age reversal. I am not going to tell you the walk replaces anything in your bathroom cabinet. But the next time someone calls the walk the lazy option, your skin is filing a quiet objection.

Act II. What the walk is doing for the new mother

This is the part nobody tells a new mother, and it is the one I went looking for and did not expect to find stated so plainly.

On the days the walk happens, the weight is lighter. That is not only fresh air, and it is not only in your head. But I have to be careful here, because you deserve the honest version. This is not a claim that a walk cures postpartum depression. It does not, and if you are in it you deserve real care, not a loop around the block. What the research shows is narrower and still remarkable: walking, on its own, moves a clinical measure of mood in the right direction by a meaningful amount. It behaves like a treatment, because it is one.

The research: researchers pooled the trials that tested walking, specifically walking, against postpartum depression. Five randomized trials, and the mothers who walked saw their scores fall by an average of four points on the Edinburgh scale, the one doctors actually use to screen for postpartum depression. The biggest effects came from walking with other mothers, ninety minutes to two hours a week, at a gentle pace. The trials are few and varied, so this is real, not a guarantee.

And it is not some special program. The exact walk you already take, stroller and all, is the one they tested. The intervention was the walk you could have taken anyway.

Someone just called it treatment and measured what it did.

The research: an Australian trial put postpartum women with depressive symptoms into a twelve-week pram-walking program, three times a week, pushing the stroller. It lifted their mood and their fitness more than a support group did. The walking beat the sitting and talking, on the support group’s own turf.

It even reaches the thing you have the least of. Not more hours, those are not yours to control right now, but better ones.

The research: across the postpartum trials, the women who moved, walking among the kinds tested, reported better sleep quality than those who did not, including one trial run specifically on new mothers whose sleep was already disrupted. The certainty here is moderate, not airtight, but the trials agree.

And some of it is not about the walking at all.

Sometimes the most important thing the walk hands you is the door. The proof that you still exist outside the walls of your own home. Another adult on the sidewalk. Weather on your face. A version of the afternoon where you are a person moving through the world, and not only the person everyone in the house needs something from.

That counts too. The research counts it. Your body counted it the whole time.

What this is really about

So here is the ruler I would actually use.

The walk is not the thing you do until you have time for the real thing. In this season, the walk is the real thing. It moves your risk, your attention, your sleep, and, in the trials, a clinical measure of your mood. It asks for nothing you do not already have. And you are almost certainly already taking it, at 4:47 on a Tuesday, because it was the only thing that worked.

You were not settling for less.

You were treating yourself with the one intervention that actually fits a life this full. Nobody handed you the data. So here it is.

The walk counts. It always counted. Now you have the receipts.

This is what an Edit is. One subject a month. I read the research and the noise so you can read one letter.

If this read true, send it to another mother who would recognize herself in it.

Below this line is the practical version: what I actually do when the ideal walk is not available. The toddler who will not stay in the stroller, the morning on no sleep, the days I miss, the minimum that still counts, and what I finally stopped feeling guilty about. That part is for paid subscribers. The letter, and the research behind it, are yours.

Read more

That is forty pounds of resistance. Uphill. For most of a mile.

In any other context, someone would call that training while in a mother’s context, it is called Saturday.

The wellness internet has decided what movement looks like.

It looks like ten thousand steps before breakfast or a predawn workout completed before anyone else in the house has stirred. It is a boutique fitness class that requires a reservation a week in advance and with it a gym bag packed the night before. It is a version of yourself who has uninterrupted time and knows exactly where her water bottle is.

It’s a beautiful version of movement if you have the life it was designed for. However let me be very honest: Most mothers do not have that life.

Most mothers wake up to a small person who has decided the day starts at 5:43 a.m and they spend the day moving, just not in the way the internet counts. Most mothers are carrying, lifting, climbing, squatting, pushing, kneeling, reaching, and standing, all day, with a baby on one hip and a toddler on the other side of the room asking for a snack she just had.

The problem is not that we as mothers are not moving. Instead the problem is that the version of movement we are sold does not fit the season we are in.

So I want to give it a different name.

Act I. What Already Counts

Before you add anything to your day, look at what your day already contains.

The carry. A baby is fifteen to twenty pounds. A toddler is twenty-five to thirty-five. Carrying that load up a flight of stairs is loaded carry work. People pay personal trainers to program loaded carries. You as a mom do it a dozen times a day, often one-handed, often while talking on the phone, often holding a snack pouch in your teeth. That is not nothing. It is something.

The hill. The walk back from anywhere with a stroller, a child, and the bag you packed at the door. You are pushing forty pounds of resistance up an incline is what coaches call sled work. The hill is the gym and the hill is the program.

The squat. Picking up the child off the floor. Picking up the toy the child threw on the floor or picking up the other child who has decided that walking is over. A mother of small children performs somewhere between forty and a hundred bodyweight squats a day, and she does most of them under load. That counts.

The floor. Down to play and then up to answer the door. Then you are down to nurse or up to get the bottle. Down to wipe a spill and up to reach the cabinet. The transitions are the move and the transitions are the work.

The hours on your feet. Cooking. Laundry. Bathing. The kitchen at six p.m. with a baby on the hip and a pan on the stove. That is movement most fitness culture refuses to count because it does not photograph well and nobody is selling a class for it. It still counts. The cumulative load of being on your feet for the working hours of a household is real work.

This is not a permission slip to do nothing else. This is a permission slip to stop pretending the day you are already living is sedentary. The day you are already living is not sedentary. The day you are already living is, by any reasonable metric, active.

Science recently caught up to that sentence. Researchers had to invent a category for movement that does not look like exercise, because the old categories could not see it.

Bursts of real effort inside an ordinary day. The stair climb. The loaded carry. The hill. When they put trackers on twenty-five thousand adults who do no formal exercise at all, three to four minutes of those bursts a day was linked to a 45 percent lower risk of major cardiac events in women, and a 67 percent lower risk of heart failure.¹

Three to four minutes inside the day you are already living.

The strange thing is that most mothers already know this.

You feel it at the end of the day. You have the tired shoulders, the sore back, or the legs that somehow feel heavy despite never making it to the gym. Your body knows it worked.

But modern wellness culture has become strangely visual. Movement only seems to count when it is logged, tracked, measured, optimized, posted, or completed in matching workout clothes. Motherhood contains a lot of physical labor that leaves no evidence behind.

• You carried the child.

• You pushed the stroller.

• You unloaded the groceries.

• You climbed the stairs.

And then the day reset. Nothing to screenshot. Nothing to close on your watch. Nothing to prove you moved.

So women spend all day using their bodies and somehow still end the day feeling like they failed.

Act II. If You Want To Layer Something Formal

Some days you want more than the day you are already living. Some seasons you want a layer of movement that is yours, that is not in service of another person, that asks something of your body the day did not.

It’s not because you’re trying to optimize yourself or because you’re chasing a smaller body. It’s just because moving your body on purpose feels good. That layer should fit the season.

These are the formal options I trust, and the order I would actually pick them in for a mother in the thick of it.

Pilates, once or twice a week. Especially for mothers rebuilding strength after pregnancy. The low-impact strength, deep core work, the kind of recovery and rebuild a postpartum body actually responds to. A reformer class is fifty minutes. You may leave it standing taller. It is not a depletion workout, and that matters more than it sounds like it should.

The research: small trials in postpartum women keep finding the same thing. It rebuilds the deep core, including healing ab separation. The studies are small yet the direction never changes.²

Yoga, when your body is knotted from the carrying. The hunch over the nursing pillow or the hip that holds the toddler all day. Your back that has not quite been the same since the second one. Yoga is the layer that unknots what a day of holding a small person ties up. Not for the metrics but for the body that is asking you to move it.

The research: in trials of stressed women, yoga lowered perceived stress and anxiety. It was not measured in mothers specifically, but the women in those studies were carrying what you’re carrying.³

Streamed workouts at home, anywhere from ten to forty minutes. This is the most flexible layer because it bends to your day instead of asking your day to bend to it. The three I keep coming back to:

• Tone It Up for quick morning cardio.

• Katrina Scott Studio for a strength-and-conditioning mix that respects a postpartum body.

• Sculpt Society for long-form low-impact strength you can do in a living room with a kid playing nearby.

Pick the one you will actually press play on. Length is negotiable between one nap and the next. Showing up is not.

The research: home-delivered programs hold up in trials, including one where the women carrying the heaviest postpartum depression symptoms improved most.⁴ The format is not the compromise it gets treated as.

Daily walks. A walk is a real workout. The walk you take with the stroller, the walk you take at lunch, the walk you take after dinner. Forty-five minutes of zone-two cardio is one of the most studied longevity interventions we have. It does not require a class card and it does not require childcare. It does, however, require a pair of shoes you can find without thinking about it.

The research: walking is the most studied movement there is, which is why it gets its own letter. The Walk Edit, next Sunday.

Heavy weights, short sessions. When you have access to weights, a thirty-minute strength session lifting heavy is one of the most efficient things you can do for your body in this decade. Strength is the buffer that protects everything else. You do not need an hour. You just need three or four lifts, done with intention, two or three times a week.

The research: in a study of more than 400,000 adults, strength training was linked to a 30 percent drop in women’s risk of dying from heart disease. Men doing the same work got 11. Women also hit their full benefit at about 140 minutes of weekly movement to men’s 300.⁵ The more-is-more ruler was calibrated on male bodies. Yours runs on a better exchange rate ;)

And finally, any class that helps you leave the house.

• Stroller fitness.

• Postpartum yoga.

• Baby-and-me movement.

Sometimes the workout is not the most important thing you get from the class. For some it’s seeing another adult or being reminded you still exist outside the walls of your own home. That counts too.

The research: mothers paired with another mother who had been through it and come out the other side were about half as likely to be depressed three months in. Fourteen percent versus twenty-five.⁶ Not from the workout but from the other mother.

That is the menu.

The menu is a menu, not a checklist.

And none of it requires the setup. You do not need the formal gym corner, the rack of dumbbells, the matching set. A plank held on the living room floor while Katrina Scott streams on your iPad and your toddler runs laps in front of you is the real version, not the lesser one. Do not let the setup become the barrier. The setup is just one more thing the wellness internet wants you to buy before you are allowed to begin.

Everyone needs to find what works in the season she is actually in. The point of the menu is options, not obligations.

What This Is Really About

This is not a piece arguing that mothers do not need exercise. Mothers need exercise just like everyone else does. This is a piece arguing that the math of what already counts in your day is bigger than the wellness internet wants you to believe, and that the formal layer you add on top should fit the life you actually have, not the life of the woman in the ad.

Movement, in this season, is often woven directly into the life you’re already living. It is the baby on your hip. The stroller up the hill. The trip upstairs because someone forgot the stuffed rabbit. The walk around the block because nobody was happy inside.

The formal workout is the layer you add when you can. The rest of it already counts. Even if nobody gave it a better name.

This is the job of an Edit. One subject a month. I read the research and the noise so you can read one letter. What counts, what works, what fits the season you are actually in.

If this read true, send it to another mother who would recognize herself in it.

The receipts, for the women who want them, and for anyone who still needs convincing you should get the hour:

¹ The three-minutes study and its women-specific analysis. Nature Medicine, 2022; wearable data from 25,000 non-exercisers.

² The postpartum Pilates trial and the network review of core rehab approaches.

³ The distressed-women yoga trial (Iyengar yoga, 72 women) and a second three-month yoga program in distressed women.

⁴ The home-based exercise trial. McGill, 88 women with postpartum depressed mood.

⁵ The strength study. Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 2024; 412,413 adults.

⁶ The other-mother trial. BMJ, 2009; 701 mothers, Ontario.

And the official postpartum guidance that counts movement in ten-minute pieces.

Before it, you are recovering but after it, you are expected to be functioning again.

The appointment happens. Someone checks a few things, tells you that you are cleared, and from there the language changes. People stop asking how recovery is going and start asking whether you feel like yourself again.

The question carries an assumption inside it: that you mostly should be back to yourself by now. So when your body still feels unfamiliar months later, it can start to feel strangely personal. Like maybe everyone else returned to normal and you somehow missed the exit.

You are still tired in a way sleep does not completely fix and your hormones still feel loud. God forbid your hair is falling out or growing back or doing both at the same time. Your body feels somehwat familiar, but not fully returned. And because the official timeline sounded so short, you start wondering whether the problem is you.

Here is what I wish someone had told me earlier:

In 2025, researchers published one of the largest looks we have ever had at postpartum recovery in Science Advances. They examined 76 different lab markers across roughly 44 million measurements from more than 300,000 pregnancies, following what happened in the body from before conception through more than a year after birth.

About half of those markers took somewhere between three months and a full year to return to baseline. Some took longer. Inflammation and immune markers continued shifting for twelve to eighteen months. Thyroid markers kept moving well past the first year, especially during breastfeeding.

A separate 2025 study looking at postpartum recovery across multiple domains found that fewer than half of women had fully recovered across all measures by three to six months postpartum. The researchers did not conclude that women were failing recovery.

They concluded that recovery itself lasts longer, and is far more multidimensional, than our current systems acknowledge. I find this genuinely comforting, and not in a “lower your expectations” kind of way. It is comforting because it finally matches the scale of what the body actually did.

Pregnancy, birth, feeding, healing, hormone shifts, sleep deprivation, immune recalibration, identity change. We tend to talk about these things separately, as if they are isolated experiences happening one at a time.

But your body experiences them all at once. Quietly. Continuously. For months.

And while all of that is happening, most mothers are also expected to resume normal life at a pace that makes the recovery itself nearly invisible: You answer emails, schedule pediatric appointments, remember the sunscreen, return texts, buy birthday gifts, pack snacks and fuunction well enough that nobody notices your body is still allocating enormous resources toward repair and regulation underneath all of it.

That is not a failed recovery but a MASSIVE one. We just do not have much language for recovery that is both functional and unfinished at the same time. So we default to extremes:

Many women are living somewhere in the middle. They are capable, functional, grateful, even. And still very much recovering. All these things can be true at once.

The one practical thing I will offer, because postpartum already comes with enough decisions, is this: You do not need to obsessively monitor yourself or build an elaborate recovery protocol. But you are allowed to ask questions long after the six-week visit is over.

If something feels off, you can ask for a CBC, ferritin, a thyroid panel, and a blood pressure recheck. You are allowed to bring up fatigue at month ten and are allowed to mention brain fog at month sixteen. You are allowed to still be paying attention to your body long after everyone else stopped asking about it.

I am not your doctor, and this is not medical advice, but I do think many women have been taught to interpret ongoing recovery as personal failure, when in reality it may be evidence of the scale of the thing itself.

You are not behind. You are still in the middle of something very large. And I wish more people had told us that.

P.S If this read true, send it to another mother who would recognize herself in it.

The research, if you want it

• On how long the body actually takes: Bar A, et al. “Pregnancy and postpartum dynamics revealed by millions of lab tests.” Science Advances, 2025;11(13):eadr7922. DOI 10.1126/sciadv.adr7922. (A cross-sectional analysis of 76 lab markers across roughly 44 million measurements from more than 300,000 pregnancies; about half take three months to a year, some longer, to return to baseline.)

• On recovery being multidimensional: “Assessment of recovery after childbirth; a cross-sectional study.” European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology, 2025;314:114676. DOI 10.1016/j.ejogrb.2025.114676. (Among 1,117 women, 42.5% reported full recovery across all four domains, physical, mental, sexual, and functional, at three to six months postpartum.)

And if you’re here, there’s a good chance you are a woman who is still functioning, still showing up to everything, and quietly very tired of how much modern life now requires you to perform proof that you’re handling it well.

The Mostly is the publication arm of Well, Mostly, a modern motherhood and wellness brand for women who are exhausted by optimization culture and would like wellness to stop feeling like another form of performance.

I’m a trained health coach, a former tech executive, and a mother of two daughters under two. But more than that, I’m someone who spent years trying to become the kind of woman modern wellness culture rewards: disciplined, informed, high-functioning, self-aware, endlessly improving.

For a long time, it looked healthy from the outside but inside, it often felt like work. Wellness has been the long thread of my life, and not always in a flattering way.

It started as a complicated relationship with food and my body that I would now recognize as an eating disorder. When I eventually moved out of that phase, I overcorrected into “healthy living” with the same intensity I had once brought to restriction. I read everything. Tracked everything. Tried every clean version of every food. It looked balanced. It wasn’t.

I realized that part of what pulled me toward health coaching as a discipline is that wellness has become another way that women manage themselves into exhaustion. By the time I was training, I already had a low tolerance for the corners of wellness culture that ask women to turn their bodies, routines, and nervous systems into full-time optimization projects. I had lived inside that mindset long enough to know what it cost.

At the same time, I was building a career in tech, over a decade in sales, training, and large-scale corporate environments that reward speed, productivity, efficiency, and constant performance. The two stories ran in parallel for years: the external pressure to optimize everything, and the quieter internal work of trying to unlearn it.

Then I had two babies in two years. A newborn and an eighteen-month-old. And life became work calls taken muted from the nursery floor with c\offee reheated three times. The strange identity shift of going from highly competent and ambitious to suddenly feeling like you are barely keeping up with your own life.

And I was doing it without my mom, who passed away when I was twenty-five. Without my mother-in-law, who is gone too. Without the invisible village modern motherhood content often quietly assumes exists somewhere in the background, making the routines and systems possible.

I know what it feels like to need support and not have anyone to call. I kept looking for someone writing to women whose lives looked mostly fine from the outside but felt relentlessly full on the inside. Women who weren't falling apart, but weren't exactly thriving either.

The woman answering Slack messages during nap time. The woman researching magnesium at midnight. The woman who is technically functioning and privately wondering why everything feels so relentless. The woman competent enough that nobody notices the cost.

I couldn’t find her. So I’m writing her.

What you’ll find here

A long-form letter, every Sunday. Closer to a magazine column than a quick post. The kind of thing you read slowly with reheated coffee before the household fully wakes up.

I write about:

Wellness without performance. What it looks like to care about your health, sleep, food, hormones, nervous system, and home environment without turning your entire life into a self-improvement project.

Research synthesis. When a wellness study starts circulating online, I’ll read it for you. I’ll tell you what the evidence actually says, what it doesn’t say, and where the internet is overstating certainty.

Modern motherhood as cultural commentary. The invisible work. Being the person everyone assumes has it together because you keep answering emails and showing up on time. Ambition after kids or the loss of the village. Missing your old life without wanting it back.

Decision reduction. Specific recommendations for the small everyday choices that should not require a six-hour research spiral. The Baby Products Guide is the first of these. More to come.

Recognition over advice. The sentence that finally names the thing you thought was just your private failure to handle modern life correctly.

And increasingly, I think many women are exhausted by systems that ask them to become endless projects instead.

I am not here to tell you motherhood is hard but worth it. You already know both of those things. I am also not here to hand you another protocol, another optimization strategy, another set of rules disguised as empowerment.

I am here to write honestly about the gap between what modern wellness culture says women should be able to sustain and what modern life actually asks them to carry.

To name the things you have already been quietly noticing and to occasionally hand you something useful: a practical recommendation, a reframing, a pocket-sized question, a sentence that helps articulate something you could already feel but had not yet fully named.

I’m here to remind you that motherhood is immersive, exhausting, it alters your identity. It is also incredibly meaningful with moments that make you laugh with their absurdity. Motherhood is worthy of being written about with more seriousness than the internet usually allows.

If you have ever wondered why everyone else seems to be handling modern life with more ease than you are, I hope you'll feel at home here. Especially if you’re reading it with the same cup of coffee you’ve had in your hand for four hours.

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None of it is bad advice.It is just written for lives where nobody needs something from you every four minutes.

A lot of mothers do not live inside that kind of time.

I don’t.

My brain sounds a little like this all day long: who needs socks, who has the appointment, what’s running low, what still hasn’t been cleaned, what everyone will eat, what someone is going to ask for later that I should probably already have ready.

I sit down to do one thing for myself and before I’ve fully opened the tab, somebody needs a snack. Or help in the bathroom. Or a different shirt. Or to tell me something extremely important about a rock they found outside. And by the time I come back to the original task, if I come back to it at all, I have to locate the thread again from the beginning.

I used to think this meant something about me. I thought that maybe I lacked discipline or that I wasn’t consistent enough. I especially thought that other women were somehow better at routines than I was.

There is research from Gloria Mark at UC Irvine on what interruption does to our attention. In one well-known study, once people were pulled off a task, they did not get back to it for an average of around twenty-three minutes. And they moved through other tasks before they did.

Twenty-three minutes.

And most mothers are not being interrupted once. We are interrupted before the recovery from the previous interruption has even finished. We are never not mid-recovery.

That line alone rearranged something in my brain when I first learned it, because suddenly my life did not look like personal failure anymore. It looked like a person trying to hold a thought together while somebody kept gently pulling on her sleeve.

And the interruptions are only part of it. There is also the constant background processing of motherhood itself. The invisible inventory system running underneath everything else: The remembering, anticipating, monitoring. The emotional climate management and running tally of what the household needs before anyone else realizes it needs it.

A 2024 review in Nature Mental Health described the mental load of motherhood as a sustained cognitive stressor on the maternal brain. It was not a personality trait or women being dramatic online. It’s a real cognitive load.

And yet mothers are still handed advice as though the problem is simply that we have not found the correct planner yet.

Not because the routines are bad or because discipline is fake. It’s because so much of modern wellness advice quietly assumes a brain that gets to finish a thought. It’s a brain that belongs fully to itself, and a lot of mothers do not experience their brains that way anymore.

At least not during these years. You can feel this in tiny ordinary moments such as trying to answer one email while somebody asks for a snack three separate times. It’s reheating the same coffee over and over or walking into a room and forgetting why you entered it because your attention got split six times on the way there. Sometimes you need thirty uninterrupted minutes and then you realize you haven’t had thirty uninterrupted minutes in weeks. Then blaming yourself for not becoming the woman who wakes up at 5:30 to meditate.

It’s not just the tasks. It’s the constant deciding. And I think a lot of women quietly carry around evidence folders against themselves because of it. It becomes the habit you couldn’t maintain or the routine that lasted nine days. It’s the stack of unread books or the 100 notifications of unanswered texts. The thing you said you were finally going to start once life calmed down a little.

As though all of it proves something about your character. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe the system was never built for a life with this many interruptions inside it.Maybe the problem is not that women are failing at optimization. Maybe it is that we are expected to optimize inside conditions that fragment attention all day long and then blame ourselves for struggling to perform like uninterrupted people.

I don’t think most mothers need another perfectly color-coded system layered on top of the load.

We need fewer open loops, unnecessary decisions, and things held entirely in our heads.

That is part of what I want Well, Mostly to become. Not another place handing women more things to perfect but something softer than that. I want it to be a place that assumes you are already carrying a lot, and understands you are probably reading this while somebody is asking you for something.

So if you have been keeping a quiet ledger of your own failures lately, I just want to offer another interpretation.

You are not undisciplined. You are interrupted. Constantly. Lovingly. Maddeningly. By people you would not give back.

Both things can exist at the same time. And it is still allowed to exhaust you.

The research, if you want it

• On how interruption fragments attention: Mark, González, and Harris, “No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work,” Proceedings of CHI ‘05, 2005, pp. 321-330. (Interrupted tasks were resumed after roughly twenty-three minutes, with other tasks handled in between.)

• On the mental load and the maternal brain: Callaghan, McCormack, Kim, Pawluski, et al., “Understanding the maternal brain in the context of the mental load of motherhood,” Nature Mental Health, vol. 2, 2024, pp. 764-772.

I used to trust this part of myself most. I was the one who remembered birthdays and passwords and the name of the woman at the front desk, plus both of her kids. I ran the family calendar in my head. I could hold details without writing them down. I was, for lack of a less irritating word, sharp.

Then I became the woman who reheated the same coffee three times or the one who walked into Target for diapers and left with toilet cleaner and absolutely no diapers. The one who forgot words mid-sentence while simultaneously remembering everyone else’s snack preferences, shoe sizes, emotional states, and next appointments.

I started losing the thread mid-sentence, reading the same text four times and retaining none of it. I was standing in the kitchen with the fridge open, narrating my own confusion to no one. I did not say any of this out loud for a long time because saying it out loud felt dangerously close to confessing that something was wrong with me. I hated that the competent person everyone relied on had quietly stopped functioning.

For a while, I assumed I was failing.

It took me much too long to consider the other possibility: maybe I was not failing at all. Maybe I was under-resourced and in the middle of becoming someone new. Here is what I have since learned, and what I wish someone had handed me much sooner:

Matrescence is the developmental transition into motherhood. The word itself is not new, but the research finally taking it seriously is. Scientists describe it as a transition on the scale of adolescence: hormones, identity, relationships, cognition, all reorganizing at once. Except teenagers are allowed to be visibly in transition. Mothers are expected to answer emails, manage schedules, keep tiny humans alive, and pretend nothing happened at all.

The thing I keep returning to is that this is not imagined. Research published in Frontiers in Psychiatry in 2025 looked at executive functioning during matrescence, planning, working memory, focus, mental flexibility, the systems required to hold six things at once. Those functions genuinely shift during the transition into motherhood. The same paper also linked those shifts to perinatal depression risk, which tells you the stakes here are real, not cosmetic.

Read that again, because it loosened something in my chest.

You did not get worse at remembering. Instead your brain reorganized. This is the fog you cannot explain, the one you have been quietly apologizing for, has a documented shape.

There is even early imaging pointing in the same direction. A very small 2025 pilot study used wearable brain imaging on women one month postpartum who screened as clinically healthy. They were not depressed or anxious anxious. They were fine on paper. Researchers still detected measurable fatigue patterns in the prefrontal cortex in some of them.

It was only eight women, and I am not building a cathedral on eight people. But it gestures toward something many mothers already know intimately: you can technically be functioning and still not be okay.

Both of those things can exist in the same body on the same day. So why did nobody tell us any of this? Because the system was never built to look.

Your six-week postpartum visit checks whether your body is healing. It does not check whether your identity detonated quietly in the process. There is no standard screening for matrescence. No roadmap. Often not even language for it.

One of the largest psychological and neurological transitions a human being goes through, and we built almost nowhere to put it.

You did not miss the memo. The memo itself barely exists.

That is beginning to change, slowly. In 2025, researchers ran what appears to be one of the first pilot programs directly teaching mothers about matrescence itself. Just understanding the transition, having it named and explained, measurably improved how clearly the mothers understood what they were going through, and how much compassion they gave themselves for it.

Which honestly makes sense to me. Because sometimes the name is most of the relief. And it’s not because it fixes the exhaustion or because it gives you eight uninterrupted hours of sleep or removes the invisible labor or magically redistributes the mental load. It’s because naming something changes the story you tell yourself about it.

• “I am broken” becomes: “Oh. This is a transition.”

• “I am failing” becomes: “This is a reorganization.”

• “I should be handling this better” becomes: “Maybe no one was ever meant to handle this alone.”

I am not going to hand you five steps or a protocol here. And I’m not trying to make this a productivity issue disguised as a wellness problem. And frankly, I think women are exhausted from being told every difficult human experience is secretly an optimization opportunity.

This is not something to hack. It is something to recognize. What I can give you is the thing I needed someone to say to me while standing on that staircase landing, holding nothing, convinced I was quietly coming apart:

And you are doing it inside a culture that still expects mothers to perform this transformation invisibly.

One more thing before I go, because I take this part seriously: if the fog comes with a heaviness that does not lift, dread, numbness, hopelessness, anxiety that feels consuming, that deserves a real conversation with your provider. Matrescence and perinatal depression can overlap from the inside, and you deserve support for either one.

I am building Well, Mostly for the woman who is still functioning well enough that nobody notices the cost. The one answering emails, packing lunches, replying “good!” and forgetting why she walked upstairs.

If that is you, you are not failing. You are in matrescence. And I think a lot more of us deserve to know the name for what happened to us.

The research, if you want it

• On matrescence as a developmental transition: Orchard, Rutherford, Holmes, and Jamadar, “Matrescence: lifetime impact of motherhood on cognition and the brain,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2023.

• On the brain reorganizing: Hoekzema et al., “Pregnancy leads to long-lasting changes in human brain structure,” Nature Neuroscience, 2017.

• On executive function and perinatal depression: Ghadimi and McCormack, “Executive functioning in matrescence and implications for perinatal depression,” Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2025.

• On the imaging: Kimura et al., “Early Detection of Neural Fatigue in Clinically Healthy Postpartum Mothers Using Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy,” Cureus, 2025. (A small pilot, eight mothers; three showed the decline.)

• On teaching matrescence: Trinko, Sarewitz, and Athan, “Improving maternal well-being: a matrescence education pilot study for new mothers,” Maternal Health, Neonatology and Perinatology, 2025. (Eighteen mothers.)

“Sticker please?”

Then louder:

“Sticker please?”

The clerk looked at me and asked how I was doing.

“Surviving,” I said.

She laughed. What I meant by surviving was something more specific than surviving.

I meant: I am still functioning. The work calls are happening, appointments are tracked, school emails are answered, dishes are mostly done. The children are fed and I am still in the room. What I am tired of is not motherhood, but the unbroken performance of proving I am handling it well.

And I think there are a lot of women quietly living inside that distinction.

The wellness internet has categories for women who are thriving and women who are falling apart, but it has very little language for women who are still functioning:

• The women showing up every day.

• The women competent enough that nobody notices the cost.

• The women who are not technically in crisis, but who are deeply, quietly tired of how much of modern life now requires performance masquerading as wellness.

That is the reason I am writing this publication and I am calling it The Mostly because I think the largest and least-named category of women in 2026 is the one between thriving and collapsing.

Not burned out. Not flourishing. Still functioning.

Still replying to the emails and still remembering the snack day. Still making the pediatrician appointment while carrying the invisible architecture of modern family life. The performance remains intact and that is what makes this category hard to see.

There is a growing body of research arriving in 2026 that I do not think the wellness internet has fully integrated yet. One of the phrases appearing in workforce research this year is quietly cracking and the point is not that people are visibly struggling. The point is that they are not. They are still productive and still responsive, capable, and still performing competence convincingly enough that the system continues rewarding them for it.

The modern woman has become extraordinarily good at looking fine from the outside. The data suggests the collapse often arrives later.

Another trend showing up this year is what creator-economy researchers are calling the loss of leverage at scale. For more than a decade, the cultural assumption has been that more optimization, more efficiency, more reach, and more output would eventually produce better returns. Yet the returns are flattening and the exhaustion is not.

And audiences themselves appear to be moving toward something else entirely:

• smaller communities

• specificity, depth

• long-form writing

• people saying one honest thing instead of performing expertise at industrial scale.

Then there is the postpartum research. A 2025 study analyzing tens of millions of lab tests from more than 300,000 pregnancies found that many of the body's systems are still returning to baseline well past the first year after birth. The six-week postpartum visit, which much of modern motherhood still quietly treats as the official endpoint of recovery, was never actually built around recovery science.

These findings seem unrelated at first glance. One is about work. One is about the internet. One is about motherhood and the body. But they are all describing the same mistake.

• Treating performance as evidence of wellness.

• Treating visible functionality as proof that the load is sustainable.

• Treating the absence of collapse as proof that nothing is costing us.

The cost of being competent inside systems that do not see the cost is the layer of modern life I want this publication to write about.

Since this is the opening letter, a little about who is writing it:

I am a trained health coach with a background in tech and two small children. I have spent more than a decade inside systems that largely operated under the assumption that more optimization always produced better outcomes. And then I became a mother, and motherhood, for me, has been one long education in the limits of optimization culture.

I still care deeply about health and because of that I read the studies. I care about evidence because it makes me feel like the time I dedicate to things is worthwhile. I care about food and sleep and movement and the nervous system and all the things the wellness internet talks about constantly. But I have also become increasingly interested in the gap between what wellness culture says women should be able to sustain and what modern life actually asks them to carry.

That gap is where most women I know now live. What I want The Mostly to do is occupy what I think of as the recognition layer.

The moment where someone finally names the thing you thought was just your private failure to handle modern life correctly. A few examples of what I think that work looks like:

• A letter, on Sundays. Something closer to a long magazine column than a quick post. Kind of like the thing you read slowly with reheated coffee before the household fully wakes up.

• Research synthesis. When a new wellness study starts circulating online, I will read it for you and I will tell you what I think the evidence actually says, what it does not say, and where the internet is likely overstating certainty.

• Cultural observation. Such as pieces about motherhood, performance, modern life, wellness, ambition, exhaustion, identity, and competence that are trying to think instead of simply react. So on and so forth.

• Stories of women calmly rethinking the systems around them. But this won’t be because their lives are imploding. This is becasue they have started noticing the cost of maintaining them exactly as written and I’m seeing it happen to a lot of my friends who are transitioning both into marriage and motherhood.

• And occasionally, when warranted, the practical thing. Things like the useful lab or the pocket-able question. Sometimes it will be the sentence that helps you articulate something you could already feel but had not yet fully named.

The goal is to be practical without becoming performative. I am not building a coaching business with a publication attached but instead I am building a recognition project.

So that is the offer. A letter, on Sundays about a particular kind of modern motherhood that I do not think the algorithm has language for yet. This is about the women still functioning and the invisible cost of competence. This is the slow refusal to keep performing proof of wellness while quietly depleting ourselves underneath it.

If a friend forwarded this to you, you can subscribe below. If you came here through Instagram, you already know where I am most days. And if any part of this feels familiar, if any of these descriptions sound uncomfortably close to your own interior monologue lately, hit reply and tell me.

I read every one.