24. Motherhood Doesn’t Make You Less Capable, It Changes What You’re Capable Of

And then how was it when your son arrived? You said that it wasn't as you were expecting because you were not prepared for that.

Tell me about going back to work after your son was born.

How this horror movie, how was it for you? So I

suppose the horror movie kind of, rather than feeling like an external monster, it felt like something, like the monster was in me kind of, you know, attacking me from the inside, kind of making me question my sanity, making me question like, Why am I feeling like this? You know, I used to be the boss of back-to-back meetings and stakeholder meetings, but something in the setup just made me feel like I just couldn't do it anymore.

And the environment made it feel like it was my problem, like it was a personal problem.

And, you know, I've done something to change because I've gone off to have a baby and I can't do it anymore.

I can't hack it anymore.

And so when I went through the shift myself, I realized there's a massive gap between that kind of structural support that businesses offer.

in theory, and the actual kind of day-to-day human experience of coming back.

I find myself navigating kind of sleep deprivation, changing family dynamics, because obviously my husband's identity had changed as well.

You know, we couldn't just go out on an evening anymore.

Someone has to be in with the baby when he's asleep.

And I put a lot of pressure on myself to kind of be who I was before, completely neglecting this massive transition that I'd been through because I'd not done the reading, I'd not read up about mattress hands and that huge transformation.

I expected to have the same kind of velocity and productivity as before when, you know, you're navigating nursery schedules and nap schedules and, you know, all of this information, all of this new stuff on so many pressures from lots of different angles, you can't possibly be the same person.

And again, I think it's naivety that I thought that and having, you know, my son's four and a half now, having a lot of time to reflect on it and to kind of work through it, you know, I had a completely reconfigured sensory and emotional capacity and I wish I'd given myself more grace at the time.

And that's the thing that I'm really passionate about now because I'm aware that lots of women may not be as naive as me when they go through that transition.

But I think there are still a lot of women that put an awful lot of pressure on themselves.

And so I really want to make sure that they give themselves that grace because you know if you think about adolescence you know the transition between childhood and adulthood we give teenagers so much grace to have mad hair and weird clothes and be super moody and you know we're just like oh they're just a teenager it's fine and yet for a woman going through matricence becoming a mother You are going to be moody.

Your hormones are all over the place.

Your identity is completely different.

You have so many more responsibilities.

But all of that is a positive thing and it should be given the same grace as adolescence because, you know, there's so much data out there about how your skills improve during motherhood as well.

I really want it to be celebrated as, no, you're not the same person that you were before, but that's a good thing.

You've grown and you've developed and that's how we progress in the world.

That's super interesting.