Juggling Motherhood, Two Businesses, and Finding Myself After Giving Birth. The Truth About My New Life.

Juggling Motherhood, Two Businesses, and Finding Myself After Giving Birth. The Truth About My New Life.

By Sapna, Founder of Modern Mothers

I have wanted to write this post for a long time. Not because I have it figured out, I want to be clear about that from the start, but because I think there is something useful in hearing from someone who is genuinely in the middle of it. Not on the other side, looking back with the soft focus of retrospect. Right here, in it, working it out in real time.

I went back to work properly at six months, though if I am honest, I never fully stopped. In those early months I worked when the baby was asleep, laptop open on the kitchen table at odd hours, carving out whatever time existed between feeds and naps and the particular exhaustion of those first weeks. That is the reality of being your own boss. The work does not pause. You find the gaps and you fill them and you keep going.

I have built two agencies from the ground up. I have sat in rooms and made things happen and solved problems and led teams and that person did not disappear when I became a mother. She just had to learn to exist alongside someone entirely new.

What I did not expect was how strange it would feel to be back in the full rhythm of work. Not bad strange, necessarily. Just strange. Like returning to a city you know well after a long time away and noticing all the things that are exactly the same while you yourself have changed completely. The meetings were the same. The emails were the same. The particular rhythm of agency life, all exactly as I had left it. I was different. The version of me sitting in those rooms was carrying something enormous and invisible that nobody in the room could quite see.

People warn you about the sleepless nights. They warn you about the feeding and the recovery and the fog. What they do not warn you about is the quiet, disorienting experience of no longer being entirely sure who you are. Not in a dramatic way. Not a crisis. Something subtler and in some ways harder to articulate. I am still me, completely and entirely me, and I am also someone I am only just beginning to know. A mother. A person whose priorities have rearranged themselves without asking permission. A woman who can be in a high-stakes client meeting and simultaneously, somewhere underneath everything, thinking about whether the baby has had enough to eat today. Both of these people are real. Both of them are me. Getting used to that has been the work of this year.

I started Modern Mothers because I could not find what I needed. I looked for it everywhere. The honest account of what this actually feels like. The space that did not make you choose between being a mother and being ambitious, between being grateful and being exhausted, between loving your baby completely and also, sometimes, missing the version of yourself that existed before. Everything I found was either too soft or too clinical. Too focused on the practical without acknowledging the emotional, or too focused on the emotional without giving you anything useful to hold onto. I wanted something that felt like a conversation with a brilliant, honest friend who also happened to know everything. I wanted editorial and intelligent and warm and completely unflinchingly honest. So I built it. In the evenings, during nap times, in the margins of a life that was already full to the edges. That is how Modern Mothers began.

The reality of running two agencies alongside a baby is something I will be honest about, because the curated version of this story does nobody any favours. Some days I am brilliant at all of it. The baby is happy, the client is happy, I have answered my emails and made something I am proud of and feel, genuinely, like I have worked something out. Some days I am not brilliant at any of it. The baby has been up since 4am. A client needs something urgently. Modern Mothers has a deadline I cannot quite reach. I am running on coffee and the particular adrenaline of someone who has too many things open at once and cannot close any of them. Most days are somewhere in between. Which is, I think, what most people's days actually look like. The difference is that not everyone talks about it.

The mental load is real and it is relentless. Being the person who holds all of the information, not just for my businesses but for my baby, our home, the invisible infrastructure of a life, is the thing I was least prepared for. It does not switch off. It does not go on holiday. It is just there, running quietly in the background of everything else.

What has surprised me most is how much I love it. All of it. The complicated and the beautiful and the exhausting and the extraordinary. I did not know it was possible to feel this expanded by something. My baby has made me more serious about the things that matter and significantly less serious about the things that do not, and that recalibration has made me a better version of myself professionally as well as personally. I have almost no patience now for things that do not serve a purpose. Meetings that could be emails. Conversations that circle without landing anywhere. The performative aspects of professional life that I used to accept without question. Becoming a mother did something to my tolerance for the unnecessary and I have come to appreciate it.

I want Modern Mothers to be the place where the conversation is honest. Where we talk about the identity shift and the mental load and the career guilt and the relationship changes, alongside the best nursing bra and the hospital bag essentials and the postpartum skincare routine that actually works when you have forty-five seconds. A space that treats you as intelligent. That does not talk down to you or wrap difficult things in unnecessary softness or pretend that any of this is easy when it is not. A community where you do not have to perform being fine when you are not.

The truth about my new life is that I would not trade any of it. Not the 4am wake-ups or the impossible scheduling or the days when I feel like I am falling short in every direction at once. On the other side of all of that is a baby who is the most astonishing thing I have ever had anything to do with, and a business I am building that means something, and a version of myself that is more complete than the one who existed before.

I am not on the other side of this. I am in it, working it out every day, in the same way that you are. That is the whole point of Modern Mothers. You are not supposed to have it figured out. You are just supposed to know that you are not doing it alone.

You are not alone.

Modern Mothers is a space for every woman navigating pregnancy, new motherhood and the postpartum period. Built by a mother, for mothers. We are glad you are here.