Today Is My Baby's First Birthday. Here Is What I Have Learnt Over The Past Year!

By Sapna, Founder of Modern Mothers

A year ago today, everything changed. Not in the way people describe when they talk about big moments — the dramatic, before-and-after kind of change that arrives with clarity and certainty. More like the kind that happens quietly, gradually, then all at once, until one morning you look up and realise you are an entirely different person standing in what is still, technically, your own life.

Kian is one today. I have been sitting with that for a while now, trying to find the right words for what this year has actually been. Not the curated version. The real one.

Motherhood is the hardest and most rewarding thing I have ever been through. I knew people said that. I had heard it enough times to have it filed somewhere in the back of my mind alongside all the other things people tell you before you have a baby that you nod at politely without fully understanding. You cannot understand it until you are in it. The tears, the sleepless nights, the moments where you genuinely wonder how anyone does this, and then your baby smiles at you. Just smiles at you. Something rearranges inside you permanently, and you understand, finally, what everyone was trying to say.

Work can wait. I say this as someone who has built two agencies, who has always worked, who finds genuine meaning in what she does professionally. I say it as someone who genuinely believed, before Kian arrived, that I would find a way to keep everything moving at the same pace. I did not. The work waited. The clients waited. Some of them did not wait. The world did not end. You can live off the absolute minimum if you need to. You can strip everything back to what actually matters and discover, with some surprise, that what actually matters is a much shorter list than you thought. There is nothing more important than the time you have with your family in that first year. Nothing on a to-do list, nothing in an inbox, nothing with a deadline attached to it comes close.

Sometimes the thing you loved and valued most will not feel the same after having a baby. For me, that was my business. The thing I had built, that I was proud of, that had defined so much of how I understood myself. For months I could not connect to it the way I used to. The clients were not all there. My presence was not all there. The version of me who used to show up for it fully was somewhere else entirely, learning how to be a mother, and she did not have much left over. I want to say that to anyone reading this who is in that place right now: one day you will find your way back to it. Not to the exact version of it you had before, perhaps, but to something. The love for what you built does not disappear. It just goes quiet for a while. Give it time. Give yourself time. It comes back.

There will be people who love and support you along the way. In real life and online, in the comments and the messages that arrive at exactly the moment you need them. Hold onto those people. They are your people, and in a year that can feel extraordinarily isolating, they matter more than they probably know. Modern Mothers began, in some ways, because I needed to build the community I was looking for myself. A place where the conversation was honest. Where you could say it is hard without it being a confession. Where ambition and exhaustion and love and grief could all exist in the same sentence without anyone flinching. A year in, I am more certain than ever that this is the right thing to be building. For Kian, partly, so that he grows up knowing his mother built something that meant something. For every woman who has found her way here and recognised herself in it.

Do not be hard on yourself. You may look different. You may feel different. Your life will never be the same again and the changes are enormous in ways that are genuinely difficult to prepare for. Your body has changed. Your identity has shifted. Your relationship has rearranged itself. Your career has been interrupted, redirected or put on hold. These are not small things. The love you will have for your baby is bigger than all of it. That is the only thing I can offer with complete certainty. Everything else is complicated and personal and specific to you. The love is not. The love is the thing that makes the rest of it not just survivable but, on most days, extraordinary.

I have learnt more this year than in any year before it. About myself, about what I am capable of, about what I need and what I can let go of and what I will fight for. About the kind of mother I want to be and the kind of person I want Kian to grow up watching. I am grateful for every single person who has been part of this year. The ones who showed up in real life and the ones who showed up online. The ones who sent a message on a hard day and the ones who just stayed.

Here is to the next chapter.

Happy Birthday, Kian. 💙

Modern Mothers is built for every woman navigating pregnancy, new motherhood and the years that follow. We are glad you are here.