It gives me pause to write publicly about my children. I’m private and protective by nature, but to talk honestly about my Motherhood Shift and about how Mother of Invention came to be, I must speak abstractly about my daughters. It would be disingenuous to do otherwise: they are embedded in my narrative
When my youngest daughter was six months old, we rushed her to the hospital, afraid she might be having seizures. Thankfully she wasn’t, but the symptoms that brought us there didn’t disappear.
What followed were months of uncertainty. There were specialists, tests, waiting and every developmental milestone carried outsized weight. Fear quietly rewired my (and my family’s) nervous system. Nothing definitive could be diagnosed and the prognosis remained open-ended.
At the same time, I was producing an ambitious audiodrama at work. It was a project of enormous creative and ethical responsibility. I was deep inside the material, leading a sensitive process that demanded rigor, humility, and care. And for the first time in years, I felt creatively awake.
And around that core tension, everything else in my life kept pressing in: a strong-willed older child, a destabilizing move, a preschool situation that didn’t feel right, and the quiet reckoning of approaching forty.
When the audio project wrapped—successfully, by any external measure—I broke.
Leading my marketing division suddenly felt empty. My confidence as a mother evaporated. I told myself stories: I was failing at life, I was being replaced by my nanny, I had taken the wrong path. I didn’t have a real purpose.
So I quit my job without a clear plan. This was neither an attempt to “lean in” or “opt out”; rather, something just had to change. And so the identity I had honed over the past decade—an accomplished executive and startup builder who effortlessly balanced motherhood alongside her demanding career—collapsed.
What I didn’t understand then is that this was the beginning of a profound awakening. There was zero clarity, maximum disorientation and a thousand tears.
Here’s the good news: my youngest child is healthy today even though we never got a clear explanation for why her symptoms faded over time. And my audiodrama was nominated for the highest honor in the audiobook industry.
Here’s the truer news: nothing resolved neatly after I left my job.
I spent a year trying to construct a narrative that would save face from what I perceived as professional failure. But as I was reluctantly pulled deeper into my Motherhood Shift, something else began to happen. Inside the discomfort, real transformation and revelation took root.
You go into the woods.
And you emerge slowly.
I wouldn’t trade a single tear to return to the woman I was before I became a mother. But I also no longer believe this transition should be silent, privatized, or endured without tools.
This is where Mother of Invention comes from: staying inside the problem long enough for real frameworks and solutions to form.
More soon.
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