One of the things that has always drawn me to early-stage company building is novelty and pace. There’s urgency and experimentation built into the daily cadence of startups. Even the most successful companies must pivot swiftly and creatively.
This type of vocational environment gets me jazzed.
So when my first daughter was born, and the adrenaline of new motherhood wore off, and I started to settle into the rhythm of life with a baby, I was woefully unprepared for how it would affect me.
The sameness of caregiving was brutal. The predictability of days with an infant, then baby and then toddler started to erode me. Even when you change the scenery—beach, park, pumpkin patch—an eighteen-month-old still toddles, points, squawks, needs a diaper change, asks for snacks, melts down.
I started to experience a kind of psychic fatigue I didn’t yet have language for. All the while I was fed lines like “just blink and she’ll be graduating from high school” and “the days are long, the years are short”. The combination created internal dissonance.
Post mat leave, I remember arriving to my office on Monday mornings relieved the weekend was over, yet I still felt tired and restless and 'off'. To cope with that feeling, I reached for ways to take the edge off and make the hours feel lighter.
And coping mechanisms that started as relief morphed into reliance.
And this is important: it had nothing to do with my daughter. I loved her deeply. I was present, attentive, and bonded. This wasn’t a failure of attachment and I didn’t regret having her. I legitimately wanted to be a mom.
It was in my own relationship to repetition that grief surfaced as listlessness and dissatisfaction; then the parts of myself I didn’t yet know (or hadn’t yet faced) started to creep to the fore.
Here’s the image I keep coming back to.
A zoetrope is one of the earliest animation devices: a series of still images spun quickly enough to appear as motion. When it’s moving fast, you see a seamless moving picture. When it slows down, you see the gaps between the images.
Early motherhood slows life down in the same way.
When everything is moving fast, identity feels continuous and the purpose feels obvious because it is attached to a moving narrative. But when the pace drops—when days repeat and change is incremental—the illusion breaks.
Modern life (and startup culture) aims to keep that zoetrope spinning at any cost. So when motion slows and pauses, it can feel like something has gone terribly wrong.
At least it did for me.
Nothing went wrong. I hadn’t yet discovered that repetition is deeply revealing. I didn’t have the capacity (yet) to see repetition as ritual.
For me and many other women, this monotony and predictability and slowing down is where identity breaks down and starts to re-form. And because we don’t talk about that, many women mistake the discomfort for failure.
It isn’t.
