For the longest time, I genuinely thought I was failing at motherhood.
I was supposed to be in med school. That was the plan I had for my life.
Then life happened the way it sometimes does. I got married. Things were not good. And then my son, Abdul Rahman, was born.
I walked into motherhood believing that somehow, I would just know. I had watched my own mother do it my entire life. She made motherhood look so natural that I assumed there was something inside every woman that simply switched on when her baby arrived.
I thought breastfeeding would come naturally. I thought if I read enough and prepared enough, I would be ready.
I wasn’t.
And when motherhood didn’t look the way I thought it would, I didn’t question the expectations around me. I questioned myself.
Maybe I wasn’t maternal enough. Maybe I wasn’t strong enough. Maybe everyone else knew how to do this, and somehow, I didn’t.
It took me years to realise how wrong that question was. I didn’t understand then that motherhood support could have changed how I experienced those early days.
The Night I Finally Said It Out Loud
I still remember the night Abdul Rahman was in the hospital with RSV.
I was already exhausted. Not the kind of tired that disappears after a good night’s sleep. The kind that builds night after night of being responsible for another human being while barely having enough left for yourself.
Then he was admitted.
I was mostly there alone. His father was barely present and barely contributing. My parents were financially holding us up, while I was trying to hold everything else together.
One night, I was so tired I could barely stand when Abdul Rahman’s oxygen suddenly dropped dangerously low.
Within seconds, the room got filled with doctors and nurses.
Machines. Voices. Hands moving quickly around my baby.
And I just stood there.
I remember crying and saying:
I’m so tired. What did I do so wrong?
I think about that sentence a lot now.
Because I didn’t ask, Why am I doing this with so little motherhood support?
I didn’t ask, Where is everyone?
I didn’t ask, Why does motherhood require one person to absorb this much?
I asked:
What did I do wrong?
Even at one of the lowest points of my life, I made myself the problem. Not the little to no motherhood support present!
And I don’t think I came up with that belief on my own.
We Teach Mothers to Internalise the Failure
We hand mothers resilience as though it is the answer to everything.
Be strong. You can do this. Other women have done it. Our mothers did it. Our grandmothers did it.
“We had ten children and managed. Why are you struggling with one?”
But did they really “manage”? Or did many women struggle quietly because there wasn’t language for what they were experiencing?
Did they cry when nobody saw them? Did they need motherhood support and learned not to ask because nobody was coming? Did surviving eventually become the story we called strength?
Because there is a difference between coping inside a system and being supported by one.
And somewhere along the way, we confused the two.
We turned silent suffering into proof of good motherhood. So every generation inherits the same expectation, and every new mother who struggles thinks she is uniquely failing.
I certainly did.
Maybe what mothers need is not more reminders to be resilient, but better motherhood support around them.
Divorce Made That Blame Even Louder
Then there was another layer.
Becoming a divorced mother.
There is a strange expectation that once a woman becomes a divorced mom, she is supposed to look like her life has fallen apart.
And I have had genuinely horrible things said to me.
What surprised me most was noticing that sometimes people seemed more comfortable with my struggle than with my growth. Seeing me study, build, work, raise my son, and actually enjoy my life did not fit the story they had already written for me.
For a while, I internalized that too.
See? Maybe they are right. Maybe you failed.
Eventually, I understood that other people’s projections cannot be the measure of my life.
My marriage ending did not make me a failed woman. Finding motherhood difficult did not make me a failed mother.
My life simply stopped following the blueprint I had been given.
So I started questioning the blueprint.
Then I Found the Word Matrescence
At the beginning of this year, I came across a word that changed the way I understood almost everything I had experienced.
Matrescence.
The developmental transition of becoming a mother. Not simply having a baby. Becoming someone new.
Your body, brain, hormones, relationships, identity, and priority change. Even the way you understand yourself can change.
And suddenly I thought:
Why did nobody tell me this?
We prepare women extensively for pregnancy and birth. Appointments. Scans. Birth plans. Hospital bags.
Then the baby arrives and so much of the attention shifts to the child.
Meanwhile, a woman is going through one of the most profound transitions of her life. This is where meaningful motherhood support matters, because becoming a mother affects far more than the care of a baby.
And we tell her:
“You’ve got this.”
That was when the question I had been carrying since that hospital room finally started to change.
Not:
What did I do wrong?
But:
What was missing around me?
That Question Changed Everything
Maybe this is why I became so interested in human systems. Because once you start looking at motherhood through a systems lens, you realize how fragmented the experience can be.
Healthcare sits in one silo. Mental health in another. Childcare somewhere else. Workplaces somewhere else. Education somewhere else. Family support is treated as a private matter. Community is discussed as something nice to have.
And the mother is expected to somehow stand in the middle and connect all of it herself.
We keep addressing individual pieces of motherhood while the woman experiencing them is one whole human being.
Her life is interdisciplinary. Her support rarely is.
That is the gap I cannot stop thinking about.
Because a mother does not experience her mental health separately from her physical health. She does not experience childcare separately from her ability to work or study. Financial security affects the home. The home affects the child. Relationships affect wellbeing. Wellbeing affects parenting. Parenting affects the next generation.
These things were never separate.
We separated them.
And then we placed the burden of navigating those silos onto mothers and called their ability to survive them “resilience.”
Maybe We Have Been Building the Village Wrong
We talk constantly about bringing back the village. I talk about it too.
But the more I study systems, and the more I understand my own experience, the more I realise that the village cannot just mean telling mothers to find better friends or ask their families for more help.
A modern village needs infrastructure.
It needs healthcare, workplaces, childcare, education, policy, community, technology and families actually speaking to one another.
It requires interdisciplinary thinking because motherhood itself touches almost every part of human life.
We cannot keep solving interconnected problems in silos. And we cannot keep designing systems around the assumption that somewhere, quietly and unpaid, a mother will absorb whatever those systems fail to provide.
That isn’t a village.
That is dependency on invisible labor.
Real motherhood support cannot depend on a mother having to build the entire village herself.
From One Mother to Another
This is why I care so deeply about the work I am building now.
I don’t want to tell another mother:
“You’ve got this.”
Of course she does.
Look at how much mothers already carry.
The question is why we keep asking them to prove it.
I want us to build the practical support that comes after the inspirational quote.
The hands. The spaces. The systems. The access. The people who actually show up.
Because mothers don’t need another person teaching them how to become better at surviving unsupported.
We need to become better at supporting mothers.
So if you are reading this while quietly wondering what you did wrong, I want to answer the question I once asked in that hospital room.
You did not fail because this was hard.
You were never supposed to do all of this alone.
Today, I am a mother, a student, and a founder. I am building a life I could not have imagined during some of those nights.
Yes, I am resilient.
But resilience should describe what I survived.
It should never become the blueprint we design motherhood around.
The future I want to help build asks something different.
Not, How much more can mothers carry?
But:
What would become possible if they didn’t have to carry it alone?
Have advice for moms or a personal story to tell? We’d love to feature your voice on our blog! Share your experiences with us here! We’re always excited to welcome new perspectives and stories from moms like you!
