This is Personal

When I first became a mum, I thought it was my job to hold everything together for everyone.

If I’m honest, I wore the “Super Mum” badge with pride and got a kick every time said

‘you’re smashing this!’ or ‘I just don’t know how you do it all?’ On the outside, I was coping,

smiling, spinning all the plates.  But there was a swell of  unease starting to ripple underneath

that got choppier and choppier as the years went on. 

Now if you’re a millennial Mum, a little girl growing up in the 80s and 90s, you may not realise how many “perfect Mum” messages you’ve grown up with. You’ve been told you

categorically CAN have it all - the career (smashing that ceiling like Ally Mcbeal and crew)

an incredible house (thanks to the wives of Wisteria Lane for this) and  keeping a handle on

the emotional stability and wellbeing of your children and wider family, despite whatever chaos is going on (Miranda Hillard, the icon of a capable Mum in an emotional sh*t storm).

Oh and don’t even get me started on Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha and what they did for my aspirations of wealth, glamour and endless cosmos in my 20s.

These were the influencers of my younger and teenhood years  and, along with the previous

generation of mothers holding families together, creating domestic bliss, taking on the

emotional load whilst juggling careers  like their Mums had never had to before, this really

did quietly create the blueprint for the  emotionally competent, perfect, capable - and

overextended modern mother -  that I ended up trying to become. 

This path is true for many other millennial women - it may ring true for you too. We

internalised the message that success meant doing everything, and doing it flawlessly.

So when motherhood came, we didn’t lower the bar - we raised it. The result? A generation

of women trying to live up to an ideal that was never really real in the first place.

So picture the scene. It’s Autumn 2018. I’ve had 2 under 3 for a few months and  things had

begun to unravel. My mental health was wobbly, but I was even holding myself to certain

perfectionist standards around that. My internal narrative said ‘I’m not that bad, people have

it a lot worse, I just need to cope!’ and ‘I wanted this, I should be grateful!’ and conclusively

‘well I’m past the 6 week checkup and the GP said I was fine, so I must be ok, right..?!’

It was a stark moment one Sunday when the undercurrent just overtook - I was heading out

for a childfree morning to meet friends for brunch, something I’d been craving for months -

and found I just couldn't walk further than the end of the road. Feelings of heaviness,

overwhelm, fog, panic had completely engulfed me like a tidal wave, so  I gave up and

turned back, defeated and baffled at my inexplicable reaction to something I so wanted and

needed to do. I felt then that my identity had shifted into uncharted waters and I just knew it

was never to return to the shore of who I was before. 

Over the years - with support from a close few - I navigated my mental health, alongside the

children, all the while as life started life-ing, as it tends to do in your late 30s. Me and my

husband who’d met in the heydays of uni fun in the early noughties and had many adventures

over the years, found ourselves stumped at how to handle this endless new list of adulting we

had to do - from managing little people’s big feelings, witnessing friends going through hell,

battling our own stuff, trying to grow a career that was demanding more and more whilst acknowledging a wedge had been driven into our dynamic too. Us as ‘partners in crime’ had

always been equal -in fun, ambition, independence, and earning power - and as soon as the

child rearing years began the scales were suddenly tipped. 

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and if I’d known then what I knew now about employee rights

at work, the case for flexible working, the screaming inequity of The Motherhood Penalty

(and so much more) maybe I would have had the fight in me to push back, back myself, forge

ahead and maintain an equal footing in my career and the economy. But a refused flexible

working request after my first mat leave was the top of the wooden block tower that sent all

the others crashing down, as I lost my place in the working world and all the recognition,

markers of success and crucially, money that comes with that. This was the start of my

freelance career journey - a positive, exciting new start with endless possibilities for freedom

and flexibility - and perfectly timed with a global pandemic. Juggling this, 2 small kids and a

big relocation,  things  crescendo’d into a chronic health burnout at the end of 2021. 

Another curveball in the motherhood map. Physically it felt more like a wrecking ball. And

through my investigations into medical and holistic prevention and cure, it slowly dawned on 

me that what I didn’t need was more resilience or grit. I didn’t need another push to

‘keep going’, a new productivity hack, a way to  learn how to “love every minute” or simply

just to crack on.

What I needed was a village.

I needed space where I could show up as myself - not the polished, put-together version -

but the real, messy, human one. A space where I could figure out what I actually needed (not

what I was told I needed - i.e.  ‘a bubble bath or to sleep when the baby sleeps!) 

And I needed to learn how to ask for help without guilt, rest in my own way without an

apology or explanation, and reconnect with the person I was before motherhood blurred the

edges and everything changed. When I started looking around, I realised how few modern mums had that kind of real, solid support. And even worse than that, how many mums believed they didn’t deserve it anyway. 

Through a lot of coaching, and a whole new understanding and perspective on this self belief, I finally realised what my village needed to look like to support me and my (now 3) children. And through coaching others, and seeing what changes happened when women started realising their worth and knowing how to ask for help, I saw the potential in this new era of mums building their own, unconventional support network to help navigate their own, unique journeys.

And that's where The Village Coach began.