If I'm being honest...
The internet debated “3-hour-a-day moms.” The real conversation is somethings different.
Recently, Emma Grede got attention for calling herself a “three-hour-a-day mom,” and honestly, I understood exactly what she meant.
Not because motherhood can be measured in hours, but because modern motherhood has become performative in a way that feels impossible for women to win.
Some women work constantly and still create deep connection and presence with their children. Some stay home full-time and spend most of the day consumed by logistics, schedules, cooking, cleaning, carpooling, homework, and invisible labor without actually feeling connected either. Some women try to balance both.
Which is why I think the real conversation is less about hours and more about intentionality. Presence, attention, connection, and above all, integration.
Perfection and hours clocked are irrelevant. There’s no inherited version of what a “good mother” is supposed to look like. Every family is different. Every woman is different. And maybe part of evolving motherhood is allowing women to build lives that actually fit them instead of forcing themselves into models that were never designed for the realities of modern life and motherhood.
Let’s get into it: Motherhood changes you in ways we’re only beginning to talk about. It’s not just emotional, it’s a full mind, body, and identity transformation. And it starts before you realize. It starts the moment you even begin thinking about becoming a mother and follows through pregnancy, postpartum, and every phase after. It constantly asks you to confront yourself, your fears, your patterns, your actual capacity, and your deepest shadows. In many ways, it becomes the deepest personal and spiritual work of your life. I read this quote yesterday: “ Motherhood is the most ambitious startup i’ve ever launched-underfunded, understaffed, and absolutely unstoppable.” And I felt that deeply.
May has a way of bringing this conversation back. Maternal Mental Health Awareness. Mother’s Day. A moment where motherhood is celebrated and incredibly misunderstood. Because what gets shared is one version of it. And what’s actually happening day to day is something else entirely.
1 in 5 women will experience a maternal mental health condition. Nearly 75% go undiagnosed or untreated. Not because it’s rare, no, because it’s normalized. And it starts earlier than most people think. Before birth, before postpartum. Infertility affects 1 in 6 couples. 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage. Those numbers are rarely said out loud. But almost every woman knows someone or is that someone. And the impact doesn’t disappear just because the experience does. There is no bounce back. It stays in the body and more profoundly in the nervous system. Because this isn’t just physical, it’s hormonal, neurological, and emotional. It’s the language only a mother knows.
And even when pregnancy does happen, that’s not where it begins either. About a third of depressive episodes begin during pregnancy. Nearly half begin after birth. The rest were already there. Which means a lot of women are entering motherhood already carrying something. Which means, Motherhood doesn’t always create a change in mental state; it often reveals it. Maternal mental health isn’t just common. It can be serious. And yet we’ve normalized the suffering and self-isolation while underestimating the severity. It affects birth outcomes and the dynamic of an entire family. And still, we treat it like it’s optional to understand or talk about. And then there’s what’s actually happening in the body. Hormones, estrogen, progesterone, and cortisol shift rapidly. And the gut, where nearly 90% of serotonin is produced and many of the building blocks for neurotransmitters originate, changes too. I experienced this firsthand, and I’ll get into that shortly. The microbiome shifts during pregnancy, after birth, and throughout postpartum, which means mood, stress response, mental clarity are ALL affected.
There’s a word I just learned for this: matrescence. The transition into motherhood. Like adolescence, but for becoming a mother. Your brain, body, identity, all changes. Threat detection increases, attachment systems activate and the world no longer feels as safe as it once did. It’s a psychological rebirth, and once you cross the threshold, there’s no going back.
Becoming a mother changes you at a neurological level, but our society treats it like something you should bounce back from. That the version of you before pregnancy that includes your body, your career, and your personality should exist in the same way. But, it doesn’t, and honestly, it shouldn’t. It’s literally impossible to return to something that no longer fits your world while becoming someone entirely new. I personally felt that shift in a very, very real way.
After the birth of my oldest daughter, I experienced delayed postpartum anxiety. Not immediately, actually. The first six months were really great, but seven months in, and what felt like overnight, everything changed. And nothing about it felt subtle. Each doctor I saw was quick to prescribe something, but no one was asking why. I felt unseen, unheard, isolated, alone, and actually terrified. I wanted to “fix’ this, but I also deeply wanted to understand how this happened to me. How one day, I could feel like I was living in a healthy, normal brain, and the next, it was dark and unrecognizable. I didn’t want an SSRI and Ambien over it to suppress it. I needed to understand it and fix it at the root.
So I ventured on my own to an acupuncturist who specialized in women's fertility and hormones, and an orthomolecular psychiatrist, sounds serious, right? It was, my life depended on figuring this out. Months of testing, thousands of dollars and eventually, a potential answer arrived. My body wasn’t producing or holding amino acids the way it should.
Fast forward several years after studying the microbiome at Stanford and immersing myself in brain health training alongside Dr. Amen’s clinic, and it finally clicked. Amino acids are produced in the gut. They’re precursors to neurotransmitters. My mood, intrusive thoughts, none of this was random. And it wasn’t the job for an SSRI or sleeping pill. I committed to a massive amino acid protocol. Turns out that amino acids are precursors to neurotransmitters, and within about nine weeks, I came back into a healthy brain. One clear of darkness and OCD. Even though I would never have considered myself suicidal, I knew I couldn’t live the rest of my life with those thoughts.
After about eight months, I was able to go off the amino acids completely. My gut had healed, and my brain had rewired. I went on to have another child a few years later, knowing that if I relapsed, I knew where to find the support I needed. The surprising part, even after another child, I didn’t relapse.
This was my first real-life experience of understanding the body’s immense ability to heal and regenerate under the right circumstances. What stayed with me all these years wasn’t just my experience; it was understanding how many women had their own version of it. Different symptoms, different timelines, same pattern. There’s a difference between living as a mother and becoming one. Most of the pressure sits in the first. The logistics, schedules, and invisible load of thinking about childcare, development, education, nutrition, the list goes on and grows every year. But the weight is in the second. Because the responsibility is measurable. By age three, most of a child’s brain is developed. Those early years matter. Not in a performative way, in a foundational one. And we all feel that, even if we don’t talk about it.
So the pressure builds, from society, our environment, from the expectation to do everything and somehow not lose yourself in the process, whatever that even means. And for a long time, the narrative has been: mothers are exhausted, overwhelmed, depleted and that’s just the job. I hate this narrative. And yes, parts of that are real. But that’s not the full picture. I always heard motherhood meant sacrifice. That to be a good mother, or even become one, parts of you had to disappear. Your ambition. Your independence. Your identity.
And honestly, that feels extremely culturally outdated now.
Motherhood hasn’t made my life smaller. It’s made it richer. Richer in perspective, in love and curiosity, and above all, in the capacity to evolve. It’s taught me that I can show up for my children without abandoning myself in the process. We don’t have to keep repeating inherited versions of motherhood that were built around depletion. Not anymore. Because for me, motherhood has been the most expansive experience of my life. To grow a human inside my body. To experience birth, pain, and presence at the same time, knowing that I am now in sync with trillions of women through a shared experience. What a gift.
To feel connected to something much bigger than myself. Not just my baby, which is profound, but in my second birth I felt deeply connected to spirit, God, and immense love. To see the world again through new eyes. I wouldn’t have built any of my companies without it. At first, I thought motherhood took me away from my work because I realized I couldn’t do the 12–14-hour restaurant days anymore. But no, it clarified it. I realized I didn’t want a life where I was gone 12 hours a day, pumping every three hours, and outsourcing the majority of my time with my kids.
So I built something else.
I worked nights. I was home during the day. My kids are growing up in and around the world I’ve built for myself. I remember nights in the lab when I was building my chocolate company. When they were babies, they’d be there with me. As they grew: homework, movies, watching the process, being part of it. And that’s something we don’t talk about enough.
My work could never be separate. It’s an extension of who I am and the world I’m building for myself. It’s integration. I learned it’s okay for your kids to see you work. To understand what you do. To hear you think. To watch you build something. Not all the time, but enough to understand what it means to care deeply about something. To create. To follow through. Even to struggle.
Kids don’t just learn from what you say. They learn from what you live. And there’s something powerful in that. Letting them see that their mother can build something meaningful and still show up for them.
Because becoming a mother doesn’t require you to disappear. It requires you to evolve. And it takes time for every Mother to realize this on her own, but knowing it will happen is paramount. Motherhood doesn’t just change your life, It changes your relationship to yourself, and if you let it, it can show you how to build a life that actually fits.
xxJewel
Postpartum mental health should never be treated as a default protocol by doctors. It should be personal, intentional and part of postpartum care from the beginning not something any woman should have to seek. A mother should never have to wait until she can’t live in her own body without screaming for help. Proactive postpartum mental health support should be standard, not urgent care. I’m a certified brain health trainer and take a select few clients every year. If you, or someone you know, is struggling postpartum, please share this with them and feel free to reach out with any questions.