Honestly? I still don’t feel forty-two.

I wasn’t staring at the calendar thinking about my age. I woke up in my own bed, looked over at my husband sleeping next to me, and before my feet even hit the floor I started taking inventory. Not of wrinkles or years. Of my life.

This isn’t the life I thought I’d have.

It’s better.

The Virginia Beach morning light came through the windows soft. The kind of light that doesn’t demand anything from you. Just enough to remind you that another day is beginning. I made my coffee before the house fully woke up and stood there for a minute longer than usual. Not rushing. Just noticing.

Then I smiled. Then I took one really deep breath. Not because I was excited to turn forty-two. Because I suddenly realized how grateful I was to have made it here.

There were years I wasn’t sure this version of me even existed.

Thirty-two was unpacking boxes in San Francisco after leaving New York City.

I had my little boy. A marriage that looked fine from the outside. Big ambition. Big dreams. I thought I was building the life. I had no idea life was still building me.

Thirty-two thought by forty-two everything would be settled. Marriage. Career. Motherhood. Confidence. She thought life got simpler with age.

Instead it got more honest.

Thirty-two was apologizing for her freedom. For wanting more. For traveling. For building. For dreaming bigger than the room she was standing in. She spent years shrinking her ambition so other people could stay comfortable.

Forty-two doesn’t do that anymore.

Thirty-two was spending her energy trying to become enough. Good enough. Successful enough. Lovable enough. She thought achievement could finally convince her she belonged.

Forty-two is spending her energy on something different. Building a life that feels as good as it looks. Protecting her peace. Creating moments the boys will remember. And helping women trust themselves sooner than she did.

Thirty-two believed she had to earn rest. Joy. Peace. Love that didn’t require performance.

Forty-two knows those things were never prizes. They were always birthrights.

At thirty-two I treated my body like an employee.

Push harder. Sleep less. Figure it out.

At forty-two my body gets a vote. And I’ve learned she’s usually right.

The last lab results felt like validation. Not because they gave me answers. Because they confirmed I hadn’t imagined the questions. For years I felt like I was trying to convince people something had changed. Those results felt like my body whispering, I told you.

Symptoms aren’t weaknesses. They’re information. My body was never betraying me. She was trying to get my attention.

Forty-two finally gave her permission. Permission to rest. Permission to heal. Permission to age without treating every change like something to fight.

The four years between thirty-eight and forty-two are the ones I did not think I would make it through.

Divorce. Rebuilding my identity. Leaving behind who everyone expected me to be. Falling in love again. Learning to co-parent. Building a blended family. Having another baby at forty. Finding my voice again. Finding my body again. Finding myself again.

The moment that came closest to breaking me was ordinary. I remember sitting alone after my oldest had gone to bed. The house was finally quiet. The legal paperwork was spread across the table. The business still needed me the next morning. I remember thinking, I don’t know how one person is supposed to carry all of this.

Then I cried. Not because I was weak. Because for the first time I finally stopped pretending I wasn’t.

I did not know I was going to make it until one completely ordinary day. I laughed. A real laugh. And afterwards I realized I hadn’t thought about surviving all day.

That’s when I knew.

I wasn’t rebuilding anymore. I was living.

I became the woman I spent my whole life looking for. Turns out she wasn’t waiting somewhere else. She was underneath everything I had to let go of.

If you are turning a corner into your forties this year, here is what I would tell you.

Stop treating forty like the end of something. It is the age where you finally stop asking for permission.

You do not need to have it all figured out. Not this year. Not ever.

You need to trust that the life falling apart may actually be making room for the life you’re meant to build.

Every hard conversation. Every goodbye. Every reinvention. Every version you thought you lost. Those weren’t random moments. They were MOMumental. They were quietly introducing you to yourself.

Here is what I am giving myself for forty-two. Not a gift. A permission.

Permission to stop rushing my own life. Permission to enjoy the one I worked so hard to build.

Maybe your forties aren’t asking you to become someone new. Maybe they’re finally introducing you to the woman you’ve been becoming all along.

If thirty-two could hear this letter, I would tell her: I know you’re terrified of losing everything. You won’t. You’ll lose what was never meant to stay. And one day you’ll wake up at forty-two, look around your kitchen, and realize the life you were so afraid of isn’t the one that broke you.

It’s the one that finally brought you home.

And here is the part thirty-two could never have imagined.

Every year, I share my birthday with a little boy who wasn’t born to me.

He turns nine today. I turn forty-two.

Every year we stand side by side, blow out candles together, argue over whose birthday it really is, laugh when everyone sings twice, and celebrate a life that neither of us could have predicted.

When I was thirty-two, I thought family was something you either kept or lost. I didn’t know family could grow. I didn’t know love could arrive through people you never expected to meet. I didn’t know that one of the greatest gifts of my life would come with the title bonus.

If you had told thirty-two that one day a little boy who didn’t share her DNA would share her birthday, and eventually share her heart, she would have smiled politely and assumed you had the wrong story.

But life has never been interested in giving me the story I expected. It has always been writing a better one.

Somehow, before I ever met him, before our families found each other, before I even knew this version of my life existed, the universe quietly stitched our birthdays together.

Every year when we blow out our candles, I’m reminded that healing doesn’t just restore what was lost. Sometimes it gives you people you never would have known to ask for.

Forty-two doesn’t celebrate the number anymore. She celebrates the family that found her.

The universe blended us long before we understood why.

MOMumentally,

Erika Hanafin Austria

Reply to this letter and tell me what the woman you were at thirty-two would be proud of you for.

If you are turning a corner into your forties and want tools for the body-truth part of this rebuild, The PHASE™ Bundle is $97 (all five volumes). The Complete Library is $228 for the Founding cohort, every workbook I have built to make this transition survivable. Join the Founding cohort · $228.

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Erika Hanafin Austria

Erika Hanafin Austria Founder, MOMumental Moments® · Publisher, MOMumental Reinvention Co-Founder, NeonID · Former CEO, HeyMama · 2x Top 50 Women Leaders, Virginia

🛒 Shop The Stack · The habits, supplements, tools, and essentials behind the reinvention. Curated by and used by me daily.

I am Erika Hanafin Austria · founder of MOMumental Moments®, IIN Board Certified Health Coach, and Board Member of Luminary, Pepperdine SEC, HONE and Next ChaptHER. Every Thursday: the essay voiced, and the story I did not write down.

In this episode:
0:00 · Cold open · the parking lot years
2:04 · The essay · On Loving Four Boys Out Loud
4:16 · The one sentence I practiced for six months
6:07 · The three practices that hold the family together
8:15 · The line I would give you if custody time is short right now
8:36 · The Co-Parenting Power Method®

Read the original essay: https://www.momumentalreinvention.com/p/on-loving-four-boys

The Complete Library · every workbook I have built · $228 Founding cohort · closes Sept 30, 2026 · https://www.momumentalreinvention.com/p/the-library

The Co-Parenting Power Method® workbook (the tool from this episode) · https://www.momumentalreinvention.com/p/the-library

Reply to Erika: erika@erikahanafin.com · I read every one

More at: https://erikahanafin.com

Music: Worth the Wait by King Sis · via Epidemic Sound

Subscribe to MOMumental Reinvention · free forever. New episodes every week.

MOMumentally,
Erika

#MOMumentalReinvention #Podcast #CoParenting #BlendedFamily #WomenReinvention #Perimenopause #ErikaHanafinAustria #MOMumentalMoments #ThePHASE

Everyone tells you the hardest part of divorce is signing the papers. It is not. The hardest part is the first conversation after. Every text felt loaded. Every email carried years of hurt. Every exchange somehow became about the marriage instead of our son. I remember sitting in my car in a parking lot staring at my phone for twenty minutes trying to write one simple response about a school pickup. Every version I typed either defended myself, corrected something small, or reopened a wound I thought I had stitched shut months ago.

We were not communicating. We were bleeding onto each other through text messages, and our son was standing in the middle of it whether he could see the blood or not.

That is when the truth became impossible to keep ignoring. The bleeding was not a communication problem. It was the wrong expectation. Two people carrying unresolved emotions cannot communicate perfectly inside a text thread. That is not a failure of the thread. That is a failure of the premise. And once I stopped expecting the two of us to fix what was still open between us before we could raise our son well together, I could start to see what was actually needed. Not better feelings. Better structure.

That realization is eventually what led me to co-found NEON ID. I wanted communication to become documentation. Facts instead of feelings. Shared information instead of shared frustration. Screenshots instead of screaming matches. When the emotion came down, the parenting got better almost immediately. The technology did not save the relationship. It protected the child from the relationship. Those are two very different jobs, and I only figured out the difference the hard way.

Even the system needed a script. For six months I practiced one sentence in my car, in the mirror, in therapy. “I have received your message. I will respond to the parenting issue only.” Sometimes that was the entire reply. Other times it became, “I am choosing not to respond to the parts that are not about our son.” Those sentences took months to learn. Not because they were difficult to write. Because they required me to stop trying to win.

Somewhere inside that practice, I stopped explaining myself. That sounds cold. It was not. I realized my son did not benefit from two parents constantly proving who was right. He benefited from one parent willing to end the argument. Every explanation I did not send became another ounce of peace he did not have to carry. Every unsent paragraph became a piece of childhood I got to hand back to him whole.

I want to name one thing that women bracing for co-parenting often expect to be the worst part, because it was not ours. The two-houses problem. Early on we made one decision that probably saved years of conflict. Our homes could look different, but the values could not. Homework came before screens. Phones slept outside bedrooms. Respect was not negotiable. There were different routines, different rhythms, different meals, different bedtimes. But there were not two completely different childhoods. That consistency became one of the greatest gifts we gave our son, and I think it happened because we made the values conversation before the animosity had a chance to poison it.

Everything I have learned since about loving all four of my boys out loud rests on three practices I keep every week without exception.

• The first is that we always answer the question being asked. No secrets. No dismissing feelings. No speeches disguised as answers. Just honest replies the boys can trust, in language that fits their age.

• The second is that we protect connection before correction. Whether the moment is homework, behavior, or a hard conversation about something that happened at the other house, I want every one of my boys to know that nothing they do can make them wonder whether they belong here.

• The third is that we create rituals they can count on. Dinner together whenever the schedule allows. Checking in about the day, not the calendar. Saying I love you every single night, and meaning every syllable.

Years after the first hardest text, our family grew. Not all at once. One relationship at a time. Loving my two bonus boys taught me that families are not built by DNA alone. They are built by showing up, over and over again, until “your kids” and “my kids” quietly becomes “ours” without anyone having to announce it. That whole story deserves its own chapter, and it is coming later this summer.

When our fourth son was born last year, something caught me off guard that I still think about most mornings. I was not raising him from the woman who had survived divorce. I was raising him from the woman divorce had rebuilt. The healing did not just change me. It changed the kind of mother I became for all four of them. Including the one whose first years I spent trying to write the perfect car-park text.

The line I would give you if you are in the messy middle of custody right now is short, because you do not have room for anything longer. Your child does not need two perfect parents. They need one adult who is willing to protect their peace more fiercely than her own need to be understood. And sometimes that adult has to be you.

MOMumentally,

Erika

PS · The Co-Parenting Power Method® is the workbook for the woman who is still trying to win the argument. Communication scripts. Documentation frameworks. Custody systems. Boundary scripts. Decision filters. The tools I wish I had had during year one. · Visit My Library

Free every Tuesday. Paid subscribers get the Community Chat, Behind the Essay, and early podcast access. $7/mo · $70/yr.

Erika Hanafin Austria

Erika Hanafin Austria Founder, MOMumental Moments® · Publisher, MOMumental Reinvention Co-Founder, NeonID · Former CEO, HeyMama · 2x Top 50 Women Leaders, Virginia

🛒 Shop The Stack · The habits, supplements, tools, and essentials behind the reinvention. Curated by and used by me daily.

The week my marriage ended, I was in due diligence on the sale of the business.

The timing could not have been worse. We were deep in the process. Every document mattered. Every call mattered. Every answer mattered. And no one on the other end of any of those calls knew what was happening in my personal life. They just knew I was prepared.

I took diligence calls from the floor of my closet because it was the only quiet place in the house. I answered investor questions from the seat of a loaner truck between meetings, laptop on the passenger side, hand on the wheel, body still in motion because if I stopped I would feel it. I wrote about the day after the decision last week. This essay is about the week the business required everything from me at the exact moment my personal life had nothing left to give.

Nobody warns you about the operator chapter of divorce. Everything becomes incredibly simple. There were only two priorities. My son. And the business that supported us. Everything else became optional. If a decision did not protect one of those two things, it did not get my energy. I stopped negotiating with guilt and started allocating my capacity like the scarce resource it was. That was the decision tree. Two filters. Run every choice through them. No exceptions.

The team rebuild happened on its own. The season made the decisions for me. I could not carry people who only took energy. I could not manage other people’s drama while managing my own survival. The people who stayed were not necessarily the loudest supporters. They were the steady ones. The people who showed up with solutions instead of opinions. The ones who made life lighter instead of asking me to carry them too. I did not have to do a performance review. The fire did the sorting.

The number that grounded me when the personal was falling apart was not revenue. It was not valuation. It was not the diligence checklist. It was one standing weekly appointment with Julie. My therapist. My yoga teacher. My grounding place. Every week she reminded me that I was not just responsible for closing deals. I was responsible for coming home to myself. She helped me regulate my nervous system before I ever had the language for what my nervous system was carrying. Looking back, those sessions were just as important as every board meeting I attended.

5 AM became the ritual that kept the empire alive. I was not sleeping anyway, so I stopped fighting the mornings. While the rest of the world was quiet, I trained. The workouts were not about fitness. They were survival. Movement became the only place my brain stopped negotiating with itself. Every workout reminded me that even when my personal life felt out of control, I could still keep one promise to myself. That discipline carried me into every meeting that followed.

The boundary between personal grief and professional show-up taught me that professionalism is not pretending your life is not falling apart. It is refusing to let your pain become someone else’s burden. I never lied about where I was. But I also did not ask my team to carry what belonged to me. I built spaces where I could fall apart so that when I walked into work, I could lead with clarity instead of chaos. That boundary protected both my business and my healing. Most operator advice tells you to leave the personal at the door. I am telling you the opposite. Bring the truth of where you are. Just do not hand the bill to the team.

If you are a founder reading this from inside the same fire, the line I wish someone had given me at the start of mine is this: this is a season, not your identity. Do not make permanent decisions based on temporary pain. Protect your health. Protect your children. Protect the business if it is worth protecting. Everything else can wait. And one day you will look back and realize you were not falling apart. You were becoming the operator your next chapter required.

MOMumentally,

Erika

The first morning after the decision, I woke up and realized I had slept. Really slept. The kind of sleep where someone takes a hundred pounds off your chest and shoulders overnight, and you only notice the weight is gone because the room feels different.

There was not joy exactly. There was relief. The kind that makes you realize how long you have been holding your breath without knowing it. I have written before about the first 90 days. The legal chaos. The protective small circle. The clarity that arrives the moment you finally make the decision you have been postponing for years. If you want that piece, it is in the archive. This essay is for the women who are further out. Or for the women who want to know what is actually waiting on the other side of the doorway.

It has been three and a half years now. October 2022 was the decision. December 2023 made it official on paper. June 2026 is the update. Here is what happened in between.

Here is what nobody warned me about the first thirty days.

The hardest part was not the divorce itself. It was carrying the secret. I did not tell my work. I did not tell my community. For six months I protected normalcy for my son and kept my circle incredibly small. What surprised me was how peaceful it felt to stop performing. I did not need everyone to understand. I just needed a few people who could hold it with me. That stopped being avoidance the moment I realized it was protection. The privacy was the first boundary I had set for myself in years.

By ninety days, the question in my head had shifted. I had stopped asking did I make the right decision and started asking what do I want to build now. That shift is the part nobody warns you about. The decision is the loud moment. The shift in your inner voice is the moment that actually changes the life.

For the first time in years, my energy was not going into surviving. It was going into becoming.

By the twelve-month mark, the thing I did not see coming was that I liked myself again. Not the accomplished version. Not the CEO version. Just me. Life had become quieter than I expected, with all this space where anxiety used to live. I thought I was grieving a marriage, but what I was actually grieving was the version of myself who had learned to live inside tension. One day I realized I was not homesick for that woman anymore. That was the moment I knew the work had taken.

Here is what I am most proud of three and a half years in.

The piece I am most proud of is the way my son and I moved through this. I made one promise to myself early on, before I had any other plan. I would answer the question being asked. Not the question I thought was underneath it. Not the fear I was projecting. Just the question in front of me. Maybe it was the operator in me. Maybe it was the lawyer in a deposition. But I learned that children do not need speeches. They need honesty. Because he knew he could ask anything, he never had to carry anything alone. Watching him turn thirteen, seeing the relationship we have now, I know that promise changed both of us.

Here is something nobody prepared me for. The financial reality.

For ten years, I had carried the financial load of the marriage. I thought the hard part would end when the marriage ended, and it did not. Supporting someone financially while trying to rebuild your own life is a grief I never expected. There were moments I felt angry. There were moments I felt resentful. And there were moments I realized that sometimes the price of freedom is expensive. But staying would have cost more. That math always wins, even when you wish it did not.

The friendship test was running in the background the whole time and I did not even notice. Honestly, I can barely remember who disappeared from my life that year. I was so deep in surviving and rebuilding that I did not have the energy to keep score. The people who showed up made themselves known. Quietly. Consistently. Without requiring updates or explanations. Everyone else simply faded into irrelevance. The ones who stay do not need a status report. They show up with their phone in their pocket and wait until you are ready to eat.

What I have stopped grieving, and what I still grieve, has surprised me too. I stopped grieving the marriage somewhere in the second year. I stopped grieving the version of me who needed to fit inside a certain box, and I stopped grieving who I thought I was supposed to be. What I still grieve is the years I spent trying to earn peace instead of believing I deserved it. And sometimes I still grieve the woman who thought love meant enduring. She was so tired.

Here is what I did not expect to find on the other side of all of it. Someone new.

Two friends, said the same thing. I have someone I want you to meet. I was not looking. I was not ready. I told them both. They both told me to trust them anyway, and I did. What I learned in that next chapter is that opposites do not actually attract. Like attracts like. The version of me that had spent years contorting to fit inside someone else’s shape had been recruiting opposites for a decade. The version that came out of the decision, the version with quiet rooms and her own voice back, attracted something different the moment she walked into the room as herself.

Happiness, whatever that word means, is on the other side. I am not telling you that to convince you of anything. I am telling you because three and a half years ago, I would not have believed it from anyone else either. The chapters that came after, the building of a blended family, the baby who arrived in the middle of all of it, the second marriage that taught me what partnership actually means, those are essays for future Tuesdays. Today this is enough.

If you are at the beginning of this, or if you are still inside the version of the marriage that has been quietly eroding you, I want to write you the card I needed at the decision point. You are not blowing up your life. You are ending the part that has been quietly blowing you apart. Trust me. The peace you are afraid of does not feel lonely. It feels like coming home.

Three and a half years did not give me my old life back. It introduced me to the woman I was becoming all along.

MOMumentally,

Erika

This essay was free. Every MOMumental Letter is.

If this work matters to you and you want more of it, the Co-Parenting Power Method® is the workbook for women who are still in the messy middle of custody, language, logistics, and the daily mental load of co-parenting after divorce. Built from the exact tools I needed in years zero to three. $47 · Check out my library.

Erika Hanafin Austria

Erika Hanafin Austria Founder, MOMumental Moments® · Publisher, MOMumental Reinvention Co-Founder, NeonID · Former CEO, HeyMama · 2x Top 50 Women Leaders, Virginia

🛒 Shop The Stack · The habits, supplements, tools, and essentials behind the reinvention. Curated by and used by me daily.

You can also support the work by becoming a paid subscriber. Monthly $7. Annual $70. Founding $150, limited to 100 members. Paid subscribers get the Tuesday Letter, full Community Chat where I respond personally, Behind the Essay exclusives, and early podcast access. You are not paying for content. You are funding a body of work for women who are rebuilding.

I had just moved back from San Francisco.

We were in the middle of the post-COVID world, the part where you could finally see a doctor in person again but had to wait six weeks for the appointment. I had just gotten in to see an OB-GYN.

For weeks I had been waking up in the middle of the night completely drenched. Not warm. Not uncomfortable. Drenched. The kind of night sweats where you wake up convinced you have run a marathon in your sleep.

I told him everything. The night sweats, the exhaustion, the feeling that my body was no longer behaving like my body. He listened. Then he said, let us try birth control and see if it helps.

That was the whole appointment. No deeper conversation. No real investigation. No curiosity.

I remember sitting there on the table, paper crinkling under my legs, thinking, I am in my thirties. Why are we treating this like an experiment? But I took the prescription anyway.

The exact words blur now, but what I heard was clear. We do not actually know. And what I felt was, maybe I am wrong.

Because I knew it was hormones. I knew my cortisol was high. I knew something was happening inside my body that was not normal for me. And yet somehow I left that appointment questioning myself instead of questioning the appointment.

That moment is the one I want to take back.

For years after that, I lived inside a different version of every appointment. I was always preparing. Bringing evidence. Tracking symptoms. Doing research. Reading studies. Walking into rooms with notebooks because if the provider was not going to ask the right questions, I was going to bring the right answers.

I thought that was advocacy. It was. But it was also exhausting in a way I did not name for a long time. Every appointment started feeling like I had to build a case for my own experience. Patient and lawyer at the same time.

Ironically, getting pregnant five years later changed everything. I switched practices. I started over. And eventually I found a practitioner who was willing to ask a different question.

Instead of trying to convince me that what I was experiencing was not happening, she became curious about why it was happening. She listened longer, asked better questions, looked at my history instead of a single symptom. Most importantly, she treated me like a participant in my own care instead of a problem to solve quickly.

For the first time in years, I felt believed.

The labs eventually came back. Hormone shifts. Cortisol dysregulation. Patterns we had been tracking together. If I am honest, the numbers mattered less than I expected them to. By the time the labs confirmed it, I had already spent years being told to wait, to monitor, to power through, to try something else. The labs did not tell me anything my body had not already been saying. They simply proved my body had been telling the truth the whole time.

That is the part nobody warns you about. The validation is good. The years it took to get the validation are the loss.

The pivot was not him. The pivot was me.

The moment I trusted myself, I hired my core.

I stopped looking for one provider who would believe me and started building the team that would partner with me. The nurse practitioner who actually listens. The functional medicine doctor who orders the panels other people skip. The acupuncturist. The therapist who knew the difference between perimenopausal anxiety and the rest of my life. The friend who texted me articles in real time. The trainer who built strength back into a body that had been in survival mode for a decade.

Not one doctor. A team.

I found them the same way most women eventually find good care. Through other women. Not through a directory. Not through a hospital system. Not through insurance. Through a recommendation that started with, she actually listens.

That is the protocol most women are running, whether they call it that or not. Network medicine. Whisper networks. Friend texts that read like prescriptions.

Within the first ninety days of building the core, everything changed. We ran better testing. We discussed options. We built a plan instead of a prescription. The symptoms did not disappear overnight, but something else did. The feeling that I was crazy. The feeling that I was making it up. The feeling that I had to convince someone my body belonged to me.

That feeling went first. The body work came after.

If you are leaving every appointment feeling smaller than when you walked in, that is your answer. A good practitioner may not have every solution, but they should never make you doubt your own experience.

Your body is talking. If the person across from you is not listening, find someone who will. Then find the next one. You do not need one doctor. You need a core.

You are not difficult. You are not high-maintenance. You are not doing too much research. You are the only person who has lived inside that body for forty years. You are the expert on the data.

Build the team.

MOMumentally,

Erika

PS · The PHASE™ Vol I · Perimenopause is the workbook for the woman who is still in the wrong appointment. The Symptom Decoder. The Clinician Conversation Script. The labs to ask for. The language to walk in with. $27 · thisisphase.co

Erika Hanafin Austria

Erika Hanafin Austria Founder, MOMumental Moments® · Publisher, MOMumental Reinvention Co-Founder, NeonID · Former CEO, HeyMama · 2x Top 50 Women Leaders, Virginia

🛒 Shop The Stack · The habits, supplements, tools, and essentials behind the reinvention. Curated by and used by me daily.

The first thing I ever outsourced was not a task. It was my own marriage.

Not the end of it. The years before the end of it. I knew long before I said it out loud. And instead of trusting what I knew, I handed it to other people and asked them to tell me if it was real. Therapists. Friends. Family. Anyone who might give me permission to trust myself.

I was collecting opinions like evidence. What I was actually doing was building a case against my own knowing.

Here is what I understand now that I could not see then. Self-trust is not a feeling. It is a return.

It is not the warm certainty you wait to arrive before you move. It is the walk back to the thing you already knew, after you let the whole world talk you out of it. The feeling is optional. The return is the entire job.

Let me tell you what the outsourcing cost, because I paid it in a currency I cannot earn back.

The divorce cost money. The outsourcing cost years. It cost friendships that could not survive the uncertainty I was living inside. It strained family. It took my sleep. It trapped me in a loop that ran day and night. Is this right. Am I doing the right thing for my son. Is this right. And underneath all of it, the most expensive line item of all. It cost my relationship with myself. Every single time I ignored what I knew, I trusted myself a little less. That is how the account drains. Not all at once. One override at a time.

The line that should have been a thunderclap came quietly. After ten years, I heard the words “I can’t do this anymore. I’m filing for separation.”

The shocking part was not hearing it. The shocking part was realizing I was not surprised.

I had known. I had known for a long time. I had just spent years asking everyone else to confirm a thing my own body had already filed as true.

The return did not happen in a therapist’s office. It did not come after a conversation or a session or one more piece of advice. It happened in my own house, after the noise finally stopped.

My son was asleep. The house was quiet. And for the first time in years, no one was asking me to explain, defend, justify, or reconsider. I sat there alone and felt the truth surface without anyone’s permission. The anxiety I thought was about leaving had always been about staying. The answer had been there the whole time. I had simply spent years asking everyone else to validate what I already carried.

That is the part no one warns you about. The answer rarely arrives. It returns. It was never gone. You set it down in a waiting room, in a conversation, in a marriage, and it sat there the whole time waiting for you to come back for it.

So I built a way to come back faster.

The first version was almost embarrassing. It was a note in my phone. That was it. I started writing down the things I knew before I asked anyone else what they thought. Not the advice. Not the opinions. Just my answer. The first one. The one that shows up before the second-guessing does.

I was trying to catch the first voice before the world got to it.

That note is the seed of everything The PHASE™ became. I did not build it as a product. I built it because I needed a record of my own knowing, and there was none. The receipts did not exist, so I started keeping them.

If you are in this right now, in the loop, in the room where everyone’s certainty is louder than yours, here is what I would say to you and mean it:

You do not need one more opinion. You need a quieter room. The answer you are looking for is almost always the one you already gave yourself, before you started collecting evidence against it.

And here is the line I want you to sit with before you scroll:

The most expensive thing I ever outsourced was not a task, a hire, or a decision. It was my own knowing.

You became someone new on purpose. Now stop asking the world to confirm it.

Here for it. Bring all of it.

MOMumentally,

Erika

Erika Hanafin Austria

Erika Hanafin Austria Founder, MOMumental Moments® · Publisher, MOMumental Reinvention Co-Founder, NeonID · Former CEO, HeyMama · 2x Top 50 Women Leaders, Virginia

🛒 Shop The Stack · The habits, supplements, tools, and essentials behind the reinvention. Curated by and used by me daily.

I want to tell you about the moment I realized busy had become a costume.

Except it wasn’t one moment. It was five acquisitions teaching me the same lesson over and over again, in five different rooms, with five different cap tables, until I finally couldn’t unsee it.

The companies that won weren’t the busiest companies. They were the clearest.

And while the winners were getting clearer, I was being praised for answering everything, fixing everything, attending everything, and somehow becoming the human routing system for entire organizations. I won the busy award every quarter. I was on every call. I was in every thread. I was, by any visible metric, crushing it.

Here is what nobody tells you in your thirties.

Indispensable to activity and replaceable in strategy is not a flex. It is a trap.

Busy was how I proved my value. Especially as a woman in leadership.

If I wasn’t carrying an impossible load, I worried people would think I wasn’t contributing enough. I had absorbed, somewhere along the way, the belief that visibility of effort was the same thing as quality of effort. So I made my effort visible. Constantly. Aggressively. In Slack threads and calendar invites and late-night replies and meeting after meeting after meeting.

My calendar at peak-busy looked like this. Forty-plus meetings a week. Team meetings. Client meetings. Internal meetings about meetings. Slack open in three windows. Inbox triaged twice a day. Fire drills slotted between strategy sessions that never actually got strategic because I was too tired to think. Approval chains routed through me because I had made myself the bottleneck and called it leadership.

Everyone got access to me except the parts of the business actually responsible for growth.

Looking back, the thing that was missing from that calendar wasn’t time. It was white space for thinking. The hours where you stare at a wall and let your brain make the connection that turns a bottleneck into a breakthrough. I had eliminated those hours and replaced them with motion.

I called it dedication. It was actually fragmentation in a nicer outfit.

The audit didn’t come from a coach or a planner or a productivity book.

It came from watching teams work harder while results stayed flat.

That is the line I want you to sit with for a minute. Because if you are running anything right now, a company, a household, a brand, a body, a marriage, and you are noticing that everyone is trying so hard and nothing is actually moving, that is the signal. Effort and output are not correlated. We had confused motion with momentum. And profitability tells the truth eventually.

So I did an 80/20 audit on my own week. Where was the actual time going. What was actually generating revenue. What was actually moving the business forward versus what was just maintaining the appearance of leadership.

The most surprising line item was not what I expected.

It wasn’t a meeting that ran too long or a project that was wasting money. It was the amount of executive energy being spent maintaining complexity. Entire functions existed because nobody had stopped to ask whether they should exist at all. We weren’t solving problems anymore. We were managing the systems built to solve old problems.

The cost of that was hidden in plain sight. Salaries, calendars, mental energy, decision fatigue, opportunity cost, all of it allocated to maintaining a machine that nobody had questioned in years. Including me. Especially me.

Standing meetings.

Not all of them. Just the ones nobody would fight to keep if I canceled them.

That is the test. If you put a meeting on pause for two weeks and nobody fights to bring it back, the meeting was never necessary. It was theater. It was a way for people to feel coordinated without actually coordinating. It was a place where work got talked about instead of done.

The world did not end. Revenue did not decline. Decisions actually got faster because people stopped waiting for permission and started taking ownership. The teams I had been micromanaging through meetings turned out to be perfectly capable of running the work themselves once I stepped out of the routing layer.

The hardest part of cutting those meetings was not the operational pushback. It was the internal voice that whispered, but if you are not in every room, how will anyone know you are leading.

That voice is the costume talking.

After the audit, I built a new filter for every commitment that came across my desk.

Is this creating revenue, creating leverage, or creating optionality?

If the answer is none of the above, it probably does not deserve my time.

That sentence sounds simple. It is brutal in practice. Because most of what fills your week as an operator is none of the above. It is reactive. It is performative. It is maintenance dressed up as progress. It is the third person on a thread who needed to be looped in for visibility but added nothing to the decision.

Once you start asking the question, your calendar starts to thin. Not because you are doing less. Because you are doing the right things.

This is the framework I now teach when I advise other founders. It lives in one of the workbooks in The Library and I want you to have it whether you ever buy anything from me or not.

Every commitment goes into one of three buckets. Revenue. Relationship. Or Noise.

1. Revenue creates money. The pitch, the close, the product launch, the email that brings in a sale today. If I do this thing, money shows up. Direct line.

2. Relationship creates future money. The investor coffee. The press conversation. The community show-up. The strategic intro. No revenue today. But the relationship compounds and produces revenue twelve, eighteen, twenty-four months from now.

3. Noise is everything else. The newsletter you subscribed to because it sounded smart and never read. The meeting you accepted because saying no felt rude. The thread you got pulled into because someone needed to feel heard. The status update that could have been a Loom. The Loom that could have been a single sentence.

Most people discover they have built entire careers around the third category.

I built one. For a long time. Until five acquisitions kept teaching me the same lesson and I finally listened.

This is the part nobody warns you about.

When I stopped being busy, I did not get tired less because I was working less. I got tired less because I was context switching less.

The exhaustion I had been carrying for a decade was not workload. It was fragmentation. Every time I jumped from a strategy conversation to a Slack ping to an inbox check to a quick fire drill and back to the strategy conversation, my brain had to reload. The cost of that reload was invisible on any spreadsheet, but it was costing me hours of effective thinking every day.

I had been treating my brain like a router. The fix was not less work. It was less fragmentation.

Revenue increased the quarter I did this. Decision quality improved. And I got pieces of my life back that I did not realize I had surrendered. The evening hours where my brain could actually rest. The weekend mornings where I could read something for pleasure instead of triaging. The capacity to be present with my kids without simultaneously composing a response to a 9pm email in my head.

The math nobody runs on busy is the math of what it costs you outside the business. That math is the one that broke me open.

If you are reading this with a calendar that looks like the one I had at peak-busy, I want you to know something.

Nobody scales a company by becoming the busiest person in it. And nobody builds a life that way either.

Busy feels safe because it gives you evidence every hour that you are working hard. Every meeting, every ping, every email, every fire drill is a little hit of I am needed. But profitability does not care how hard you worked. It only cares whether your effort mattered.

Your effort mattering is the operator’s actual job.

Not your visibility. Not your responsiveness. Not your willingness to absorb everyone else’s chaos. Your judgment about what to do and what to let go of.

That is the work nobody can outsource. That is the work nobody can replace you on. That is the work busy was hiding.

The version of you that runs the audit, makes the cuts, builds the filter, holds the line, and lets the noise go is the version of you the next five years actually need.

This is the place in the essay where I would normally tell you to grab one of the workbooks. I will, in a second. But I want to say something first.

The shift I am describing is not a productivity hack. It is a re-architecting of what you believe leadership looks like.

For most of us, especially women, leadership got modeled to us as be everywhere, know everything, hold everyone. That was the price of entry. And it worked until it stopped working, until our companies stopped scaling, until our health started talking, until our families started waiting, until we burned out and called it a season instead of a system error.

The operator version of leadership is quieter.

It is allocating resources instead of reacting to noise. It is building systems so information reaches you when it matters and not before. It is trusting your team to run the work you trained them to run. It is the willingness to be wrong faster instead of right slower. It is the discipline to put every commitment through the Revenue, Relationship, or Noise filter before it lands on your calendar.

It is the conviction that being needed and being effective are not the same thing.

If that lands, I want you to know I built a whole architecture around this shift. The Library at MOMumental Reinvention is where the operator tools live. Specifically, the Must-Have Frameworks for Profitability workbook is where the Revenue, Relationship, Noise framework lives in full, with the audit prompts and the cut-list templates and the calendar reset.

It will take you about an hour. It might rebuild your entire month.

Browse The Library →

That is the close. No false urgency. No countdown. Just an offer to keep going if this resonated.

MOMumentally,

Erika

Erika Hanafin Austria Founder, MOMumental Moments® · Publisher, MOMumental Reinvention Co-Founder, NeonID · Former CEO, HeyMama · 2x Top 50 Women Leaders, Virginia

🛒 Shop The Stack · The habits, supplements, tools, and essentials behind the reinvention. Curated by and used by me daily.

My oldest son was born Memorial Day weekend thirteen years ago in New York City. Two weeks late. Already larger than life at 9 pounds 10 ounces.

My youngest son turned one twelve days ago. He was born May 13. Less than two weeks before his big brother turned thirteen this past Sunday.

The same nine-day stretch of calendar that opened my motherhood is now bookended by both their birthdays. A second birth, after thirteen years of becoming, in the same season as the first.

I did not know with my oldest that his life and mine would become a series of crossings. Three states. Two major cities. New York and San Francisco. A marriage. A divorce. Perimenopause. Miscarriage. Reinvention after reinvention. Then a second chance at motherhood at the edge of forty. A blended family of four boys.

Somewhere out there a woman my age is picking her midlife crisis off a menu. Peptides. Pickleball. Bangs. A panic baby. I am not judging. I tried half that list. But underneath every single one of those is the same thing nobody puts on the menu. Grief.

Every birthday since the first one has carried two truths at once. Celebration and reckoning.

This is the body-truth conversation we do not have enough. We have language for the losses that came with funerals. We do not have language yet for the losses that came with paperwork. Or with silence. Or with the slow midlife unraveling of an identity that used to fit.

But those are memorials too. We just do not mark them.

What I remember about that hospital weekend is not the room. It is the woman I was becoming without realizing it. The version of me who still believed if I loved hard enough, worked hard enough, held everyone together carefully enough, I could outrun loss.

A birthday cluster like this one has a way of stripping things down to what remains after survival.

My son grew up alongside my becoming. His identity shifted while mine did too. We both learned that rebuilding is not graceful. It is loud. Exhausting. Lonely. Beautiful. Sometimes all in the same season.

The grief I have carried most quietly is the loss of my sister while we are both still alive.

It happened slowly. Quietly. In unanswered calls in the months leading up to my youngest son’s birth. In silence during the pregnancy I had prayed for. In the absence of someone who never came to meet the baby she knew was coming.

He turned one twelve days ago. She has still never met him.

What hurt most was realizing she knew how to show up when my life was collapsing, but disappeared when I finally started rebuilding it. There is a particular loneliness in understanding that some people are more comfortable with your wounds than your healing.

I grieved the version of sisterhood I thought my sons would inherit. I grieved the idea that becoming a mother again at forty might soften old fractures. Instead, I learned some relationships do not end with a fight. They end with an absence so consistent it becomes its own answer.

And still, every birthday season since, I feel it. The ache of someone still alive who chose not to witness the life I fought to rebuild. The ache of a one-year-old whose aunt has only ever existed in family stories.

That is what disenfranchised grief actually looks like. The kind nobody hands you a casserole for. The kind that does not get a microphone, a flag at half-mast, or a family photo with everyone holding hands.

The other grief I have buried quietly is the version of me who thought love was earned through suffering.

For years, I thought love was earned through overextending. Through rescuing. Through surviving impossible things quietly. I carried entire relationships on my back because I thought being needed was the same thing as being loved.

Putting that down felt terrifying at first. Like stepping into open air without knowing if anyone would catch me.

And the truth: some people noticed immediately because they no longer had access to the version of me that abandoned herself for everyone else.

But the people who truly loved me. They finally got to meet me without the exhaustion.

If you have been reading me for any length of time, you know I built The PHASE™ out of years like the ones I am describing here. Five volumes for the perimenopause, hormone, daily architecture, self-trust, and execution rebuilds that come at us in midlife with no warning and no map. The framework lives at thisisphase.co.

But here is what I did not put in the workbooks until now.

The framework was not built after the grief lifted. The framework was built INSIDE the grief. Every Volume is downstream of a loss I had to name out loud before I could move through it. Vol I is the perimenopause map I built while I was grieving the body that used to work. Vol II is the hormone primer I built while I was grieving the doctor who never listened. Vol III is the daily architecture rebuild I wrote while I was grieving the version of motherhood I had pictured. Vol IV is the self-trust I rebuilt while I was grieving the people who only knew the older version of me. Vol V is the execution I learned while I was grieving the woman who used to outrun loss with productivity.

Five volumes. Five unmarked memorials made workable.

The rebuild did not begin after the grief. The grief was the blueprint.

Every heartbreak, every silence, every person who disappeared when I stopped shrinking myself. All of it cleared space for a life that could finally hold the truth of who I am now.

Grief was not proof I was broken. It was proof something old could no longer survive in me.

And honestly, some things needed to die so I could finally live without apologizing for becoming.

Here is the line I would say to my sons in twenty years, when they are old enough to understand it.

I was not tired, boys. I was carrying the weight of becoming someone new while mourning everyone who could only love the older version of me.

You saw a mother trying to hold things together. What you did not see was how many nights I sat awake grieving relationships, identities, expectations, and dreams that no longer fit the life we were building.

I was not grieving because life fell apart. I was grieving because I finally stopped abandoning myself to keep everyone else comfortable.

That kind of rebuilding costs something.

If I could invent a ritual for midlife, it would not look like a holiday. It would look like dusk.

Women would gather outside. No performances. No fixing. No pretending we are “past it.” Just a long table somewhere with candles, photographs, old journal pages, wedding rings we no longer wear, letters we never sent, names we do not say out loud anymore.

We would speak honestly about the versions of ourselves we had to bury to survive. The marriages. The friendships. The ambitions. The innocence. The family dynamics that never healed the way we hoped they would.

And before leaving, every woman would write down one thing she is no longer willing to carry into the next season of her life.

Not to erase it. Not to resent it. Just to finally stop dragging it behind her like proof she loved deeply.

I want the woman reading this to stop minimizing the losses that did not come with funerals.

The friendship that disappeared after the divorce. The sister who stopped calling. The identity she outgrew. The version of motherhood she thought she would have. The life she fought for that still cost her people she loved.

Sit with it. Send it to your sister if you need to. Or do not. Some grief does not need confrontation to be real.

But at minimum, tell yourself the truth this week.

Not every absence is accidental.

Not every relationship survives your healing.

And rebuilding your life is still something worthy of honoring.

MOMumentally,

Erika xx

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Erika Hanafin Austria

Erika Hanafin Austria Founder, MOMumental Moments® · Publisher, MOMumental Reinvention Co-Founder, NeonID · Former CEO, HeyMama · 2x Top 50 Women Leaders, Virginia

🛒 Shop The Stack · The habits, supplements, tools, and essentials behind the reinvention. Curated by and used by me daily.

The closet floor.

That is where it actually happened. Not the boardroom. Not the press release. Not the hospital room. Not the lawyer’s office. The closet floor.

Surrounded by hanging clothes, door shut, crying so hard I could not catch my breath. Full-body grief. No audience. No leadership voice. No performance to manage.

That was the room.

The hardest moments of the rebuild were not the ones that look hard from the outside. The acquisitions. The births. The separation. Those were the headlines.

The hardest moments were the closet floor. The bathroom mirror at 2 AM. The hurricane Uber from the airport. The conversation that finally named what was actually happening.

Today I am naming twelve of them.

Some of these I have not written about. Some of these I am still inside of. All of them happened.

Not advice. Not a framework. Twelve scenes.

Here for it. Bring all of it.

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ONE · The body moment

It started with the night sweats.

Not the kind where you wake up warm. The kind where you wake up at 2 AM feeling like you ran a marathon in your sleep. Heart pounding. Hair soaked. Sheets damp. I would sit on the edge of the bed trying to catch my breath wondering how my body could feel so foreign when technically nothing was wrong.

Then came the exhaustion no amount of discipline could outperform.

And the part no one talks about enough. Losing my sex drive completely. Not diminished. Gone.

I did not recognize myself anymore.

I remember standing in my bathroom looking in the mirror thinking, I am too young to feel this disconnected from my own body.

I was not broken. I was uninformed.

No one had prepared me for what perimenopause actually looks like in high-performing women still building companies, raising children, leading teams, and carrying entire ecosystems on their backs.

The first moment was not about weakness. It was about a system that never taught women what this season actually feels like.

TWO · The professional moment I could not perform through

I was driving home from DC after negotiating one of the biggest wins of my career. The partner wanted a 30-day close. I got it done in seven.

Seven.

That version of me knew how to push through anything. Acquisitions. Fundraising. Crisis management. I had built a career on being the woman who closes the loop.

But on that drive home, sitting behind the wheel six months pregnant, I felt something I had never allowed myself to feel before.

Complete depletion.

Not stress. Not burnout. Emptiness.

I had crossed the finish line professionally and realized my body had nothing left. No adrenaline. No celebration. Just silence.

For the first time in my life, performance stopped working as a survival strategy.

THREE · The night that broke the streak

3:17 AM.

I remember the time because that was the moment I stopped pretending. I had already been awake for hours. Mind racing. Body exhausted but unable to settle.

I got out of bed at 4:30 AM and sat on the couch in total darkness scrolling my phone because the silence felt too loud. I Googled:

• Why do I feel exhausted and wired at the same time?

• Can hormones cause panic at night?

• Perimenopause insomnia early 40s.

Every woman remembers the first search that made her realize she was not imagining it.

That was mine.

FOUR · The conversation I cannot unhear

I had changed my flight from LA to Virginia Beach because of a hurricane. I took the red eye home anyway because that is what moms do. We pivot. We make it work.

Before boarding, I texted asking if we had enough groceries because the storm was getting worse. I was told not to worry about it.

The next morning, after landing, I had to take a taxi home from the airport because he would not pick me up even though it was pre-hurricane.

Just as I walked through the front door exhausted, carrying bags, running on no sleep, the power goes out. My son, running to greet me was hysterically crying because he was hungry and there was no breakfast ready. No plan. No support. No sense that anyone had held the line while I was gone.

That was the moment.

Not dramatic. Not explosive. Just devastatingly clarifying.

I remember thinking. I cannot keep mothering everyone in this house alone.

I filed for separation the next day.

FIVE · The version of mothering I had to put down

I had to let go of performative motherhood.

The perfect birthday parties. The Pinterest-level holidays. The pressure to make every moment magical while quietly drowning behind the scenes.

What surprised me most is my boys did not notice the things I stopped doing nearly as much as they noticed who I became when I stopped exhausting myself trying to do them.

Our family became a beautiful blended family. Baby B changed all of us in the best way. And somewhere in that rebuilding, I stopped striving for perfection and started striving for love and patience instead.

More presence. Less performance.

Turns out my children never needed a perfect mother.

They needed a regulated one.

SIX · The professional door I closed that was supposed to define me

The last acquisition was supposed to be the thing that defined me.

Another milestone. Another proof point. Another room where people would say look what she built.

And honestly. I could have kept going. I know how to win in those rooms. I know how to negotiate, scale, rebuild, and close.

But I remember sitting quietly after everything finalized realizing I did not want my entire identity tied to being endlessly impressive anymore.

I closed the door on the version of success that required me to abandon myself to sustain it.

That was not failure.

That was discernment.

SEVEN · The friendship that did not survive the rebuild

Some friendships did not survive my rebuild because they were built around the version of me that over-functioned.

The hardest part was not the dramatic endings.

It was the silence.

No calls checking in on me or the baby. No how are you really doing. No showing up when my life cracked open.

I stopped begging people to care in the ways I needed care.

And eventually I realized.

Some people only know how to love the version of you that requires nothing.

I am not her anymore.

EIGHT · The financial moment that scared me

No paid maternity leave changes the way you experience motherhood.

There is the emotional exhaustion of postpartum life, and then there is the very practical panic of how long can I afford to pause. What bills are due next. How much can I carry alone.

Add separation, legal expenses, co-parenting logistics, and trying to preserve stability for your children, and suddenly even successful women are quietly doing financial math at 2 AM.

There were moments I looked at spreadsheets while holding a baby wondering how women are expected to recover physically while remaining financially operational.

We do not talk enough about the economic reality of rebuilding a life as a mother.

NINE · The body-truth moment with a practitioner

My nurse practitioner at Complete Women’s Care changed everything because she finally listened.

Really listened.

Not the rushed seven-minute appointment where someone glances at your chart and tells you to reduce stress.

She sat with me for over an hour. Asked questions. Connected dots. Took notes seriously.

At one point she looked at me and said, you are not imagining this.

I almost cried from relief.

She ran the tests I needed. She called to check on me afterward. She treated me like a whole human being instead of a difficult woman with vague symptoms.

That appointment gave me language for what my body had been trying to say for years.

TEN · The thing I almost did not ship

There are pieces I have written that sat unpublished for weeks because once you tell the truth publicly, you cannot untell it.

Especially for women who built careers being polished, composed, and capable.

I almost did not share the parts about exhaustion. About rage. About rebuilding. About motherhood not always feeling beautiful.

But I kept coming back to the same thought.

If women like me keep pretending we are fine, other women will keep believing they are failing.

So I hit publish anyway.

Not because it was comfortable.

Because it was necessary.

ELEVEN · The interior moment with no witness

The closet floor became my sanctuary.

There were afternoons I would shut the door, sit on the floor surrounded by hanging clothes, and cry so hard I could not catch my breath.

Not delicate tears.

Full-body grief.

Releasing the pressure. The resentment. The fear. The exhaustion of holding everyone else together while quietly unraveling myself.

No audience. No performance. No leadership voice.

Just me finally admitting I could not carry all of it alone anymore.

TWELVE · The moment I knew it was a rebuild and not a breakdown

The shift happened when I stopped asking what is wrong with me and started asking what is this version of me trying to build.

That question changed everything.

Because suddenly the exhaustion was not evidence of failure.

It was evidence that an old identity was collapsing.

The over-performer. The fixer. The woman who could survive on adrenaline and applause.

She got me here.

But she could not take me where I needed to go next.

This was not a breakdown.

It was a rebuild.

And rebuilds are messy, expensive, emotional, nonlinear, and profoundly honest.

But they are also where new foundations get built.

THE LINE I WANT YOU TO SCREENSHOT

You are not failing because you can no longer carry what was never sustainable to hold alone.

THE TWELVE ADD UP TO ONE THING

The version of me who scrubbed the neon-green pool five years ago is not the version of me who is writing this Letter.

She got me here. She closed the seven-day deal. She mothered through the hurricane. She held the company together at six months pregnant. She survived the night sweats and the closet floor and the friendships that fell away.

She got me here. She cannot take me where I am going next.

The twelve moments above are not a list of things that happened to me. They are the architecture of how an old identity collapses and a new one builds in its place.

That is the whole rebuild.

The breakdown was the diagnosis. The rebuild is the protocol.

Here for it.

ONE LAST THING

Most of the body-truth and architecture moments above live inside the protocol I built when nobody handed me a playbook.

The PHASE™. Five volumes for the body. The Power Method® for the architecture. Two companion tools. One free starter kit if you just want a place to begin.

Built for the woman who is still in it. Built for the woman who is just starting.

Both, and both at once.

Bring all of it.

MOMumentally,

Erika

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Erika Hanafin Austria Founder, MOMumental Moments® · Publisher, MOMumental Reinvention Co-Founder, NEON ID · Former CEO, HeyMama · 2x Top 50 Women Leaders, Virginia

🛒 Shop The Stack · The habits, supplements, tools, and essentials behind the rebuild. Curated by and used by me daily.

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Fifteen minutes. The night before Baby B’s first birthday. The Letter I almost didn’t publish.

READ NOW

If you missed it, the replay is here. Hit play.

📱 Watching this in your inbox? Open it in the Substack app for the full experience. The Live plays better there. The chat happens there. The next Live notification fires there before anywhere else.

The Inner Room is open. If the replay catches you · drop one line in the Chat thread. What part stayed with you?

If this lands · restack it. Help one more woman find the room.

Next Tuesday at 9 AM Eastern · the Letter is 12 Hardest Moments of the Rebuild. Twelve numbered. The ones I have not written about yet. The ones that took me eighteen months to find the words for.

Live #2 · Tuesday June 2 at 8 PM Eastern. Biweekly from here forward. Each one earns the next.

The walk is yours. The phone is on.

MOMumentally,

Erika

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Mother’s Day five years ago, I was scrubbing a neon-green pool.

The house looked intact from the outside. Behind the scenes it was cracking.

That specific year my ex had let the pool go to full chaos. Murky. Could not see the bottom. So I scrubbed it. I cleaned chlorine off my hands. I packed a bag. I got on a flight for a work trip the next morning.

No pause. No soft landing. Survival wrapped in productivity.

That was the version of Mother’s Day I knew. Performance art with a side of pretending the pool was fine.

Now? Mother’s Day is mine.

Some years I have all four boys. Some years I don’t. That’s the reality of co-parenting. Either way I don’t outsource meaning anymore.

The shift was not in the day. The shift was in me. Five years ago I was maintaining an image. Now I am designing a life.

The hardest part of Mother’s Day as a co-parent is not the logistics.

I can operationalize anything. I have built companies. Led acquisitions. Navigated complexity at scale. Calendars do not scare me.

It is the unpredictability of the emotional landscape.

Some years it feels expansive. Like we have hacked a new, modern version of family that actually works. Other years it is sharp. You feel the absence of what you originally built, even as you stand proud in what you have rebuilt.

The hardest part is holding both truths at the same time without shrinking either.

I do not believe in pretending it is easy. I believe in being clever enough, bold enough, to create something meaningful anyway.

Motherhood used to feel like a structure I had to protect. Now it feels like a force I get to expand.

I have four boys. A blended, dynamic, sometimes chaotic ecosystem. It has made me more imaginative about what love looks like. There is no single blueprint anymore, and that is where I thrive.

Motherhood for me now is about building humans who can think, feel, adapt, and lead. It is less about control and more about influence. Less about perfection and more about presence.

I am not trying to recreate what was. I am inventing what is next.

This version is deeper. More intentional. Earned.

One moment from this past year made me stop. It was not a milestone. It was a moment.

We were all together. No tension. No transition energy. No split. Just us. Loud overlapping conversations, boys interrupting each other, someone laughing too hard at something that was not even that funny.

I clocked it in real time. This feels safe. Not perfect. Not polished. Grounded. Connected. Real.

That is when it hit me. I did not just rebuild a life that works. I rebuilt one that feels good to live in.

That moment was the return on every hard decision.

A note for Mental Health Awareness Month, because it is May, and May is May.

The “this feels safe” moment did not arrive on its own. It was earned in a season I do not usually write about.

I went into perimenopause before I got pregnant with Baby B. I knew the signs. I had been tracking my own labs because nobody else was going to do it for me.

I had also lost five.

One before B. Four before Baby B.

Five hearts. Five anniversaries. Five mornings on bathroom floors that nobody else marks. Four boys at the table now. Two of my own. Two bonus boys from my husband. Five who never made it.

Then I got pregnant with Baby B at 40. Sold a company six months pregnant. Delivered a 9lb12oz baby boy. Four months in, the floor opened up underneath me.

What followed was the deepest postpartum depression I have ever known. Not the baby blues. Not “adjusting.” The kind where you watch your own life from behind glass and cannot find the door.

The day after this letter ships is Baby B’s first birthday. He is the baby the year that broke me open gave me. The whole rebuild lives inside that twelve months.

Here is the part Mental Health Awareness Month should be telling and is not.

As a certified holistic health coach, I tried everything else first. Lifestyle protocols. Supplements. Hormone optimization. Therapy without meds. None of it alone could get me off the floor. The only way out was an SSRI and a hormone panel.

Not either. Both.

I had a doctor who took me seriously. I had a therapist who knew her lane and pushed me toward the labs. I had the labs that confirmed what my body was already telling me. I had the SSRI that gave me enough oxygen to do the rest of the work. I had people in my corner who held the line when I could not.

If someone had handed me one of those without the others, I would still be on the floor.

This is the part of the rebuild people do not see when they look at the “this feels safe” moment from earlier. The moment was real. It was also earned. It cost me a year of asking for help in every direction at once and being honest about what I actually needed.

If you are reading this and you are in that year right now, hear me.

One · you are not failing. You are in a chapter that needs more interventions than the one before it. That does not make you weaker. It makes you smart enough to use everything available.

Two · the binary the internet sells you is a lie.

Your healing does not have to be pure. It does not have to be unmedicated. It does not have to be “natural.” It has to work. Yours can be SSRIs and hormone panels and therapy and labs and a thread of three women who get it. All of it counts. All of it is the work.

Mental Health Awareness Month should be the month we say this part out loud.

So I am saying it.

To the mothers who carry the babies they never got to hold.

I see you.

The ones whose first wins were silent. The ones whose anniversaries nobody else marks. The ones who lost one before the one who stayed. The ones who lost four before the one who finally came home. The ones still waiting.

You did not become a mother on the day the baby came. You became a mother the moment your body said yes for the first time. Every single time after that, you said yes again.

The body remembers what nobody else marks. You are still a mother. Today is for you too.

To the mothers who came before mine.

My mother taught me how to scrub the pool while everything was on fire. I learned the performance from her. I learned the rebuild from leaving it.

To my boys’ grandmothers, who held the babies the year I was on the floor. The rebuild does not happen alone. Today is for you too.

And to the women who mother without giving birth. The aunts who became the parent. The friends who showed up the night nobody else did. The women bottle-feeding rescue puppies at 2am the same way I bottle-fed Baby B. The body knows that work too.

To the woman spending Mother’s Day alone for the first time. Not a pep talk. The real thing.

It is going to feel weird. Maybe quiet in a way that is louder than noise. Maybe peaceful for five minutes and then not.

Do not rush to fix it. Do not overbook it. Do not try to win the day.

Let it be what it is.

Here is the part no one says out loud. This version of the day is a transition, not a destination. You are in the middle of rewriting something, and rewriting always feels disorienting before it feels powerful.

You are not behind. You are in process.

When you are ready, not today, not on command, you will start to see the openings. The freedom. The possibility.

Not a silver lining. A whole new landscape.

Mother’s Day for me is no longer a reflection. It is a declaration.

I am celebrating authorship.

Not just being a mother. Being a woman who refused to let motherhood be the container that limited her. Instead I used it as a launchpad.

I am building companies. Advising. Investing in women. Reimagining what leadership looks like for mothers who refuse to choose between ambition and presence.

This is the beginning of a life where I get to be both deeply devoted and wildly expansive.

If that feels a little bold. A little unconventional. Good.

That is exactly the point.

Here for it. Bring all of it.

MOMumentally,

Erika

Erika Hanafin Austria

Erika Hanafin Austria Founder, MOMumental Moments® · Publisher, MOMumental Reinvention Co-Founder, NeonID · Former CEO, HeyMama · 2x Top 50 Women Leaders, Virginia

🛒 Shop The Stack · The habits, supplements, tools, and essentials behind the reinvention. Curated by and used by me daily.

Three words.

Dr. Alison Schmidt asked me to pick three words that begin with “un” to describe who I am. She does this on her podcast, (UN)Conversations®. Every guest gets the same prompt. Most people overthink it.

I didn’t.

Unconventional. Unrelenting. Unapologetic.

They came out of my mouth before my brain caught up. Because these aren’t aspirational words I picked from a vision board. They’re the words I earned. Through five acquisitions, a CEO turnaround nobody thought I should touch, a divorce that dismantled everything I’d built personally, and the slow, unglamorous work of becoming someone new while raising a blended family of four boys.

I want to tell you what each of those words actually costs. Because the polished version sounds great in a podcast intro. The real version is harder. And more useful.

Unconventional: The Path That Doesn’t Exist Yet

I’ve never followed the rulebook. Not because I’m rebellious. Because the rulebook wasn’t written for me.

When I started building in the startup world, there was no “mom tech” category. No women-focused VC funds. No playbook for a woman who wanted to build companies AND be present for her kids. The infrastructure didn’t exist. So I built anyway.

That’s what unconventional actually means. It’s not a personality trait. It’s a survival strategy. When the path doesn’t exist, you either wait for someone to build it or you start walking and let the path form behind you.

MOMumental Moments® was born that way. I didn’t see a movement honoring the quiet, invisible moments that redefine women’s lives. The pivot after failure. The clarity that arrives in burnout. The courage hiding inside caregiving. Nobody was naming those moments. So I did.

Here’s what I’ve learned about being unconventional: it’s lonely at the beginning. Everyone else’s path looks more legitimate. More proven. More safe. The comparison trap will eat you alive if you let it. But comparison is just fear wearing a research hat. Your path doesn’t need to look like anyone else’s. That’s the whole point.

Unrelenting: Build, Scale, Pivot. Repeat.

Five acquisitions. A CEO role everyone told me not to take. A company in crisis that I rebuilt from the inside out.

When I stepped into HeyMama as CEO, the company was bleeding. People told me to walk away. That’s exactly why I stayed. Not because I’m stubborn (although, yes). Because I recognized something I’d seen before: the biggest breakthroughs come from the situations everyone else abandons.

That chapter taught me something I carry into everything now. Momentum isn’t a catchphrase. It’s a practice. You don’t get to be unrelenting only when things are going well. You’re unrelenting when payroll is uncertain and you still show up. When you’re running on two hours of sleep and your kid has a fever and the investor call is in forty minutes. When every part of you wants to quit and the only thing keeping you in the chair is the version of yourself you haven’t become yet.

That same muscle followed me out of the boardroom. This month I'm calling it FORTRESS. Boundaries as architecture, not as walls. The thing you build to hold what matters. When you’ve pitched to investors who said no forty-seven times, a hard conversation with a co-parent doesn’t scare you. When you’ve rebuilt a company from crisis, navigating a blended family feels like a skill you’ve been training for.

The entrepreneurial mindset isn’t compartmentalized. It bleeds into everything. Parenting. Partnering. Showing up for yourself on the days nobody’s watching.

Don’t give up. Especially on yourself.

Unapologetic: The Rooms I Stopped Entering

For a long time, I saw “unworthy” in the mirror.

I questioned whether I belonged at the funding table. In leadership rooms. In spaces dominated by people with different pedigrees, different last names, different versions of what “qualified” looked like.

I used to edit myself to fit rooms that weren’t built for me. Soften my voice. Shrink my ambition. Apologize for being too much, too direct, too emotional, too ambitious.

Then I stopped.

Not all at once. It wasn’t a single moment of liberation. It was a thousand small decisions to stop apologizing for the things that made me effective. My directness. My emotion. My refusal to separate motherhood from leadership.

Someone once asked me: “How do you balance being a mom and a CEO?” I used to hear that as a challenge to my legitimacy. Now I hear it as an invitation. Balance doesn’t mean equal time. It means aligned energy. I don’t hide my motherhood in boardrooms anymore. And I don’t hide my ambition at pickup.

Unapologetic doesn’t mean reckless. It means clear. It means I stopped waiting for permission to become who I already was.

The Moment That Changed Everything

Dr. Alison asked me a question nobody had ever asked before: “What was the quiet moment that changed everything?”

Not the big, headline moment. Not the acquisition or the title or the launch. The real one.

I was driving my son to school. Late. Exhausted. He was mid-tantrum. I was holding it together the way I always did. White knuckles on the steering wheel, running through the mental list of everything I was already behind on before 8am.

Then The Chainsmokers came on. “Something Just Like This.”

I turned it up. Loud. Way too loud for a school morning.

And something shifted. He stopped crying. I stopped clenching. We started screaming the words. Then singing. Then laughing. Full volume, windows probably shaking, two people who had been at war with the morning suddenly on the same team.

He walked into school in an entirely different mood than the one he woke up in. And I drove to work proud. Not of a deal I closed or a meeting I crushed. Proud of that. Proud of the redirect. Proud of the instinct to turn the music up instead of the pressure up.

That’s a MOMumental Moment®.

It wasn’t quiet at all, actually. It was loud and messy and set to a Chainsmokers track at 7:45am. But it was the moment I realized: this is the work. Not the boardroom performance. Not the curated version of motherhood. This. The chaotic, imperfect, music-blasting Tuesday morning where you choose connection over control.

Those moments don’t make the highlight reel. But they rearrange everything.

The Failure Nobody Talks About

I also told Dr. Alison about my biggest failure. Not a business failure. A personal one.

I failed by trying to do it all. Perfectly. Quietly. Alone.

I thought being a strong leader meant holding everything together without help. I micromanaged in business. I over-functioned in my personal life. I told myself I could outwork the overwhelm.

I didn’t trust. I didn’t trust my team to lead. I didn’t trust my support system to hold me. I didn’t even trust my own body when it was screaming for rest.

Burnout caught up with me so deep it made me question everything I’d built.

Here’s what I’d tell a woman who is in the middle of that right now: Burnout isn’t a failure of stamina. It’s a failure of systems. Of boundaries. Of support. You don’t need to push harder. You need to build differently.

That insight is one of the foundations of everything I create now. We’re not building spaces for women to grind through another season. We’re building ecosystems where they can thrive through every transition. Where “doing it all” is no longer the goal. Doing it well, supported, and sustainably? That’s the new model.

Three Things You Can Do This Week

I closed the podcast with three tangible things. I want to give them to you too.

1. Name your MOMumental Moment®.

Take five minutes today and write down the one quiet moment this year that shifted something inside you. It doesn’t have to be dramatic. It might be a conversation. A realization in the car. A sentence your kid said that cracked something open. Naming it gives it power. That’s the first step of reinvention: seeing what’s already happening inside you.

2. Audit your energy, not just your calendar.

For one week, track not just what you do but how each thing makes you feel. Where are you drained? Where are you lit up? Reinvention doesn’t always mean a dramatic pivot. Sometimes it means reorganizing your life around what gives you energy instead of what takes it away.

3. Stop waiting for permission to become who you already are.

If you’ve been waiting for someone to tell you it’s okay to start that business, leave that job, write that book, or rebuild your identity after divorce or motherhood: this is your permission slip. You don’t need to have it all figured out. You need to take one unrelenting step. Clarity comes from action, not the other way around.

Listen to the Full Conversation

This essay was inspired by my appearance on Dr. Alison Schmidt’s (UN)Conversations® podcast. If you want the full, unfiltered conversation about unconventional leadership, reinvention, and what it really takes to rebuild, you can listen at unconventionllc.com.

Dr. Alison asked me a question at the end that I’m still thinking about. She has a way of making you see your own story differently. That’s what good conversations do. They don’t just confirm what you already know. They crack something open.

Reinvention isn’t just possible. It’s powerful.

MOMumentally,

Erika

Erika Hanafin Austria

Founder, MOMumental Moments® · Publisher, MOMumental Reinvention

Co-Founder, NeonID · Former CEO, HeyMama · 2x Top 50 Women Leaders, Virginia

🛒 Shop The Stack · The habits, tools, and essentials behind the reinvention. Curated by me.

💎 Become a Founding Member · The first 100 women get permanent access to the MOMumental Letters, community, and everything that comes next. $150/year. The Founding window closes May 12.

The last time I didn’t trust myself wasn’t after something happened to me. It was after a stretch of time where I knew. And didn’t act.

My gut was clear. In family dynamics. In work decisions. In my health. It wasn’t subtle. It was direct.

And I overrode it.

Sometimes because I wanted a different outcome. Sometimes because I thought I should be more logical, more patient, more accommodating.

But every time I ignored it, there was a cost.

So the break in trust wasn’t just what happened externally. It was the realization that I had abandoned my own internal guidance system, repeatedly, when it mattered most.

That’s the part nobody talks about when they talk about betrayal. The external event gets all the attention. The person who lied. The system that failed. The relationship that cost more than you expected.

But underneath all of that is a quieter betrayal. The one where you knew, and you negotiated with yourself anyway.

I need to tell you what that actually feels like. Because if you’ve lived it, you already know. And if you’re in it right now, you need to hear that someone else has stood in that exact place.

It feels like knowing you had the answer and talking yourself out of it. That’s the part that lingers. Not just the outcome, but the awareness that you felt it coming.

Day to day, it creates hesitation. You don’t just question the situation. You question your ability to read the situation.

There’s a quiet erosion of certainty. “Was that my intuition, or was I overreacting?”

And because you’ve seen what happens when you ignore your gut, there’s also a layer of self-betrayal underneath it. It’s not just confusion. It’s disappointment in yourself.

That disappointment is the heaviest thing to carry. Heavier than the betrayal itself. Because you can eventually make peace with what someone else did. Making peace with what you allowed takes longer.

Read more

The founder mindset is waking up every day knowing no one is coming to figure it out for you. And deciding you are going to build anyway.

It is not confidence. It is resourcefulness. It is the willingness to move before you feel ready, to make decisions with incomplete data, and to take full ownership of the outcome.

I have carried this orientation through five acquisitions, two companies, and a life that restructured itself without warning. And I can tell you: the founder mindset is not just a business strategy. It is a survival framework. It is the single most transferable skill I have ever developed.

Here is what I mean.

In business, everything is a test. You launch. You learn. You adjust. There is no emotional attachment to being right. Only to getting closer to what works.

When I started applying that same logic to my personal life, everything shifted.

I stopped treating decisions like they were permanent. I started making them as experiments instead of declarations. I gave myself permission to try things without needing them to define me forever.

That mindset removes so much pressure. And replaces it with momentum.

Think about how startups work. You do not build the entire product before you test it. You build the smallest version that gives you real signal. You put it into the world. You watch what happens. You iterate.

Personal reinvention works the same way.

The equivalent of a minimum viable product in your life is a low-risk, real-world action that gives you data. Not “I think I want this life.” But “I am going to live one small piece of it and see how it feels.”

It could be one conversation. One day structured differently. One boundary held. One opportunity pursued.

The key is that it is real enough to give you signal. But small enough that you are not trapped by it.

Reinvention does not start with a leap. It starts with a test. These are your MOMumental Moments®.

Founders also understand something that most people avoid: the pivot.

I walked away from a version of success that looked right on paper but did not feel aligned anymore. At the time, it felt like I was undoing something I had worked incredibly hard to build. From the outside, it looked like loss.

But what I could not see then was that I was not failing. I was recalibrating.

That pivot created space for a more honest, more values-driven version of my life and work. It taught me that sometimes the most strategic move is not scaling what exists. It is having the courage to evolve beyond it.

In startup language, that is called a pivot. In life, people call it giving up. But the founder in me knows the difference.

Giving up is stopping because it is hard. Pivoting is redirecting because you have new information. They look similar from the outside. From the inside, they are nothing alike.

Building in public, in life, means letting people see you in process. Not just in polish. It is sharing the evolution, not just the outcome. The questions, not just the conclusions.

But the line is this: you share from clarity, not from confusion.

Not everything needs to be processed out loud. Some things are meant to be lived privately until they are integrated. Transparency without discernment becomes exposure.

The goal is not to show everything. It is to show what is true. And what is useful for others to see.

That is exactly what MOMumental Reinvention is. Me building in public. From clarity, not confusion. Sharing what I have learned after I have lived it. Not while I am still spinning.

If you are reading this and you keep waiting to have everything figured out before you start, I want to tell you something I wish someone had told me sooner.

You do not get clarity before you start. You get it because you start.

Waiting to feel ready is one of the most convincing ways we delay our own lives.

Founders do not build from certainty. They build from curiosity, instinct, and a willingness to learn fast.

You do not need the full plan. You need the first move.

Start where you are. Use what you have. Adjust as you go.

The version of you who has it figured out is built through action. Not waiting.

I did not become a founder because I had all the answers. I became one because I was willing to ask better questions instead of waiting for better circumstances.

And I did not rebuild my life because I had a blueprint. I rebuilt it because I treated every day like a founder treats a company in its earliest stage: with resourcefulness, with forward motion, and with the understanding that the only real failure is standing still.

Rebuild Everything That Matters.

P.S. If this landed, share it with one woman who keeps waiting to feel ready. She doesn’t need a plan. She needs someone to tell her the first move counts.

Next week, paid subscribers get the first MOMumental Letter. I asked them to send me one question about reinvention. The real one. Not the polished version. Their questions wrecked me. If you want in on that conversation, this is the week.

Subscribe now

MOMumentally,

Erika

Erika Hanafin Austria · Creator, MOMumental Reinvention

Co-Founder, NeonID · Former CEO, HeyMama · 2x Top 50 Women Leaders, Virginia

This essay was free. Every MOMumental Letter is paid. Paid subscribers get the MOMumental Letters (every other Tuesday), full Community Chat where I respond personally, Behind the Essay exclusives, and early podcast access.

If this work matters to you, subscribing is how you fund it. Monthly is $7. Annual is $70. Founding is $150, limited to 100 members.

You are not paying for content. You are funding a body of work for women who are rebuilding.

I miss the version of me that was more fearless.

She moved fast. She didn’t over-explain. She trusted her instincts without needing consensus or validation. She walked into rooms like she belonged there. Because she decided she did.

She was bold in her ambition and unapologetic about wanting more. Less calculation, more conviction. Less protection, more expansion.

I miss how quickly she chose herself.

If you’ve ever caught yourself missing a version of you that everyone else thinks you should be relieved to leave behind, this letter is yours.

Nostalgia is warm. It edits. It highlights the glow and softens the edges. It says, “That was beautiful.”

Grief is honest. It doesn’t curate. It confronts. It says, “That version of you is gone. And something in you knows she’s not coming back in the same way.”

I’ve felt both.

Nostalgia lets me visit her. Grief makes me release her.

And the truth is, they often arrive together. One hand holding memory. The other asking me to evolve.

Most reinvention content skips this part entirely. It goes straight to the glow-up. The “new chapter” language. The before-and-after.

But in between those frames is a woman standing in the middle of two identities. Missing one. Not yet trusting the other.

That’s where the real work happens.

I tried to keep the pace. The speed at which I used to operate. The constant motion. The quick pivots. The ability to outrun discomfort by staying in action.

But that version of speed was built for a different season. It didn’t account for depth. For healing. For the kind of leadership that requires presence instead of just performance.

I had to learn that not everything worth keeping is meant to be carried forward unchanged.

Some things were survival strategies dressed up as strengths.

That realization doesn’t land easy. Because the survival strategies worked. They got you through. They earned results. Promotions. Revenue. Respect.

But at some point, the thing that saved you starts costing you.

And you have to choose: keep performing the version everyone recognizes, or start building the one only you can feel forming.

I didn’t give myself permission to grieve who I was. Not at first.

Permission came when pushing forward stopped working. When I realized I could achieve, build, lead, and still feel a quiet disconnect underneath it all.

That was the signal.

The door opened when I stopped treating my emotions like obstacles to optimize around. And started treating them like information.

Grief wasn’t regression. It was integration.

Once I let myself feel it, I stopped trying to rebuild my old life. And started designing a new one.

Reinvention is not starting over. It’s finally building what was always meant to be yours.

Here is what missing a former self actually taught me.

I am not the role. I’m the throughline.

The titles change. The seasons shift. The identities evolve. But there’s a core version of me that has always been there. Curious. Driven. Willing to take risks. Deeply invested in building something meaningful.

Missing a former self stripped away the illusion that any one version was the final version.

I’m not losing myself. I’m meeting myself at deeper levels.

And that is a much more powerful identity to stand in.

You’re not wrong for missing her.

Even if that version of you was complicated. Even if she made choices you wouldn’t make today. Even if other people think you’ve “outgrown” her.

She was still you. She carried you through something. She built part of the life you’re standing in now.

Missing her doesn’t mean you want to go back. It means you recognize her value.

Growth without acknowledgment is just disconnection.

You’re allowed to feel both. Pride in who you’re becoming. Tenderness for who you’ve been.

They’re not opposites. They’re the same season.

P.S. If this letter landed, share it with one woman who needs to hear that grief and becoming can coexist. She probably won’t tell you she’s missing a former version of herself. But she is.

MOMumentally,

Erika

Erika Hanafin Austria · Creator, MOMumental Reinvention

Co-Founder, NeonID · Former CEO, HeyMama · 2x Top 50 Women Leaders, Virginia

This essay was free. Every MOMumental Letter is paid. Paid subscribers get the MOMumental Letters (every other Tuesday), full Community Chat where I respond personally, Behind the Essay exclusives, and early podcast access.

If this work matters to you, subscribing is how you fund it. Monthly is $7. Annual is $70. Founding is $150, limited to 100 members.

You are not paying for content. You are funding a body of work for women who are rebuilding.

This Substack exists because the body got too loud and no one was listening.

Over the past decade I have moved across the country, sold a company twice, gone through a nasty divorce, co-blended a family of four boys, had a baby at 40, lost a pregnancy, walked through perimenopause without knowing it, and watched four doctors miss what a hormone panel finally explained in one paragraph.

Some of that you may have seen publicly. A lot of it needed more than a caption.

That is what this is.

Here you will find body-truth essays on perimenopause, divorce, blended family, identity in mid-career, motherhood at 40, the second half, and the practical mechanics of starting over without losing the operator credibility you spent two decades building.

This space holds everything. The body. The marriage. The kitchen floor at 2am. Not as the disclaimer. As the support.

A few helpful notes as you settle in.

• Tuesday letters are free. Always. Long-form essays, 9 AM ET, every Tuesday.

• Paid subscribers get The MOMumental Letter once a month on Sunday, where the deeper work lives. Plus Community Voices, stories from readers shaped into essays. Plus full archive access. The MOMumental Letter is where the keystone material I will not put behind a free wall lives. The body-truth no one is telling you anywhere else.

If you want the wider movement, MOMumental Moments® lives at momumentalmoments.co.

Anything that makes you pause and think,

That just landed.

This space is about body-truth. Not optimization. Not performance. Not hustle. Just the rebuild, written from inside it, by a woman who has been there.

Rebuild Everything That Matters®.

Glad you are here.

MOMumentally,

Erika

Founder of MOMumental Moments® · Founder of The PHASE™.

Co-Founder of NEON ID. 2x Top 50 Women Leaders, Virginia. Former CEO.

I always knew I would be a mother. But I did not think it would happen when it did, or look the way it does.

I was on a clear trajectory. Career. Leadership. The corner office. High heels. Momentum. I was not questioning whether I could build something big. I was already doing it.

And yet, the cultural narrative was loud and limiting: you can be exceptional at work or exceptional at motherhood, but not both at the same time.

What made that narrative confusing for me is that my lived example said otherwise.

My mother was not labeled a “career woman,” but she outworked almost anyone I knew. Leading, organizing, building community, showing up with relentless consistency. My grandmother was a CEO and chairwoman in the late

1970s. Before it was acceptable. Before it was common. Before there was language for what she was doing.

So I grew up with proof that women could expand.

But culture still whispered: choose.

And I think, for a long time, I believed I would have to.

Here is what I want to say clearly, because not enough people are saying it: motherhood did not dilute my leadership. It sharpened it.

It made me more empathetic. More decisive. A stronger operator. A better delegator. Ruthlessly clear on what actually matters.

There is this assumption that time away from work is a gap. I see it as one of the most intensive leadership training grounds that exists.

At my former company, HeyMama, we built an initiative called Motherhood on the Resume, because we needed to rewire how the world values this experience. Motherhood teaches prioritization under pressure, emotional intelligence at scale, resilience without applause, and execution with zero margin for error.

That is not a break from leadership. That is advanced leadership.

I will say it plainly: mothers are some of the most effective decision-makers in the world. If you want something done, give it to a mother.

But I also want to be honest about the tension. Because pretending it does not exist helps no one.

I remember 2013 so clearly. My son had just been born, and my maternity leave was essentially nonexistent. I was working long days, traveling, pushing forward, while also navigating what it meant to have this entirely new human who needed me in a way nothing else ever had.

I felt the tension. Deeply.

Then I read a piece in The New York Times that reframed everything for me: it is not about quantity of time. It is about quality of presence.

That landed.

Because my son was not tracking hours. He was experiencing moments. The MOMumental Moments®.

So I made a decision that has stayed with me ever since: when I am there, I am fully there. We create moments. Real ones. Conversations. Shared experiences. Intentional connection. And those moments matter more than any perfectly balanced schedule ever could.

Which brings me to the biggest lie about motherhood and ambition that I want to dismantle.

The lie is that you should be striving for balance.

Balance is a beautiful concept and a completely unrealistic standard. It sets women up to feel like they are constantly failing.

Because the truth is: some days, work will demand more of you. Some days, your family will. Some days, you will need to come first. That is not imbalance. That is life.

What actually matters is having non-negotiables. The anchors that keep you grounded inside the chaos. For me, those are movement, presence with my kids before bed, nourishing my body, and moments of reflection or meditation. Some days it is 10 minutes. Some days it is 45. It is not about perfection. It is about consistency of self-connection.

That is what creates stability. Not chasing some imaginary equilibrium.

My mother and my grandmother both modeled this, in completely different ways.

My grandmother broke ceilings before there was language for it. She led, built, and operated at a level that was not designed for women at the time.

My mother built impact through community. She showed me that leadership does not have to be loud to be powerful. It can be consistent, committed, and deeply influential.

What stayed with me from both of them is this: motherhood did not make them smaller. It made their impact more dimensional.

That blueprint changed how I saw what was possible.

If I could write one sentence that every new mother received along with her postpartum care instructions, it would be this:

Embrace the season.

Not because it is easy. Not because it is perfect. But because it is formative. This is not the end of who you were. This is the expansion of who you are becoming.

Motherhood does not close the chapter. It rewrites the scale of the story.

You do not lose yourself. You meet a version of yourself that is more precise, more powerful, and more aware of what actually matters.

And from that place, you do not just build a life. You build it differently.

If this resonated, share it with one woman who needs to read it.

MOMumentally,

Erika

Erika Hanafin Austria · Creator, MOMumental Reinvention / Co-Founder, NeonID · Former CEO, HeyMama · 2x Top 50 Women Leaders, Virginia

This essay was free. Every MOMumental Letter is paid. Paid subscribers get the MOMumental Letters (every other Tuesday), full Community Chat where I respond personally, Behind the Essay exclusives, and early podcast access.

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Blending my family and choosing to have a baby while walking away from a company I had poured myself into were two of the hardest decisions of my life. And they happened in the same season.

What made them hard was not just the stakes. It was the lack of clean answers. There was no spreadsheet that could tell me the right move. No guaranteed outcome. Just competing truths.

On one side, I had built something meaningful. I knew how to win there. I understood the system, the people, the playbook. Walking away meant choosing uncertainty over proven success.

On the other side, I was being called into a more expansive version of my life. One that required me to rebuild identity, family structure, and future vision all at once.

The hardest decisions are never about logic alone. They are about identity expansion. And expansion does not come with instructions. It comes with risk.

I want to share what I have learned about making decisions when everything feels uncertain. Not because I have a formula. But because I have been through enough of these moments to recognize the pattern.

First, I do not rush clarity. I sit in the discomfort longer than most people are willing to. That is where the real signal is.

Then I start observing. Not overthinking, but noticing. What keeps pulling at me? What feels heavy versus expansive? Where am I trying to control the outcome because I am scared?

I let the noise burn off.

At a certain point, something shifts. It is not always loud, but it is unmistakable. My gut gets sharp. Clean. Decisive.

And here is the part most people avoid: once I know, I move. Quickly. I do not crowdsource the decision. I do not wait for consensus. I do not over-validate. Because in my experience, hesitation after clarity is where self-trust starts to erode.

Sometimes you do not get more information. Sometimes you get a moment. And you either leap, or you stay stuck.

I choose the leap.

But here is what I have also learned: there is a critical difference between a decision made from fear and a decision made from clarity. And if you cannot tell which one you are in, you will make choices that protect your current identity instead of building the one you are becoming.

Fear is loud, urgent, and incredibly convincing. It comes with a thousand reasons. What if this fails? What will people think? What if I lose everything I have built? Fear tries to protect your current identity.

Clarity is different. It is quieter, but it is grounded. It does not argue. It does not spiral. It just knows.

The biggest distinction for me is this: fear contracts you. It makes your world smaller, safer, more controlled. Clarity expands you. It might terrify you, but it moves you forward.

Here is the paradox: a clear decision can still feel scary. But it does not feel confusing.

If I feel chaotic, scattered, or desperate for validation, I am in fear. If I feel steady, even if it is bold or risky, I am in clarity.

And my body always knows before my brain catches up.

When something is off, I feel it as tension. Tight chest. Shallow breathing. A kind of internal resistance that does not go away no matter how much I try to logic my way through it.

When something is right, even if it is big or disruptive, there is a sense of expansion. My breathing deepens. My posture changes. There is energy instead of depletion.

I have learned to trust that. Because every time I have ignored my body in favor of a “good on paper” decision, I have paid for it later.

Your body does not care about optics. It cares about truth.

I want to tell you about a decision I made that everyone around me thought was wrong. Walking away from something that looked successful from the outside.

To other people, it did not make sense. Why leave something that is working? Why disrupt stability? Why risk starting over?

But they were evaluating the decision based on visible success. I was evaluating it based on alignment. And those are not the same metric.

It forced me to rebuild. But on my terms. More aligned, more expansive, more honest to where I was going, not where I had been.

From the outside, it looked like a step back. From the inside, it was a strategic repositioning. And that distinction changed everything.

If you are reading this and you are waiting to feel ready before you make a major life change, I want to tell you something I wish someone had told me sooner.

You will never feel ready.

There will always be a reason to wait. More money. More time. More certainty. More validation. But “ready” is a myth we use to delay discomfort.

What you are actually waiting for is the moment where fear disappears. And that moment does not come.

The women who change their lives are not the ones who feel ready. They are the ones who decide anyway.

You do not need more time. You need more trust in yourself. And the only way to build that trust is to act.

The most important decisions of your life will not come with guarantees. They will come with a quiet knowing and an opportunity to become someone new.

The question is not: what is the right choice?

The question is: do I trust myself enough to choose?

MOMumentally,

Erika

Erika Hanafin Austria · Creator, MOMumental Reinvention / Co-Founder, NeonID · Former CEO, HeyMama · 2x Top 50 Women Leaders, Virginia

This essay was free. Every MOMumental Letter is paid. Paid subscribers get the MOMumental Letters (every other Tuesday), full Community Chat where I respond personally, Behind the Essay exclusives, and early podcast access.

If this work matters to you, subscribing is how you fund it. Monthly is $7. Annual is $70. Founding is $150, limited to 100 members.

You are not paying for content. You are funding a body of work for women who are rebuilding.

The day after the decision, a dark cloud lifted.

I know that is not the story people expect. We are supposed to talk about the devastation first. The sleepless night. The mascara on the pillowcase. The dramatic silence. And those moments are real. They exist somewhere in the timeline. But the morning after, the morning when it was actually done, what I felt was not destruction.

It was clarity.

Like the energy shifted and I could see more clearly. It was emotional, deeply emotional, but it was also positive. And that surprised me more than anything. Because when the weight of a decision that big settles and the first thing you feel is relief, that tells you something. That was the sign that my decision was not a bad one.

I want to write about the first 90 days honestly. Not the legal version. Not the therapy version. Not the Instagram version where the woman is journaling in golden hour light with a latte and a fresh start. The actual texture of those days, from someone who lived them while running a company, navigating an acquisition, and raising a son.

Here is what nobody warned me about.

Do not listen to everyone. I learned this faster than I expected. Everyone has an opinion about your divorce. People you barely know will have thoughts about what you should do, how you should feel, whether you tried hard enough, whether you left too soon or stayed too long. And when you are dealing with a narcissistic ex, rumors are going to spread. Things will be said about you that are not true. Stories will circulate that you have no control over.

I learned quickly to keep a very small bubble around me. And when I say small, I mean small. My therapist, my Julie, who became my lifeline. My family. Two close friends. That was it. I did not share publicly what I was going through until six months in.

That privacy was not avoidance. It was survival. When you are in the middle of the hardest chapter of your life, the last thing you need is an audience. You need a circle. A tiny, trusted, ruthlessly loyal circle that holds you without trying to direct you.

And in every decision, every single one, I asked myself: is this what I want, or is this what is best for my son? My son was the priority. Always was. Always has been. Always will be. That question became my filter for everything.

Here is something else nobody prepares you for: functioning professionally while your personal life is in free fall.

To be honest, I do not know how I functioned with work. I was in the middle of an acquisition. The kind of high-stakes, all-consuming process that demands every ounce of your cognitive capacity. I could not stop. There was no pause button. My cortisol was through the roof. My body was in survival mode while my brain was running spreadsheets and strategy decks and leadership meetings.

I relied on my core and stayed focused, knowing what I was going through was a season. A dark season. But one that would change. That belief, that this was temporary, that the darkness had an expiration date even if I could not see it yet, is what got me through the days when I had nothing left but still needed to show up.

What I let people see at work: competence, focus, steadiness. What I protected: everything else. The crying in the car. The panic at 2 AM. The grief that showed up in my body as exhaustion, as tension in my jaw, as a heaviness that no amount of coffee could lift. That stayed private. Not because I was performing strength. Because I was protecting the fragile process of becoming someone new while the old version of my life was still falling apart around me.

My son taught me something about resilience in those first months that I had not expected. He taught me that resilience does not always look like strength. Sometimes it looks like showing up anyway.

There were mornings when I felt like everything familiar had cracked open. But he still needed breakfast. Homework help. Laughter. Normalcy. Watching him adapt, still curious, still hopeful, reminded me that life does not pause just because your heart is hurting.

What I did not expect was that he would become my compass. His ability to keep moving forward, to find joy in small things, the MOMumental moments, showed me that resilience is not about pretending you are fine. It is about continuing to love, parent, and build a life even while you are rebuilding yourself.

If you are about to go through divorce, or if you are in the first weeks of it right now, here is the thing women need to hear that nobody is saying out loud:

Divorce is both a loss and a doorway.

Everyone talks about the grief, and it is real. But not enough people talk about the moment when you realize your life is no longer confined to a version of yourself that was not fully aligned. Divorce forces radical clarity. You see what matters. You see who shows up. And you see what you are actually capable of carrying.

You are not failing. You are recalibrating. And the version of you that emerges on the other side is often more honest, more courageous, and more intentional than the one who walked into the marriage.

The moment I first felt like a new version of myself was surprisingly ordinary.

I was driving home and instead of feeling the heavy knot in my chest that had been there for weeks, I felt space. Not happiness exactly. But possibility. I realized I had made it through the hardest stretch, the legal chaos, the emotional whiplash, the fear of the unknown, and I was still standing.

More than that, I was starting to think about the future again.

That was the moment I knew a new version of me was emerging. Not the woman I had been before. But someone sharper, braver, and more intentional about the life she was building next.

If you are in the first 90 days right now, I want you to know: the dark cloud does lift. Not all at once. Not on a schedule. But it lifts. And when it does, you will realize that you did not lose yourself in the process. You found the version of yourself who was strong enough to walk through it.

Stay in your small circle. Trust your gut. Keep your child at the center. And know that this season, however dark, has an expiration date.

The doorway is right in front of you.

MOMumentally,

Erika

This essay was free. Every MOMumental Letter is paid. Paid subscribers get the MOMumental Letters (every other Tuesday), full Community Chat where I respond personally, Behind the Essay exclusives, and early podcast access.

If this work matters to you, subscribing is how you fund it. Monthly is $7. Annual is $70. Founding is $150, limited to 100 members.

You are not paying for content. You are funding a body of work for women who are rebuilding.