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.

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.

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.

An acquisition, from the inside, is not what the press release makes it sound like.

It is exhausting, exhilarating, and emotional. Everything feels personal. You have dedicated months, sometimes years, to getting to this moment, and when it is done, when the papers are signed and the congratulations roll in, there is this strange silence. You stand in the aftermath and think: what do I do next?

In some acquisitions, you keep going because of earn-out terms or transition obligations. In others, you are simply done. And in that emptiness, you feel like you have lost a version of yourself.

I have been through five acquisitions. Four I led directly. And the most important thing I took from all of them was not a playbook for business. It was a framework for navigating every major life transition I have faced since.

The skill I developed through those five acquisitions is learning how to separate what is emotional from what is essential.

When you are in the middle of an acquisition, everything feels personal. People built the company. Teams poured years into it. Identities are wrapped up in it. But if you cannot step back and clearly see what the core value actually is, you cannot make the right decisions.

The same is true when your life is in transition. When a marriage is ending. When your career is shifting. When your identity is being restructured by circumstances you did not choose. The emotions are real and they deserve space. But if you let them drive every decision, you will optimize for comfort instead of clarity.

Separating what is emotional from what is essential does not mean ignoring your feelings. It means refusing to let them make your strategic decisions. It means sitting with the grief and still asking: what is the real asset here? What is worth protecting? What needs to be released so something better can be built?

One of the most profound things the acquisition experience taught me is about identity. If your identity is tied to the org chart, every transition will feel like a loss.

In acquisitions, org charts change overnight. Titles shift. Reporting lines move. Sometimes the role you built disappears entirely. If your sense of who you are is anchored to that structure, it can feel like the ground just dropped out from under you.

But going through five of them taught me to see something different. The org chart is a map of responsibilities, not a map of identity. Identity lives deeper than that.

Through those transitions, I realized my identity was not “the title” or even the company itself. My identity was the capability I brought into every room: the ability to build, to stabilize something under pressure, to connect people, to see opportunity where others saw chaos. That capability did not disappear when the org chart changed. It just needed a new place to operate.

The same is true for women in personal transition. Your identity is not your marriage. It is not your job title. It is not the structure of your daily life. Your identity is what you bring to every room you walk into, and that transfers.

There is a piece of conventional leadership advice I followed early on that turned out to be wrong: “Do not trust your gut. Wait for all the data.”

In theory, it sounds responsible. Analytical. Disciplined. And as someone who naturally values being organized and thorough, I believed the right answer had to come from the spreadsheet, the diligence report, or the outside advisors.

But acquisitions move faster than perfect information.

What I learned, sometimes the hard way, is that data tells you what has happened. Your gut often sees what is about to happen. Your instincts pick up things the models cannot measure: the subtle tension in a leadership team, whether a culture will actually integrate, whether someone is telling you the whole story, whether the opportunity is real or just well packaged.

There were moments where all the numbers looked right, but something in me hesitated. And when I ignored that signal because the “responsible” leadership playbook said to defer to the data, those were usually the moments I wished I had listened more closely.

The lesson I carry now: do the diligence. Study the data. But never outsource your judgment. Your gut is not irrational. It is pattern recognition built from experience. And after leading through multiple acquisitions, you start to realize that instinct is often the most sophisticated form of intelligence you have.

Trust the data to inform you. Trust your team to challenge you. But trust your gut to decide. And do what is best for you. Negotiate for yourself.

That advice applies to every woman navigating a life transition. You can gather all the information, consult all the people, weigh all the options. But at some point, the spreadsheets end and leadership begins. You make a decision with incomplete information and then you build the clarity forward.

Early in my career, I believed the goal was to reduce uncertainty to zero before acting. But acquisitions do not work like that. And neither does life. The leaders who navigate acquisitions well are not the ones who eliminate uncertainty. They are the ones who create structure inside it.

When a woman is in transition, after a career shift, a divorce, a major life change, the instinct is to wait until everything feels clear before she moves. She wants certainty about who she will be, what the next chapter looks like, whether the risk will pay off. But certainty is not the prerequisite for action. Action is how you find certainty.

There is one more parallel I think about constantly: the connection between organizational due diligence and the kind of life audit women need to do before they can truly reinvent.

When you acquire a company, you do not just look at the headline numbers. You conduct deep diligence. You examine the real assets underneath the surface: the culture, the leadership capability, the operational systems, the financial health, the risks.

You ask: What is solid here? What is fragile? What is valuable enough to build around?

Women need to do the same kind of life audit.

Look at your life the same way you would examine a company you are acquiring. What are the core assets you are bringing forward? Your skills. Your resilience. Your relationships. Your values. What systems are actually working? Your routines, your support network, your decision-making habits. What liabilities need to be acknowledged? Burnout. Misaligned environments. Old identities you have outgrown.

And then the most powerful diligence question of all: What is worth building the next chapter around?

In acquisitions, once you identify the real asset, everything else becomes clearer. You protect that asset and redesign the structure around it. Life reinvention works the same way. You are not starting from scratch. You are identifying the most valuable parts of who you have become and building the next chapter intentionally around them.

The most transformative opportunities, in business and in life, often look messy at the beginning. But with the right diligence, courage, and vision, those messy transitions become the moments where the real value is unlocked.

Five acquisitions taught me that. Rebuilding my own life confirmed it.

MOMumentally,

Erika

I was walking to work in San Francisco.

It was a few months after I had relocated my entire family from New York, and I should have felt like I was starting something. New city. New chapter. New energy. That is what it was supposed to be.

Instead, I felt stuck. Claustrophobic, actually, in the middle of the street. Not from the buildings or the fog or the crowds. From the inside. From the slow, suffocating realization that the life I was living, the version of me who was living it, no longer fit. Something has to change, I thought. I need to do something better.

That was the beginning. Not a dramatic exit. Not a public pivot. Just a woman walking to work who could no longer ignore the distance between who she was performing as and who she was actually becoming.

I think most women know this feeling. You have built something real. A career. A family. A reputation. An identity that works. And then one day, without warning or permission, you notice the edges of that identity getting tight. Not because anything went wrong. Because you outgrew it.

The version of me that needed to change was the leader. The one who carried everything and everyone without complaint. There was nothing I could not do or handle. I was the person who absorbed every crisis, managed every detail, showed up for every obligation, and made it all look seamless. That woman was brilliant in many ways. She built real things. She earned real trust. She held real responsibility.

But she was also running on a model that required her to disappear inside the role. She could lead, but not without compromising herself. And that compromise, the one I had been making for years without naming it, was the thing that finally became impossible to sustain.

Here is what I want you to understand about that moment: it was not failure. It was evolution.

We treat reinvention like it is something that happens when things fall apart. Like you only rebuild when the building burns down. But the truth is, the most important reinventions happen when the building is still standing. When everything looks fine from the outside. When people are telling you how impressive your life is, and you are standing in the middle of it thinking, this is not it anymore.

That is not ingratitude. That is growth pressing against the walls of a container you built for a different version of yourself.

I have been through this more than once. As the former CEO of HeyMama, leading a community of over 75,000 women through a turnaround and acquisition. As the co-founder of NeonID, building something entirely new in personality science and AI. As a woman navigating pregnancy at 40, miscarriage, divorce, co-parenting, blending a family of four boys, and early perimenopause. Every single one of those chapters required a version of me that the previous version could not have been.

And every time, I had to face the same question: What do I actually keep?

Here is what I have learned. Reinvention does not erase what you built. It reveals what was actually yours all along.

When something changes, a company, a title, a marriage, a chapter of life, it can feel like the ground disappears. Especially for women who have poured years into building something meaningful. The fear is real: if I step into something new, do I lose the proof of everything I did?

But the things that mattered most were never the title or the container.

You keep the architecture of who you became while building it. You keep the instincts you sharpened making hard calls. You keep the relationships you built through trust. You keep the resilience you earned when things got messy. You keep the pattern recognition that only comes from being in the arena.

No one can take those.

What actually falls away are the labels, structures, and roles that once held your work. And sometimes that is uncomfortable, because we confuse the container with the impact.

But reinvention is not demolition. It is repurposing the foundation.

I think there is a difference between reinventing out of necessity and reinventing on purpose, but in my experience, most meaningful reinventions are a blend of both. Necessity strips away illusion. It forces clarity. You see what still matters, what you are capable of, and what you are no longer willing to tolerate. And then purpose takes over. You look at your life, your impact, your values, and decide that the next chapter should be bigger, braver, or more aligned.

The version of me that walked down that San Francisco street was being pushed by necessity. The version of me writing this today is building on purpose.

And the new version of me understands something the old one could not yet see: you are not the role you are playing. You are the force that makes the role matter.

Earlier in my career, I believed the impact lived inside the structure. The company. The title. The position at the table. I thought if you wanted to create change, you had to hold onto the platform that allowed it. The new version knows the opposite is true. The platform is temporary. The capability is permanent.

Everything you build, every company you grow, every community you nurture, every hard decision you navigate, is actually building you. Your judgment. Your instincts. Your leadership pattern. And those compound.

The old version thought success meant holding the structure together. The new version understands that real leadership is knowing when to evolve beyond it. Not because what you built failed. But because you have grown into someone capable of building something even more aligned with who you are now.

So if you are standing in a life that looks right but feels wrong, if you are the woman who built something impressive and is quietly wondering what comes next, if you are terrified that reinventing means erasing everything you worked for, I want you to hear this:

The question is not “What am I losing?”

The real question is: “Now that I know what I am capable of, what do I want to build next?”

And the beautiful, terrifying freedom of reinvention is this: you get to bring all the wisdom without being limited by the old shape of the story.

That is the MOMumental Becoming. Not a breakdown. Not a do-over. An evolution. And you are already in it.

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.

Everyone talks about starting over like it is something you do from nothing.

Like reinvention is for the woman who lost everything and is building from the ground up, brick by brick, with nothing but grit and a story that will eventually be inspiring. We celebrate that narrative. It is clean, it is cinematic, and it makes for an excellent keynote.

But here is the version nobody talks about: starting over when you are already successful. When you already have the career, the reputation, the network, the track record. When people look at your life and see someone who has no reason to change. When the thing you are walking away from, or the thing that is falling apart beneath you, is something most people would kill for.

That kind of starting over does not get the same sympathy. Because from the outside it looks like you are being reckless. Or ungrateful. Or dramatic. How could you leave when things were going so well? How could you be struggling when you have so much? What could possibly be missing?

I will tell you what is missing, because I have lived it.

Read more

There was a time when I shared everything.

Not in the oversharing-on-social-media sense, though I did that too. In the deeper sense. The sense where I believed that connection required full transparency. That if someone asked how I was doing, they deserved the real answer. That holding anything back was a form of dishonesty. That being open was the same as being strong.

I carried this belief through friendships, through my marriage, through my career. I told people what I was going through because I thought that is what brave women did. I let people into my process while it was still happening, raw, unresolved, half-formed. I treated my own evolution like a communal experience, something that belonged to everyone who cared about me.

And for a long time, this felt virtuous.

Until it did not.

The shift happened during my divorce. Not because anyone did anything wrong (although some people did) but because for the first time I was going through something so seismic and so personal that sharing it in real time felt like giving away pieces of myself I could not afford to lose.

I was co-parenting. I was processing grief. I was physically changing in ways I could not control. I was trying to figure out who I was outside of the identity I had built inside a marriage, a company, a life that no longer existed. And every time someone asked me how I was doing (with genuine care, with good intentions) I felt the pull to perform my healing for them. To package my process into something digestible. To make my mess make sense to someone else before it made sense to me.

Read more

There is a version of me that people still ask about.

She is the one who ran at a certain speed. Who said yes to everything. Who could manage a board meeting, a toddler’s meltdown, and a funding pitch in the same twelve-hour window and make all three look effortless. She was the version of me that people praised most, because she was productive, accommodating, and never, ever difficult.

She was also exhausted. And lonely in ways she could not admit to anyone, least of all herself.

Read more

There is a moment I do not think women talk about enough.

It is the moment when you are standing in the middle of a life you worked incredibly hard to build (the career, the family, the home, the stability) and you feel something you were not expecting.

You feel restless.

Not unhappy, exactly. Not ungrateful. Just aware that something inside you is asking for more. More depth. More alignment. More room to grow in a direction that does not have a name yet. And the immediate response, the one that rises before you can even finish the thought, is guilt.

Because how dare you want more when so many people would love what you have? How dare you feel restless when you have children who are healthy, a career that pays the bills, a roof over your head? Who are you to want something different when you chose this?

I know this feeling intimately. I have lived inside it for years at different points in my life. And what I want to tell you, what I wish someone had told me sooner, is that wanting more does not mean you are ungrateful for what you have. Those two things can exist at the same time. They almost always do.

Gratitude and desire are not opposites. They are companions. You can love your children fiercely and still miss the version of yourself that existed before them. You can appreciate your career and still feel the pull toward something that uses a different part of your brain and your heart. You can honor the life you have built and still recognize that you have outgrown parts of it.

This does not make you selfish. It makes you alive.

I spent years in leadership roles where I watched women shrink themselves out of this exact fear. Brilliant, capable women who had built real things (companies, communities, families) and who quietly began to feel the edges of their own expansion pressing against the walls of what they had already created. And instead of honoring that expansion, they shamed themselves for it. They called it selfishness. They called it a midlife crisis. They called it being too much.

I did it too. After my divorce, after the identity overhaul that came with co-parenting and blending a family and navigating my body through perimenopause, I found myself wanting things I could not easily justify. I wanted to build something new. I wanted creative space. I wanted time alone with my own thoughts that was not stolen in five-minute increments between drop-offs. I wanted to matter to myself in a way that had nothing to do with being useful to everyone else.

And the guilt was suffocating.

Here is what moved me through it: I started thinking about desire the same way I think about business growth. In startups, there is a phase where the company has achieved product-market fit. It is working, it is stable, customers are happy. And then someone on the team says, “I think we can do more.” That is not ingratitude. That is vision. That is the instinct that separates companies that plateau from companies that scale.

The same instinct exists inside you. When you feel that pull toward more, it is not a rejection of what you have built. It is evidence that you have the capacity to build further. It is your ambition telling you that you have not reached your ceiling yet. Not even close.

But we live in a culture that tells women to be grateful and stop there. To count their blessings and quiet down. To appreciate what they have and stop making everyone uncomfortable by wanting something more. And so we learn to treat our own desire as a character flaw instead of what it actually is: a signal.

A signal that you are evolving. That the life you built was perfect for the woman you were, and now you are becoming someone who needs something different. Not more in the material sense, though sometimes it is that too, and that is fine. More in the sense of alignment. More meaning. More truth. More of a life that reflects who you are actually becoming, not just who you were when you designed it.

I am not suggesting you blow everything up. I am suggesting you stop apologizing for wanting what you want.

You can hold gratitude in one hand and desire in the other. You can say thank you and also say what is next. You can love your life and still be honest that parts of it need to change.

That honesty is not betrayal. It is the beginning of the MOMumental Becoming. And every woman I admire, every woman who has built something real, who has led through complexity, who has remade her life on her own terms, started with this exact feeling.

The restlessness is not the problem. The guilt is. Let the guilt go. Keep the wanting.

It is trying to tell you something.

MOMumentally,

Erika

Reinvention is usually described as a moment.

A decision. A pivot. A line in the sand. The day you walked out, walked away, or finally said enough. We love that version of the story because it is clean. There is a before and an after. There is a woman who was stuck and then she was not.

But that is not how it actually works. Not for most of us.

For most of us, becoming someone new does not begin with a dramatic exit. It begins with something much smaller and much harder to explain. A feeling of distance between the life you are living and the woman you are turning into. A slow, persistent sense that the things you used to reach for (the goals, the routines, the relationships, the version of success you spent years chasing) do not quite land the way they used to.

You might not even be able to name it at first. You just know something has shifted. And the discomfort is not because something is wrong. It is because something in you is outgrowing the container you built for it.

I have felt this more than once.

The first time was during my years inside startups. I had spent over a decade growing small businesses, leading teams, navigating acquisitions, advising founders. I was good at it. The work lit me up. And then at some point, not suddenly but gradually, I started feeling the edges of that identity getting tight. The version of me that thrived on the chaos of early-stage companies was starting to want something different. Not less ambitious. Just differently ambitious.

The second time was more personal and more painful. It came during the unraveling of my marriage, the early days of co-parenting, the physical upheaval of perimenopause, and the grief of miscarriage, all happening roughly in the same window of time. I remember looking at my own life and thinking: I do not recognize any of this. And I do not recognize the woman who is supposed to be navigating it.

That is the part no one prepares you for. Not the events themselves. You can Google divorce timelines and perimenopause symptoms and co-parenting schedules. What no one tells you is that you will lose yourself in the transition. Not permanently. But thoroughly enough that you will question everything you thought you knew about who you are.

And here is what I want you to hear if you are in that place right now: that questioning is not a breakdown. It is the beginning of something MOMumental.

I think about it like the space between companies. In startup culture, there is a concept called the “messy middle,” the phase between the initial burst of building and the eventual clarity of what the company will become. It is the least glamorous phase. There are no launch parties. There is no viral moment. There is just the daily, unglamorous work of figuring out what this thing actually is now that the early version has run its course.

That is what becoming feels like. It is not a glow-up. It is not an Instagram-worthy before-and-after. It is waking up every day and making one small choice that aligns with who you are turning into instead of who you used to be. It is saying no to something that the old version of you would have said yes to. It is sitting with the discomfort of not having all the answers and choosing to stay in motion anyway.

I used to think reinvention required clarity. That I needed to know where I was going before I could leave where I was. But what I have learned, from building companies and from rebuilding my own life, is that clarity is something you earn through action. You do not wait for it. You move toward it.

When I co-founded NeonID, a company built on personality science and AI, I was doing this exact work in real time. We were building a tool that helps brands and individuals understand who they really are at their core. And I remember thinking how much I needed that same tool for myself. Underneath the roles, the titles, the responsibilities, the expectations: who was I, actually? Not who did people need me to be. Not who had I been trained to perform as. Who was the woman underneath all of that?

That question does not get answered in a weekend retreat. It gets answered in the daily, ongoing, sometimes tedious work of paying attention. Noticing what lights you up and what drains you. Noticing which relationships make you feel seen and which ones require you to shrink. Noticing where you are performing out of habit and where you are living from truth.

That is the work. It is not loud. But it is deeply, fiercely intentional. And there is nothing passive about it.

I write about this because I think women, especially women who are high-functioning, accomplished, used to holding it all together, need a space where the in-between is honored. Where you do not have to have the answer yet. Where the process itself is respected as something worth witnessing.

That is what MOMumental Reinvention is. And that is what the MOMumental Becoming looks like from the inside. Not a single courageous moment, but a thousand small ones strung together by a woman who decided she was worth the effort of becoming again.

If you are in the middle of it right now, you are not behind. You are not lost. You are becoming.

Stay with it.

MOMumentally,

Erika

MOMumental Reinvention is a weekly publication by Erika Hanafin Austria on identity, reinvention, and what comes next.

For women who are in the middle of becoming someone new. Not because they chose a dramatic reinvention, but because life changed and they are figuring out who they are on the other side of it.

I write from inside the chapters most women navigate privately: divorce, co-parenting, blended families, motherhood at 40, miscarriage, perimenopause, career pivots, and the slow, fierce work of rebuilding an identity that actually fits.

I also write from nearly two decades of building. Former CEO of HeyMama (75,000+ members, acquired by Luminary). Co-founder of NeonID. Five acquisitions. Millions raised for women founders. 2x Top 50 Women Leaders of Virginia. The modern voice for reinvention.

This is not a self-help newsletter. It is not coaching. And it is not a performance of healing.

It is a body of work for women navigating reinvention with clarity, self-trust, and the kind of honesty that only comes from having lived it.

What I Write About

Identity shifts that do not come with instructions. Motherhood and ambition coexisting without apology. Divorce, rebuilding, and emotional recalibration. Blended families and co-parenting in real life. Leadership through personal transition. The MOMumental Becoming, a framework for women entering their next era.

About Subscribing

Every Tuesday, a new essay lands in your inbox. Free subscribers receive selected long-form essays. Paid subscribers receive the full body of work, including weekly MOMumental Letters, community features, early podcast access, and the writing I hold closest.

No noise. No urgency. Just honest work from a woman who has built, broken, rebuilt, and emerged.

MOMumentally,

Erika Hanafin Austria

Founder, MOMumentalMoments™ | Co-Founder, NeonID | erikahanafin.com