The version of you that worked before was built for a life you no longer live. You don't need to go back. You need to build forward.

I'm Erika. I'm really glad you're here.

I'm a former CEO who led five startup acquisitions, co-founded a personality science company (NEON ID), and built movements for women in business. I've also navigated pregnancy at 40, divorce, co-parenting, and blending a family of four boys.

MOMumental Reinvention is where I write about all of it. The identity shifts. The ambition that doesn't die. The transitions that reshape who women become. Every Tuesday.

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

Rebuild Everything That Matters.

— Erika Hanafin Austria, Founder of MOMumental Moments®

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

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

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

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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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