What Mother's Day Means When You've Rebuilt Everything
FREE for every mother who is still in it. HERE FOR IT.
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.
The protocol I built when nobody handed me a playbook is now public. The PHASE™ at thisisphase.co. Five volumes for the body. The Power Method® for the architecture. Two companion tools. One free starter kit for anyone who just needs 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.
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
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