The Questions I Carried Before Things Began to Shift

There was a time in early motherhood when something in me began to shift.

Not dramatically. Not in a way I could name at the time. But steadily, like something just beneath the surface beginning to move.

Emilia was still small, somewhere around nine months old. I was in that in-between space of learning how to be in a life that felt entirely new, while still trying to recognise myself inside it. The days were full in the way early motherhood often is — structured around naps and feeds and the constant, low-level hum of responsibility — and yet, underneath it, there was this subtle restlessness I couldn’t quite place.

Not dissatisfaction and not unhappiness, just a sense that something in me hadn’t fully arrived.

During that time, I spent a lot of my days at home. We were in the middle of painting and renovating, and I would move slowly through small jobs while Emilia slept, filling the quiet with podcasts. Conversations about creativity, about work, about building something meaningful. I didn’t listen with any real intention. It was just something to soften the silence.

Until one day, something caught: three questions from three different podcasts, completely unrelated and yet they lingered.

I didn’t rush to answer them, instead, I carried them with me. I let them move with me through the ordinary rhythm of my days. They followed me on walks, sat quietly in the background while I cooked dinner, surfaced in small moments of pause. I wrote about them sometimes, without trying to land anywhere.

They were simple, almost easy to overlook. But over time, they began to reveal things I hadn’t fully let myself see.

And then one day, without effort, something shifted. Not a clear answer, not a fully formed idea. Just a sense of something beginning to take shape. Like pieces that had been scattered were starting to recognise each other.

I could feel, quite clearly, the tension I had been carrying around the way women are expected to move through life. The quiet shedding that happens as we transition from one role to another. The subtle pressure to become someone new, rather than remain connected to who we’ve always been. At the time, I didn’t have language for it, I just knew it didn’t feel right.

The second question was harder to recognise, because it asked me to take my own life seriously. To see that what I was already living, already navigating, might be enough. That there was value in the way I was thinking, questioning, moving through motherhood — even if it didn’t look like anything defined yet.

And then there was the third. When I asked my mum what I had been like as a child, she didn’t hesitate. She told me about how I used to line up my teddies and dolls, creating a classroom, speaking to them for hours as if it mattered. As if what I had to say was worth listening to. I hadn’t thought about that version of myself in years but something in me recognised her immediately.

And it wasn’t that these answers gave me direction, at least not in a clear or structured way. It was that they began to soften something. They shifted the way I was relating to myself. They made it harder to dismiss what I was feeling as insignificant or indulgent. Harder to ignore the sense that something in me was asking to be taken seriously, even if I didn’t yet know what that meant in practice.

Looking back, I can see that this was the point where things began to change. Not outwardly, nor all at once. But internally, in the way I started to listen.

Because what unfolded in the months that followed wasn’t a sudden discovery of purpose, but a slow unravelling of everything that had been sitting on top of it. The beliefs I had absorbed without question. The ways I had learned to shrink, to fit, to follow paths that didn’t quite feel like mine but made sense on paper.

Motherhood didn’t create that tension, but it made it impossible to ignore.

There’s something about that season of life that strips things back. It removes the distractions, the external markers, the ways we’ve learned to define ourselves. And in that space, what’s left becomes much harder to avoid.

For me, that looked like questioning things I had never thought to question before, and slowly, almost without noticing, I began to respond to that feeling. Not in big, decisive ways, but in small ones. I started paying attention to what felt true. I followed threads of curiosity. I invested time and energy into understanding myself in a way I hadn’t before. It wasn’t linear. It wasn’t clear. But it was honest.

There were moments of doubt, of resistance, of questioning whether any of it was leading anywhere at all. And yet, something in me kept going. Not because I had a vision of where I was heading, but because I could feel that staying where I was — internally — wasn’t an option anymore.

Over time, things began to take shape. Not as a single idea or direction, but as a way of seeing. A way of understanding myself, my life and the women around me. A recognition of patterns, of shared experiences, of quiet tensions that weren’t often spoken about but deeply felt. And woven through all of it was something surprisingly simple: a return to myself.

Not the version shaped by expectation or performance, but something quieter. More familiar. Something that had always been there, just waiting underneath everything I had learned to carry.

Those questions are still with me. Not as something to answer once and move on from, but as something to return to. To sit with. To let evolve as I do. Because the value was never in the answers. It was in the way they invited me to listen. And maybe nothing new is being asked of us.

Maybe it’s simply a matter of noticing what has been there all along, waiting to be acknowledged.

Rhi xx