What working moms actually need to hear about postpartum anxiety, personal branding, and surviving early entrepreneurship
There's this thing that happens after you have a baby.
Everyone around you is asking about the baby. Is the baby sleeping, is the baby eating, is the baby hitting the milestones — and somewhere in all of that you're standing there thinking: something is off with me. Not the baby. Me.
And then you Google it. You take one of those quizzes. It tells you you're fine.
So you think, okay. I guess I'm fine. And you carry on.
I've been sitting with how many of us are walking around in the middle of something really hard — and have fully convinced ourselves we don't qualify for support because we passed the quiz.
Postpartum anxiety doesn't look like what the quiz is testing for
It doesn't always show up as crying on the bathroom floor or not being able to get out of bed.
Sometimes it looks like hosting people and feeling totally fine — and then the moment they leave, cold sweats and this gnawing sense that none of it can possibly last.
Sometimes it looks like watching your family walk down a hallway together — this scene you'd been dreaming of — and bursting into tears because you're convinced it's about to be taken from you.
And because that doesn't fit the description online, you assume you don't have it. You assume it's just you.
And that's where it gets really hard — because now you're carrying the thing and quietly shaming yourself for carrying it.
Work, sometimes, it's the thing that holds you together
We've been given a very particular story about what it looks like to cope well with hardship. Rest. Be present. Put the phone away.
And I don't think that's wrong exactly — but it's not the whole picture.
Because sometimes, work is the thing that makes you feel like a person when everything else is completely out of your control. You need to know you're still good at something, when the thing in front of you is so big and so scary that all you can do is wait.
So is it really a failure of coping or is it the thing that is actually getting you through this season of life?
You were probably hiding more than your pregnancy from your clients
A lot of us keep the messy parts of our lives very quietly off to the side.
The pregnancy. The baby. The reason you can't do the 4:30 meeting.
And it feels like protection — and maybe it was, for a while. But I think about how much energy goes into managing what people know.
What would have been different if we'd let people in a little sooner? Not everything. Just enough to be human.
Your personal brand already exists
If you've been filing "personal brand" under things that are for other people — people with big followings, or a lot to say — I want to push back on that.
Even if you've never posted a single thing, your name exists online. And if someone looks you up — a client, a colleague, someone deciding whether to hire you — there's already something there.
Or there isn't. And that's also information.
The first step is just to know. Google yourself. See what comes up. Then decide, with actual information in front of you, what you want to do about it.
Motherhood has a way of changing who you want your work to be for
There's something that shifts when you go through the hard parts of having kids — the early chaos, the things that didn't go the way you planned, the seasons where you weren't sure you were doing any of it right.
You come out the other side and realize you're not exactly the same person who started this.
And sometimes that shows up in the work. You start attracting different clients. You want to tell different stories. What used to feel like the obvious lane suddenly feels a little too small.
And that’s a reflection of you arriving at the next version of yourself.
Want more of this?
This came from a recent episode of All Figured Out with PR strategist Jenn Wint — and we went all over the place together, in the best way.
Her story about working from a hospital recovery room hours after giving birth, about postpartum anxiety she didn't recognize, about building a business for 13 years before she ever had to figure out how to do it alongside kids.
