Welcome to Her Daily Reverie

Missing you old life after having a baby

There was once a version of me that feels very different to who I am now… and sometimes I miss her. Don’t get me wrong, I would never trade my family for anything. I love the life my partner and I have created. It’s messy, loud, beautiful and exhausting — sometimes all within the same hour.

Before meeting my partner I lived life fully. I lived in different cities. I travelled. I had slow mornings, long showers, gym sessions, beach days and couch days. I did what I wanted for a lot of my adult life.
No one tells you before you have a child that you might feel a sense of grief for your former life after becoming a mother. Or maybe my friends didn’t get those feelings.

Is it something that goes unspoken because no mother wants to be seen as ungrateful for the beautiful family she has? I am very grateful for everything I have, but it’s only now that I realise the small things I used to do for myself were actually protecting my peace. They anchored me and now without them my brain feels louder and more chaotic. My patience shorter. My temper closer to the surface than I’d like to admit.

I walk around the house getting things done, ticking off invisible lists, pouring love into my kids — but my mind is constantly in “what needs to happen next?” mode, working part-time. One child in school. One in daycare three days a week. Some weeks we feel fine financially. Other weeks it feels like we’re just keeping our heads above water and in the background of it all, my mind hums with the same question:
How can I bring in extra money, how can I give us just a little more breathing room?
I hate admitting that sometimes I measure my worth in those three days of work. Like that’s all I contribute.

Logically, I know that’s not true, I know what I do in this house matters. Raising children is work, emotional labour is work, carrying the mental load of motherhood is work, but the pressure still sits there.

For a while that pressure turned into this constant search for “the thing", the side hustle, the idea. the breakthrough, something that would make me feel like I was adding more, doing more, being more.
I still don’t have the answer to that and honestly, that used to make me feel like I was behind.
Like everyone else had figured something out that I hadn’t, but in that search for extra income… something unexpected happened, I started drawing every night on my iPad instead of scrolling my phone and I noticed something... my brain got quieter. The constant “what’s next?” softened, the mental to-do list paused and I was just creating.

It calms something in me.

That’s when I realised something important: even on the most overwhelming days, there are still small moments I can reclaim.
Tiny ones, it just takes intentionally slowing my mind down, breathing and choosing to be present in them.

Waiting for the coffee machine in the morning, staring out the window while the sun comes up, it might only be two or three minutes but in those moments I force my brain to slow down.

I breathe.
I don’t plan the day.
I don’t mentally organise dinner.
I don’t calculate expenses.
I just stand there.

They’re not big moments and they definitely don’t fix everything. But they’re mine, my peace in Motherhood.

It has made I’ve realised something I wish someone had told me earlier. Peace in motherhood doesn’t come from having less to do, it comes from learning how to exist inside the chaos without losing yourself completely.
I think a lot of us are quietly rebuilding, we love our children deeply and we would choose them again and again, but we are also adjusting to a version of ourselves that looks different than it used to, and that adjustment can feel like grief.
Grief for spontaneity.
Grief for silence.
Grief for the version of you who didn’t feel pulled in twelve directions at once.
That doesn’t make you ungrateful. It makes you human.

Romanticising the ordinary

My goal is to romanticise the ordinary, not because everything is magical.

But because sometimes choosing to see it differently is the only thing that keeps us steady. These moments are happening whether we notice them or not and I don’t want to rush through them anymore. I don’t want to live in constant “what’s next?” mode, I don’t need a different life to feel peaceful, I need small pockets of myself within the life I already have.

If you’re in this season too — feeling stretched, rebuilding, loving your kids fiercely but also missing pieces of who you used to be — you are not failing.

You are adjusting.
You are growing.
You are carrying more than most people see.

and you deserve moments that belong only to you.

This is just the beginning of that space.
Welcome 🤍

Her Daily Reverie is a motherhood blog sharing real mum stories and reflections on identity, mental load, and finding peace in everyday motherhood.