Hello, I’m Tania
Before I became a mother, I thought I had prepared carefully.
I was running a fine jewellery business I had spent half a decade building. We had just moved to a new city in the middle of COVID. I was pregnant, overwhelmed, scaling my team quickly, trying to make sure everything would keep moving while I stepped away. In my head, I genuinely thought I would be back to normal capacity within a couple of months…I was so wrong.
I had prepared for the baby.
I hadn't prepared for what would happen to me.
After my daughter Noa arrived, it felt like the version of me I knew had been placed somewhere slightly out of reach. I was holding this entirely new life while trying to find myself at the same time. There was so much love and awe, but also grief, disorientation. A quiet unravelling I didn't have language for yet.
I found the word matrescence later, and I remember thinking ‘why haven’t I heard of this before? Why is no one talking about this?’. There was a word for what I was feeling and navigating, I wasn't failing or falling apart. I was in a transformation.
Around that time, I started having deeper conversations with other women. Honest ones. And what I realised was that so many of us were moving through these enormous internal shifts quietly, privately, believing we were alone in them.
But we aren't.
I started searching for spaces that allowed me to slow down and actually hear myself again. Motherhood had changed the way I saw everything. Success, ambition, time, presence. The life I had built no longer fit in the same way, even though I had worked so hard for it. I still wanted to work. I still wanted to create things that mattered. But what that looked like, and how it needed to fit into my life, had changed entirely.
I asked myself what I would do if I wasn't afraid. And the answer that kept coming was to let go.
Eventually, I made one of the hardest and most necessary decisions of my life. I decided to sell the business I had spent almost a decade building. Despite the success, despite my love for it, because whilst it had continued to grow on the path I had laid out for it, I had changed.
And now, pregnant with my second daughter, I find myself meeting this season differently. More softly. Without the same panic to return to who I was before.
Matrescence Diaries is the space I wish had existed when I first became a mother.
A place for honest conversations about identity, ambition, creativity, relationships, loss, growth, and the quiet, profound reshaping that so often happens when we become a mother.
Most of all, I hope it reminds women that they are not alone in what they're feeling.
I am so glad you found it.
x Tania
