Don't lose yourself in the life you built

There is a particular kind of disappearing that can happen when you become a mother.

It doesn't happen dramatically.

Nobody announces that from this point onwards, your needs, ambitions, earning potential and professional identity will gradually move further down the list.

It happens in tiny increments.

You take the longer maternity leave because it makes sense.

You turn down the promotion because the travelling would be difficult with two children.

You stop going to industry events because they clash with bedtime.

You don't renew the qualification because you're exhausted.

You lose touch with former colleagues.

You stop following what's happening in your industry quite so closely.

Perhaps another baby comes along.

And somewhere between school runs, packed lunches, doctors' appointments, birthday parties, homework, laundry and keeping an entire household functioning, five years have passed.

Then ten.

This isn't necessarily a story about an unhappy woman.

You might be enormously happy.

You might have consciously chosen to stay at home. Your partner might be wonderful. Your marriage might be strong. You might genuinely prefer being with your children to being in an office, and you might consider the years you spent raising them some of the most valuable years of your life.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But there is a difference between choosing to devote yourself to your family and allowing yourself to become economically and professionally invisible.

And I think we need to talk about that difference.

Self-care isn't only bubble baths and pilates

We talk endlessly about mothers needing to practise self-care.

Exercise.

Sleep.

Eat properly.

See your friends.

Take some time for yourself.

All important.

But there is another form of self-care that gets considerably less attention.

Protecting your future self.

Financial self-care.

Professional self-care.

Intellectual self-care.

Maintaining the knowledge, skills, relationships and confidence that would allow you to support yourself if you ever needed to.

Not because you are secretly preparing to leave your husband.

Not because you don't trust your marriage.

Not because you should spend your life anticipating catastrophe.

Simply because life is unpredictable.

A marriage can end.

But a partner can also become ill.

Someone can become disabled.

A business can collapse.

An industry can change.

A family can experience a financial crisis.

Someone can die unexpectedly.

The point isn't to live frightened of these possibilities.

The point is to make sure that one unexpected event doesn't remove every option you have.

There is nothing wrong with being a stay-at-home mother

I think this distinction matters particularly now because we've seen a renewed romanticisation of traditional domestic roles.

There are women who genuinely thrive as stay-at-home mothers.

There are families for whom one parent staying home makes financial and practical sense.

There are marriages in which that arrangement works beautifully for decades.

And there are women who have absolutely no desire to climb a corporate ladder, build a business or maintain a conventional career while raising children.

They don't need correcting.

The problem isn't choosing domestic life.

The problem is allowing that choice to require the complete dismantling of the person you were outside it.

Because parenting can consume whatever space you give it.

There will almost always be something your child needs more urgently than you need to read an industry report.

There will always be something happening at school.

Something to wash.

Something to organise.

Something to book.

Someone who needs collecting.

Something that feels more immediately important than keeping your CV updated.

And that's how perfectly capable women can eventually look up and realise they wouldn't know where to begin if they suddenly had to earn money.

Your family's division of labour has an economic value

There is another uncomfortable reality here.

When one partner steps away from work to facilitate the other partner's career, the financial sacrifice doesn't only exist today.

It compounds.

You don't simply lose this year's salary.

You potentially lose promotions.

Pension contributions.

Professional relationships.

Experience.

Raises.

Employer benefits.

Confidence.

Knowledge of new technology.

Familiarity with your industry.

Years of evidence demonstrating what you can do.

Meanwhile, the working partner's career may be able to accelerate partly because somebody else is absorbing the domestic load.

That doesn't make the arrangement unfair.

It can be an entirely sensible division of labour.

But both people should understand what is being exchanged.

Unpaid work is still work.

And if one person's unpaid work makes the other person's paid work possible, financial security should reflect that.

Know where the money is

There is also a difference between not earning the family income and not understanding the family income.

You should know what your household costs.

You should know what comes in.

You should know what goes out.

You should know what you own.

You should know what you owe.

You should understand your savings, investments, pensions, insurance and debts.

You should know where important documents are.

You should understand roughly what would happen financially if either adult couldn't work tomorrow.

And ideally, your family shouldn't build a lifestyle that requires absolutely everything to continue going right indefinitely.

That isn't pessimism.

That's adulthood.

Because experiencing a major family crisis is difficult enough without simultaneously discovering that you don't understand your own financial life.

Keep something that belongs to you

This doesn't necessarily mean going back to work full-time.

In fact, I think that's where some conversations about women's financial independence become unrealistic.

If you're raising three children, telling you to casually maintain a demanding 50-hour-a-week career on the side isn't particularly useful.

The answer can be much smaller.

Take the course.

Keep the qualification current.

Read what's happening in your industry.

Have coffee with an old colleague.

Learn the technology everyone in your profession is suddenly using.

Do occasional freelance work.

Keep your LinkedIn profile alive.

Attend the conference once a year.

Maintain the business you only have five hours a week for right now.

Learn something completely new.

Keep a small income stream if that's feasible.

Invest.

Understand your household finances.

Maintain relationships with people who know you as something other than somebody's wife or somebody's mum.

You don't necessarily need to be maximising your earning potential during every season of your life.

You are simply trying not to allow your earning potential to disappear completely.

Keep your mind in the world

And this isn't purely about money.

There's something important about remaining curious.

About having things you're learning that have nothing to do with your children.

About knowing what's happening in business, technology, politics, science, culture or whatever world interests you.

About occasionally being a beginner again.

About maintaining opinions that weren't formed around what's best for the family.

About having conversations in which nobody asks you about school admissions, swimming lessons or whether somebody has eaten their vegetables.

Motherhood can become an enormous part of your identity without becoming the entirety of it.

You were a person before your children arrived.

You're still that person while you're raising them.

And eventually, those children will build lives that don't revolve around you.

Keeping part of yourself alive isn't selfish.

It's preparation for the many versions of yourself you're still going to become.

Independence doesn't have to mean separation

Perhaps we've framed this conversation incorrectly.

Marriage doesn't require two people to behave as though they're single.

Families depend on one another.

There will be periods when one person earns more.

Periods when one person does more childcare.

Periods when somebody's career takes priority.

Periods when illness, babies, relocations or other circumstances completely distort whatever equal division you imagined when you first got together.

That's life.

The objective isn't perfect independence.

It's resilience within interdependence.

I can rely on you without becoming incapable without you.

You can support me without becoming responsible for my entire ability to survive.

We can build a life together without either of us surrendering every individual resource we brought into it.

There's something profoundly loving about that.

Think about the woman you might need to be

I have been thinking about this in my own life.

Not because I'm planning for disaster.

Because I realised that looking after my future means asking myself an uncomfortable question:

If circumstances changed tomorrow, what could I actually do?

What skills do I have?

Which ones have become rusty?

What could I earn?

What would I need to learn?

Who is still in my professional network?

Which industries have moved on without me?

What knowledge should I be keeping current?

Could I support myself if I needed to?

And if the answer to some of those questions makes me uncomfortable, that's useful information.

I can do something about it now.

That's the point.

You don't need to become obsessed with preparing for the end of your marriage.

You don't need to reject staying at home.

You don't need to monetise every hobby, turn motherhood into a side hustle or spend your children's childhood worrying about your CV.

But every now and then, look up.

Look outside the family you've built.

Check that you still recognise the woman standing inside it.

Keep learning.

Keep understanding your money.

Keep some professional relationships.

Keep your skills alive.

Keep something that is yours.

Because one of the greatest gifts you can give your family is your love and commitment.

But one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself is knowing that whatever life eventually asks of you, you haven't forgotten how to stand on your own two feet.