There is a particular kind of discomfort that can come with becoming a mother when you've spent years knowing how to achieve. Before children, perhaps you knew the rules: work hard, set goals, solve problems, get promoted, move forward. You could look back at the end of a week, month or year and see evidence of your progress.
Then you become a mother, and suddenly the rules change. You can spend an entire day working relentlessly and still reach bedtime wondering what you've actually achieved. Meanwhile, the professional world you temporarily stepped away from keeps moving. Colleagues get promoted, businesses grow, people announce new jobs on LinkedIn, and someone you once worked alongside seems to be flying professionally while you're sitting on the sofa feeding a baby.
Even when you desperately wanted that baby, it can be difficult not to wonder: am I falling behind?
This is something Motherhood & Identity Coach Jacqueline Lantzen experienced herself. In our conversation on The Mothership Podcast, we explore what happens when ambition meets motherhood — and why the very qualities that helped many women succeed professionally can make the transition into motherhood surprisingly difficult.
Key takeaways
Feeling as though you don't know who you are after becoming a mother doesn't necessarily mean something has gone wrong; motherhood itself involves a significant transition in identity.
Women whose identity has been strongly tied to career, achievement and productivity may find the unpredictability and slower pace of early motherhood particularly confronting.
Matrescence gives women language for understanding the physical, emotional, social and identity changes that accompany becoming a mother.
The goal doesn't have to be getting your "old self" back. Parts of her remain, but motherhood can also create space to decide who you want to become.
Workplaces can support parental transitions by recognising that returning from maternity leave isn't simply an employee resuming the exact life she had before.
Support, boundaries and honest conversations can help women build lives that make room for both motherhood and the other parts of themselves that matter.
When achievement becomes part of your identity
Before becoming a mother, Jackie's career was central to her identity. She had spent more than a decade in the corporate world, leading international teams and working across time zones. Her days were fast-paced and full. There were problems to solve, targets to hit and clear markers of progress. Like many ambitious women, she had become very good at operating in that environment.
Then she had her son. Instead of packed agendas and professional problems to solve, Jackie found herself sitting at home with a newborn. The pace of her external life had slowed dramatically, yet she was more exhausted than ever. At the end of the day, she would look around and wonder what she had actually done.
Of course, the answer was enormous: she had cared for another human being. But it didn't feel like achievement according to the system she'd spent years using to measure herself. That is where the collision can begin.
Why high-achieving women can find motherhood so challenging
Ambition isn't the problem. Neither is being organised, productive or driven. Those qualities can be enormously valuable, but some of the characteristics that help us succeed professionally can become much harder to rely upon in early motherhood.
At work, you might have been able to plan your day and feel confident that, if you put in the work, you could influence the outcome. Motherhood is far less predictable. At work, completing something usually produced a result. With a newborn, you can feed the baby, change the baby and finally settle the baby, only to begin the entire cycle again. At work, you may have received feedback, recognition or promotions that told you that you were doing well. Motherhood often provides very little immediate external validation.
Jackie talks about achievement, control, planning and the need for productivity as qualities that can make this transition particularly difficult. If you've spent years connecting those things with your sense of worth, suddenly finding yourself in an environment where they work very differently can be deeply unsettling.
Why does motherhood make you feel like you're achieving nothing?
There is so much work involved in caring for a baby, but much of it is repetitive and invisible. You feed, settle, hold, change, wash, prepare, research, remember, worry and anticipate what somebody else needs before they can tell you themselves. Then you wake up the next morning and do much of it all over again.
For someone accustomed to measurable progress, this can create a strange disconnect. You are busier than you've ever been and potentially more exhausted than you've ever been, yet you can feel as though you're achieving less than you ever have.
Perhaps the problem isn't that you're achieving nothing. Perhaps we're trying to measure motherhood using a definition of achievement that was created somewhere completely different.
The fear that everyone else is moving forward
There was another part of Jackie's story that I think will resonate deeply with many career-focused mothers. While she was at home with her baby, she would look at LinkedIn and see promotions, professional successes and other people continuing to move forward. Eventually, she deleted the app from her phone because watching everyone else's careers progress while she felt stuck became too difficult.
Comparison isn't unique to motherhood, of course, but maternity leave can create particularly fertile ground for it. One moment you're part of an organisation, industry or professional community, and then you're temporarily outside it, watching from the sidelines while everything continues without you.
You can be incredibly grateful for the time you have with your child and still feel uncomfortable about what is happening professionally. You can love your baby and miss work. You can value maternity leave and worry about your career. You can want to slow down while simultaneously being terrified that everyone else is overtaking you.
Those feelings aren't mutually exclusive.
What does "falling behind" actually mean?
This is where I think we need to challenge the language itself. If you feel as though you're falling behind, it is worth asking: behind whom, and heading where?
Career progression is usually presented as a relatively straight line. You gain experience, progress, earn more, take on more responsibility and move upwards. Motherhood can disrupt that trajectory, but disruption isn't necessarily failure.
It might be a temporary pause. It might change your priorities or the way you want to work. It might make you more protective of your time. It might make you question a career you previously assumed you'd continue indefinitely. Or it might reinforce just how much your career and professional identity matter to you.
There isn't one correct response. The important thing is recognising that a change in pace isn't automatically the same thing as falling behind.
Understanding matrescence
This is where the concept of matrescence becomes so useful. Matrescence describes the transition of becoming a mother. Rather than thinking only about the arrival of the baby, it gives us a framework for recognising that the mother herself is undergoing a transition too.
Relationships can change. Friendships can feel different. Bodies change. Priorities shift. Careers can suddenly look different. Your sense of self can move underneath you.
Not every woman experiences that transition in exactly the same way or with the same intensity. Jackie makes this point clearly in our conversation: matrescence isn't a one-size-fits-all experience. But having language for the transition can help us understand what we're experiencing rather than immediately assuming something has gone wrong.
Instead of asking, What's wrong with me?, we can begin asking, What's changing for me?
The fear of losing your edge
Slowing down can be surprisingly uncomfortable when you've spent years moving quickly. Jackie talks about the fear that slowing down might mean losing your edge — particularly when you've spent years in environments where slowing down simply wasn't an option.
Sometimes what we're frightened of isn't simply missing work. We're frightened that something fundamental about us is disappearing. Am I still ambitious? Am I still capable? Will people still take me seriously? Can I still compete? What happens when I go back? Will everybody else have overtaken me?
Jackie describes this period as the "messy middle": you've started changing, but you don't yet know what you're changing into. Giving yourself permission to be there without immediately knowing the end result can be incredibly difficult.
You don't necessarily need to "get back" to your old self
Much of the language surrounding motherhood is about returning: getting your body back, getting back to work, getting back into a routine, getting back to normal, getting yourself back.
But what if backwards isn't actually where you're supposed to go?
Jackie's work isn't about helping women recreate exactly who they were before motherhood. Instead, she helps women understand why things feel different, explore the beliefs and pressures they're carrying and begin working out what they actually want their lives to look like now.
That doesn't mean abandoning ambition. You might still love your career. You might still want the promotion, responsibility, financial independence, challenge and professional recognition. But you might want those things alongside stronger boundaries. You might value your time differently. You might no longer be willing to work in exactly the same way. Or you might discover that your ambitions themselves have changed.
Parts of your old identity can absolutely come forward with you. The point isn't to reject the woman you were; it's to give yourself permission to change.
Returning to work as a different version of yourself
This is also why parental transition needs to become a workplace conversation. Returning from maternity leave isn't simply a logistical event. A woman may return to the same desk and the same organisation while feeling profoundly different herself.
Many women also return carrying a new pressure to prove themselves. Jackie talks about the self-doubt women can experience after being away from work and the temptation to feel they must demonstrate that they're still capable. Her argument is that they have already demonstrated that capability; what may be more valuable now are sustainable boundaries and leaders who respect them.
Jackie's own experience demonstrates the difference a supportive manager can make. Before she left, her manager — who had experience of parenthood himself — encouraged her not to commit to an exact return date before she knew what she would need. When Jackie eventually realised she wasn't ready to return when she'd originally expected, that support mattered.
For organisations, there is an important lesson here. Supporting parental transition doesn't mean assuming mothers are suddenly less ambitious or lowering expectations for them. It means recognising that becoming a parent is a significant life transition and creating an environment in which talented people don't have to pretend nothing has changed in order to continue succeeding.
Ambition doesn't disappear when you become a mother
Perhaps this is one of the biggest misconceptions we need to challenge. Becoming a mother doesn't automatically make a woman less ambitious. But ambition may now need to coexist with an entirely new set of responsibilities, priorities and constraints.
The answer isn't necessarily to choose between being an ambitious woman and being a present mother. It's to work out what ambition looks like in this version of your life.
For some women, that might mean returning fully to a career they love. For others, it could mean reducing their hours, establishing stronger boundaries or finding more support at home. Some may decide that their previous career no longer fits at all and want to build something different. Jackie sees all of these different outcomes in her work, which is why she emphasises that there isn't one correct version of life after motherhood.
Maybe you aren't falling behind
If you're on maternity leave, working reduced hours, rebuilding your career or simply moving more slowly than you did before children, it can be incredibly easy to look sideways. Someone else is earning more. Someone else got promoted. Someone else's business is growing. Someone else appears to be managing motherhood and work effortlessly.
But perhaps motherhood hasn't made you fall behind. Perhaps it has changed your pace. Maybe it has changed your priorities, or even changed where you're heading.
That doesn't make you less ambitious, less capable or less valuable. It means you're navigating a significant transition while trying to work out how all the different parts of you fit together now.
And perhaps the question isn't, How quickly can I catch up?
Perhaps it's: Where do I actually want to go from here?
About Jacqueline Lantzen
Jacqueline Lantzen is a Motherhood & Identity Coach helping ambitious women understand one of the biggest transitions of their lives: becoming a mother. After more than a decade leading international teams in the corporate world, she realised that while we prepare women for birth, we rarely prepare them for the profound identity shift that follows.
Today, she helps mothers make sense of who they're becoming and is on a mission to change the way we support women through matrescence at home, in healthcare and in the workplace.
Website: https://jackielantzen.com/
Instagram: @jackie.lantzen
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Listen to the episode
Navigating your own transition?
If motherhood has changed how you think about your identity, ambition, career or what you want from your life, I work with women through matrescence and identity coaching.
I also work with organisations to improve how parents are supported through parental leave, return to work and the wider transition into parenthood.
Explore coaching, corporate consultancy and speaking at www.lounevitt.co.
Instagram: @lounevitt.co