My son Oliver was born on March 2023.
I was still feeling pretty good right up until the last weeks of pregnancy. My hair was thicker than it had ever been, my skin was clear, and I was working full time on my own creative business, something I had literally been dreaming about for YEARS.
I’d started maternity leave from my office role in January, and had a couple of months up my sleeve to create lots of content. My Instagram page @glowdiaries___ had grown by around 100k followers in the space of a few months of dedicated attention.
I even scored a little cameo on a local television cooking show as a guest chef at 38 weeks pregnant (it’s called My Market Kitchen – you can watch the episode here).
The day I went into labour, I was working right up until the contractions became too much. I really love what I do!
I had a positive birth experience overall, with a much-wanted epidural delivered at the last minute. If you are curious you can listen to the full birth story podcast ep here on Spotify (or search “Thrive Diaries birth story” into your podcast app).
At first, I felt pretty on top of the world after having Ollie. He was so perfect, so sweet. I was so proud of myself and I loved this little baby so much. I remember putting on a shower cap and air pods at near-full volume in the shower the day after we got home and dancing. After giving birth to a baby, I felt like I could do anything, like I was superwoman.
I think both my husband (Steve) and I were on a bit of a baby/oxytocin high, and were already talking about our future children as though it was a given we would do this again. It’s an incredible experience bringing a child into the world. It blows my mind to think that this is how we all got here, that all parents have experienced this feeling. That something so commonplace can be so profound.
Physically, post-partum and breastfeeding was rough, but in the standard way. I felt like I came out of it in pretty good shape overall. Ollie had to go back into hospital because of jaundice and a UTI for about a week which was really awful. Seeing him in the little incubator box was heartbreaking, even though we knew his condition wasn’t serious. Awful as it was, we were also grateful for the overnight care and being able to get some sleep. But spending long days at the hospital meant I ended up spending too much time on my feet, and a couple of weeks later, discovered I had a minor prolapse.
Side note: we need to talk about vaginas more!! So many women experience this. Mine is minor and managed through pelvic floor exercises, but it’s still a bit of an insecurity. Katherine Ormerod wrote an awesome piece on this topic but more needs to be done. Probably a bit outside my niche haha but maybe one day I’ll do something on it.
It was around this time in March/April 2023, I was posting A LOT on my stories about what was going on. I was so used to candidly sharing my day-to-day life and didn’t really think that it may not be wanted by my audience. Sharing was kind of therapeutic for me too, a way to process this huge change in my life.
I got lots of DMs, and made very meaningful connections, but I also lost hundreds of followers every time I posted something baby-related.
One morning, two weeks postpartum, around 2am, completely delirious, I was breastfeeding Ollie in bed. I knew I shouldn’t, but I started flicking through my “other” inbox on Instagram, where you get messages from people you don’t follow.
Earlier that evening, I had shared a story showing a graph of how many followers I’d lost, and I saw a reply from a woman in Europe, I think around the same age as me. She told me, plainly, that she was very disappointed I was talking so much about motherhood when I had said before I gave birth that I didn’t intend on becoming a mommy blogger. She said she felt she had to say something because I had built something here on Instagram, and she didn’t want to see me lose what I had built. She thought she was helping me by being honest.
It really stung, because it tapped into my biggest fear. Social media changes quickly, and I was scared this fleeting creative career I was building, and loved so much, was going to slip out from under me.
I had no idea how to integrate being a mother into my old life, and I felt silenced. Like the people had spoken and told me they didn’t want to hear about me and my baby. But being a new parent and taking care of a newborn is all-consuming, and I felt like I had nothing else to offer. I felt like I was barely keeping my head above water.
My day was completely dedicated to an eat-play-sleep cycle, and if I wasn’t changing a nappy, I was pumping, breastfeeding or trying to take care of myself aka brush my teeth, eat or shower.
Even though I’ve had my fair share of hate on social media, this really got to me. I just felt so vulnerable, so raw postpartum, so hormonal, and I couldn’t stand the idea of exposing myself and my beautiful little Ollie to people who didn’t want to see it. It was a sacred time that I had voluntarily exposed and then deeply regretted putting myself in that position.
I hashed it out with this person over DM, and she did apologise, but in that vulnerable post-partum haze it hurt me way more than I should have let it.
I stopped posting nearly as much on social media, especially to stories. I did a poll of my audience about who did and didn’t want to see baby content, and I started to set up a close friends list of about 1000 people who said yes.
It took weeks to get it sorted, I took tens of screenshots of the list of people who said “yes” and was manually copying and pasting every single handle into this close friends list, only for me to lose enthusiasm and to barely post anyway.
My time was limited, so I couldn’t keep up with my regular recipe creation and take care of Ollie, and I felt guilty for even trying to work at all, because shouldn’t I be dedicating myself wholeheartedly to maternity leave? Shouldn’t I be loving this newborn bubble?
It felt like I wasn’t very good at being a recipe creator or being a mother. On top of that, because I was trying to work, because I was afraid that I was going to lose what I had built, I felt isolated.
I didn’t immerse myself in my new parents group as much as I could have. We had moved to the outer Melbourne suburbs during the COVID lockdowns in 2021, which hadn’t really been an issue until now. But as a new mum with no family or close friends nearby, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so lonely.
My mum would come and stay with us when we really needed it for a few days at a time, but that was more of a crisis-mode midnight call. Even when I had company, I didn’t feel like I could relate to people in the same way anymore, unless they were also parents of young kids. The responsibility of being primary carer felt heavy.
I had this idea that it was going to get continually easier to be a parent, but in reality, it just gets different.
I remember when Ollie was around 5 months old, going out for coffee with a friend who had a baby 3 months after me and I started crying out of nowhere at the café. I had been wanting to reassure her, that a few months ahead, the road was less foggy, but it wasn’t.
I think the sleep deprivation had really started to wear on me by that point. I just felt like it should be getting easier, and it was disheartening to still feel like getting through the motions of the day was still such an effort. Life felt hard and I wanted more than anything to reach an equilibrium, a new feeling of normal.
I didn’t feel like I was adapting well to “mum life”, the days felt aimless, like I was killing time until we could start dinner/bath/bed routine. The evenings were short though, Steve and I would have 90 minutes together as a couple before I had to get to bed. I was sleeping in our spare room, and Steve slept in our bedroom with Ollie in the bassinet. We did this because I had so much trouble sleeping and was disturbed by every little sound Ollie would make.
We reached the “housemate stage”, taking the night feedings in shift, which was essential for us both to function. Steve would do an 11pm dream feed, while I would pump and go to bed early at 8:30 or 9pm and set an alarm for 3am, then eventually 4am, when Ollie would wake up.
I would try to go back to sleep, but I’ve had insomnia on-and-off for years, and more often than not, I would lie there awake, getting frustrated. This survival mode went on for months, and it was honestly depressing.
I’d try to break out of the funk, to reclaim a sense of control over the day, by staying up from 4am and going to a 6am gym class with a friend. But that only lasted a few weeks before Ollie’s sleep routine changed, or we would have a bad night and I would cancel.
The thing about having a baby is that your life becomes all about baby’s routine, but it also becomes very unpredictable at the same time. You never know what the night or day will bring. The only reason I got any work done was because I had an amazing occasional childcare service for a couple of hours on weekdays, sometimes I would drive the 3 hours to go stay with my parents and because my dear friend Sarah Brown who is also a content creator @sezzy.brown would come around to our house and help me film and take care of Ollie. She is a true friend.
During this whole blur of postpartum, I was approached by a publisher to write a cookbook. I couldn’t give up the opportunity, a book was a step closer to being a professional recipe creator. They confirmed the offer late May, and wanted a manuscript with 100 recipes by November, but I knew it would be impossible and negotiated the deadline to April 2024.
I doubted many times whether I could do it, but somehow, we made it work. Steve took parental leave for 3 months and I had full-time hours to write the book. I was worried I didn’t have any energy left to do something so creative… people say writing a book is like having a baby and I was not up for that again so soon, possibly never lol.
Thankfully, although it was a mammoth effort, it was nowhere near as hard as making a human baby. Sarah Brown, again, at my most desperate moment in the weeks before deadline, came round to help me cook and clean up while I was recipe testing.
In hindsight, I put a lot of pressure on myself post-partum, but it was because I so badly wanted to feel like my old productive self again.
I also viewed my maternity leave period as my “now or never” test period as to whether I go back to my 9-5 career or take the leap and work for myself as a content creator.
I felt like I had to prove it to myself that I could earn enough money to justify taking the chance. This was a pressure I put entirely on myself, not from Steve. I love a bit of woo woo personal development and am aware after listening to all the gurus lol that I live in a “scarcity mindset”, because my fear of “losing it all” is not only about social media, but with money as well.
It is silly, because we have a comfortable amount of savings and Steve’s income covers us. But I still make “rules” for myself and it’s like I have to prove something in order to give myself permission to dream. I need to work on that.
On top of the cookbook, I had also started exploring a potential cooking show with some of the production team I had met on my TV cameo. We filmed a little pilot, got a bunch of amazing sponsors on board, but it didn’t get picked up unfortunately. I have hope something will come through on that front eventually. We need more plant-based cooking shows.
I started focusing more on my website, writing lifestyle articles and diversifying my content. I was curious about reaching people via Google search and other more publisher-type platforms rather than social media. I don’t know why I thought this was the priority for me, given I was neglecting my established Instagram page, but maybe I had got so used to hiding on social media that it felt more comfortable to take a less public approach. Or maybe it was because I wanted stability, to anchor my career in something less transient than social media, like the book, a tv show or Google.
Ollie started childcare part time in January 2024 when Steve finished up parental leave. Honestly, I still have mixed feelings about childcare and some guilt, even though Steve and everybody agrees that is silly.
It is necessary if I want to do any work. I am realising a toddler is much more of a handful than a baby. I submitted my cookbook manuscript at 5:30pm on the day of deadline, April 1st after weeks of my beautiful followers volunteering to help me recipe test (I am so grateful to you guys btw, my heroes).
I think it was through the cookbook creation, prioritising my career and taking the leap by resigning from my previous role, that I started to regain a sense of identity.
It made me appreciate my time with Ollie so much more too. I am really proud of all the recipes in that book, and although it was overwhelming and hard, I managed to get it done.
It forced me to focus on making recipes that were easier, quicker and balanced. I didn’t have time to be feeling any more lethargic than I already did (Ollie doesn’t sleep through the night yet) so I made sure that most of the recipes were wholesome and filling.
I love dessert too though, so I haven’t made it exclusively healthy. You’ve got to have something to look forward to at the end of a long day!
I eventually realised that being a mum has actually made me better at this job, because whether it’s a baby, career, family or other commitments, life keeps us all busy but we still need solutions to eat well, quickly.
Now the reason for the 100 days challenge… well that was Sarah Brown again. She had a tough year herself online, getting a lot of hate about no longer being vegan. She was also feeling discouraged about social media and came up with the idea to do a 100-day recipe challenge. We had lunch a couple of months ago, and she encouraged me to do the same. I was kind of hesitant to throw myself into another big project so soon, but I learned from the book that when you give energy, you get so much more in return. Once the creativity starts flowing, it has a snowball effect.
So I feel a bit nervous throwing myself back into the social media game again after what feels like a long hiatus. It hasn’t been *that* long in real terms but social media time is a bit warped of course, things change quickly online.
That’s why I am so touched you are here to join me and are reading this (also this is a long post, thank you for sticking with me).
Because just as the book was a big joint community effort of recipe testing, this too is going to be another big community experience. I would LOVE for you to send me any recipe requests, ideas or feedback on how I can make any of the recipes better.
Tell me what kinds of foods you like, what you don’t, and what challenges make it hard for you to eat well. What would you like your diet to be like? It should serve you. Comment below this post, or email me hello@glow-diaries.com 🙂
I personally want to feel energised by my food, for it to be bloody tasty and as easy as possible to make. I also like a little dose of fun and inspiration (hello sweet treats).
I haven’t exercised in what feels like 1000 years (it’s probably been about 6 months) but I’m hoping to get back into a good routine with that too, and I need my meals to support me.
I have said so many times over the past year that I feel like I don’t have the balance quite right. It’s hard to juggle a career, family, friends and taking care of ourselves. I don’t have it all figured out, I still feel overwhelmed most days, but I know that I can help make this one little aspect of eating well easier for us all.
Thank you so much for being here, for seeing me, for joining me on this challenge. I am scared and excited at the same time!! Let’s do this. Here’s to 100 days of good eating. You’ll be getting recipes to your inbox v soon.
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