If you’ve ever stood in a kitchen at 7am, half-dressed, making packed lunches while simultaneously answering questions about where the PE kit is, you’ll know the feeling. That low hum of wishing you were somewhere else. Still in bed. On a yoga mat. Or sitting somewhere quiet with a coffee that’s actually hot.
But you’re here. Because someone needs you. And so your needs get folded away like laundry that never quite makes it back into the drawer.
We tell ourselves one day we’ll have more time. One day the kids will be older, the schedule will ease, life will open up. And maybe it will. But that day has a habit of arriving much later than expected, and the years in between? You can count on one hands the things you did for you.
If this resonates in any way, it might be time to look at something called life design.
Life design isn’t a productivity system. It isn’t about colour-coded planners or rigid five-year plans. At its heart it’s a philosophy, one that says your life is not something that simply happens to you. It is something you can shape, with intention, with your own hands.
Borrowed from the world of design thinking, it asks you to approach your own life the way a great designer approaches a problem. With curiosity rather than judgment. With experimentation rather than fear. With a genuine desire to understand what actually matters before you start building anything at all.
It starts with three questions. What do I value? What do I want? And am I building a life that actually reflects either of those things?
For mothers, questions like these can feel indulgent. We are so wired to focus on what’s immediate. The school run. The work deadline. The voice from the other room, screaming “Mummy! Snack please.” Sitting down to reflect on what you actually want from your one life can feel like a luxury you simply haven’t got the time for.
But if we’re being really honest, most people spend more time planning a two-week vacation than designing the life they actually want to live. And unlike a holiday, your life doesn’t come with a return date.
The Cost of Living Without Design
But what happens if we don’t do this? If we just keep going the way most of us are going?
We drift. And drifting as a mother has its own particular flavour. It looks like staying in a job that stopped fitting years ago because the salary covers childcare and the fear of leaving feels bigger than the pain of staying. It looks like the business idea, the course, the creative thing you’ve been meaning to get back to, getting quietly shelved. Not abandoned. Just perpetually next week, next month, next year.
And it looks like your body changing in ways you didn’t choose and can’t seem to find the time to address. Not for lack of wanting to. But because eating well requires planning, and planning requires time and motivation when you’re already running on empty. So you eat what’s quick. You move less than you used to. And slowly, you stop feeling confident in your own skin.
That part doesn’t get talked about enough. The way it follows you into the bedroom. The lights go low because you’d rather not be seen. There’s a quiet disconnection that settles in, from your body, from your desirability, from the woman your partner fell for and the woman you used to feel like on the inside. It isn’t vanity. It’s grief. For a self that felt more confident naked.
And then one day you’re at the school gate and your child walks in without turning back to wave. Because they’re old enough now. They don’t need to. The chapter ends, quietly, without warning or ceremony. And you look at the blank page in front of you and realise your confidence for writing the next one isn’t where you thought it would be.
Women who stepped back from their careers wonder if they’re still hireable. Women who gained significant weight during the years of survival mode wonder if it’s too late to feel good again. Women who had an idea, wonder if the moment has passed. The fear is less about the future and more about the confidence in oneself that feels lost.
And somewhere in the back of your mind, a question surfaces. Would things be different if I had just kept a small, consistent piece of myself alive through all of it?
The answer, almost always, is yes. But the more important truth is this: it’s not too late. You don’t need a dramatic reinvention. You just need to start building, slowly and deliberately, towards the life you want.
Life Design Is Not Selfish — It’s Generational
Here is the reframe that stops most mothers in their tracks. You are already excellent at designing a life that works for your children. The school they thrive in, the home they feel safe in, the childhood you have quietly, carefully built for them. But a life designed only around their happiness has a gap in it. You. Filling that gap is not selfish nor indulgent. It is not something you need to justify. It is one of the greatest gifts you will ever give yourself and your children.
Children don’t need martyrs. They need role models. When your children watch you honour your own ambitions, protect your own energy, pursue something that lights you up, they learn that their needs matter too. Not just their immediate needs, but their deepest ones. The need to become a full human being, not just a person who exists to serve others.
A mother who knows what she values and lives accordingly is not less present. She is more present. Not quietly resentful. Not silently grieving. Not running on fumes and hoping nobody notices. She is there, genuinely there. Steady. Warm. Emotionally available. Because she has tended to herself enough to give an abundance of joy.
Where to Begin
Life design doesn’t require a retreat or a sabbatical or a dramatic reinvention. It doesn’t require a free weekend or a cleared schedule or waiting until the kids are older. It begins with something much simpler. Attention. A quality mothers have in extraordinary abundance, almost always directed everywhere except inward.
Start by noticing. What gives you energy and what quietly takes it. The moments in your week when you feel most like yourself, not the most useful version of yourself, not the most needed, but the most alive. And the moments where you are simply going through the motions, present in body, somewhere else entirely in spirit.
Then ask the questions most of us spend a lifetime avoiding. What would I be doing if I weren’t afraid? What does a day that actually means something look like for me, not a productive one, a meaningful one? If my children could see not just what I do but how I feel while I’m doing it, what would I want them to see?
There are entire books written on how to do this well, and they are worth your time. But the most important thing to know right now is simply that it’s possible. That other women have done it, are doing it, in the middle of full lives that looked a lot like yours.
In a future post, I’ll share exactly how I approach my own life design, the practical, honest, unglamorous version of it. But for now, the invitation is just to start getting curious about your own life. Which, it turns out, is one of the most radical things a mother can do.
The Seasons of a Mother’s Life
One of the most liberating things about life design is that it doesn’t ask you to have it all figured out. There is no single, fixed vision you’re supposed to be working towards. No arrival point where everything finally makes sense and stays that way.
Because life doesn’t work like that. And motherhood especially doesn’t work like that.
Your life moves through seasons. The early years where survival genuinely is the strategy, where getting everyone fed and sleeping and basically intact counts as a win. Then the season where the children need you slightly less, and you start to find moments for yourself again. Then the season where they need you differently, and the identity you built around being needed starts to shift in ways nobody really prepares you for.
Each season asks something different of you. The woman who needed rest at thirty-five might be craving something different at forty-five. What felt like enough last year might not be enough this year.
Life design is about knowing yourself well enough in this season to choose what’s right for you. And being willing to update when the season changes.
A Call to the Intentional Life
This is for every mother. The one with a newborn who hasn’t slept properly in months and can barely remember what she used to care about. The one with teenagers who is starting to feel the shape of her own life returning and doesn’t quite know what to do with it. The one whose children have left home and who is standing in a quiet house wondering who she is now that the role she built everything around has changed.
It doesn’t matter how old your children are. It doesn’t matter how far you feel from the woman you once imagined you’d become. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been running on empty or how many times you’ve told yourself you’ll get to this eventually.
That life you think about in the quiet moments before you fall asleep, the one that feels almost embarrassing to want because it seems so far from where you are right now, that life is not a fantasy. It is a design waiting to be built. And you, with everything you have survived, everything you have carried, everything you have given without being asked twice, you are more than capable of building it.
So choose yourself. Not instead of your family. Not at the expense of the love you have for them. But alongside it. With the same energy, the same creativity, the same fierce and bottomless devotion you have always given to everyone else in your life.
Design your life. Not because it needs to be perfect. But because you deserve to be happy.
And that, finally, is enough of a reason.
