Nichole had it all planned out.
The nursery. The birth. Her motherhood story.
She’s a Type A eldest daughter. The kind of person who had her hospital bag packed weeks early and every detail mapped before the first contraction.
Control wasn’t just a preference.
Control was how she moved through the world.
Her journey into motherhood took that away from her.
After a forty-two-week pregnancy, a failed epidural, forty-eight hours without sleep or food, an emergency C-section she hadn’t prepared for, and a son who arrived blue and went straight to the NICU, Nichole came home a different person than the one who had walked into that hospital.
“It was my first lesson in motherhood,” she says, “to say, you actually have no control over this.”
That lesson, delivered in the hardest possible way, became the throughline of everything that followed.
What struck me most while sitting across from Nichole wasn’t the trauma she experienced.
It was how clearly she could trace the woman she’s become back to the moments that broke her plans wide open.
The NICU stay that taught her to advocate for herself and her son.
The corporate job that taught her the system wasn’t built for her, and barely included her.
The breastfeeding consultant who told her to give up, and the six weeks of pumping that followed when she refused.
She describes herself now as the Pivot Queen.
Her friends gave her the title, and it’s obvious that she’s earned it.
If you don’t like the way something is, you don’t have to just accept it. You can do what you need to do to change it. So I did.
Nichole
When she returned to work three months postpartum, she could have accepted things as the way they were: navigating a male-dominated finance department with no framework for motherhood, and a boss who’d just walk into her office while she was pumping.
Instead, she started the first working parents employee resource group at her company. She found an executive sponsor. She advocated for the maternity leave that wasn’t available for her with her first son.
But by the time her second son arrived, she was able to take six months leave.
“If you don’t like the way something is, you don’t have to just accept it,” she says. “You can do what you need to do to change it. So I did.”
The program she launched still exists even though she hasn’t worked at that company in years.
It outlasted her because she built it for everyone, not just herself.
Years later, she made deliberate choices to repair what her body had been through, physically and otherwise.
Nichole talks about her mommy makeover the same way she talks about everything: directly, without apology, and with the clarity of someone who has already decided she doesn’t owe anyone a more comfortable version of her truth.
“It wasn’t so much about not liking the body I had, but not feeling the best of myself in that body because it went through so much,” she said. “It is way more mentally and emotionally rejuvenating. Fulfilling.”
Nichole had two c-sections and breastfed two children. She had a four-finger separation in her abdominal muscles (diastasis recti). And how she felt in her body impacted every aspect of her life.
“It really helped me become a better me.”
Another aspect of being her best self? Finding her community, her chosen family.
She calls them her “ShePack.”
They met in a breastfeeding support group, realized that they had similar struggles, and became close friends.
They had found each other at a time when their old friendships weren’t surviving the shift into parenthood.
So they built something new: Mani Mondays. Costa Rica for their fortieth birthdays. A Marco Polo group chat.
“There’s this whole sense of it takes a village to build your community. And in this day and age we live in, your village isn’t the same as it would have been back then. It’s not your close family. It’s not your grandparents. It’s not your parents. It’s not necessarily like your siblings, but it is the family by choice. And we made a choice to, you know, kind of build our own little family.”
That’s what the village actually looks like now.
Not limited by geography.
Not out of obligation.
Built by choice.
Nichole’s boys are ten and seven. One fences and plays traveling soccer. One does Mandarin, tennis, and more soccer than anyone signed up for. Their weekly schedule is, by any honest accounting, a lot.
She knows it. She owns it. She wouldn’t trade it.
And the impact of everything she’s gone through on her sons?
Her goal is to raise boys who understand what women actually carry. That being a stay-at-home mom is not for every woman.
“I always say I am doing my best not to raise white men, and that is literally the facts.”
Going back to work made her a better mother, not a lesser one. And she wants her boys to understand that women can choose how they want to be a mom, if that’s what they want to begin with.
“Don’t let society pressure you into having kids if you don’t want to,” Nichole advises. “You can have a fulfilling life with children, and you can have a fulfilling life without children.”
That’s what a decade of motherhood taught Nichole.
Not that plans are useless.
Not that control is the enemy.
But the most important things she built came from what she did when the plan fell apart.
The pivot was always the point.
The Postpartum Project is a documentary portrait series capturing the real stories of motherhood, like the ones that don’t fit on a birth plan.
If your story is ready to be told, I’d love to be the one to document it.
Learn more or book your curiosity call below.