The Mother Untitled Movement
Throw the stereotypes out the window; motherhood is being redefined.
Missed y’all last weekend! I went fly fishing with my mom for her birthday and took the week off from writing. I have a few fun things I’m testing out soon, will be excited to hear your thoughts on it! And Happy Mother’s Day to all the mommas / momma figures out there. 💗
The Mother Untitled Movement
Since I last wrote about motherhood in 2019, Covid hadn’t happened, tradwives didn’t exist, and I wasn’t a mom yet. I wrote about how the the post-internet and social media riddled world had spawned a new breed of motherhood: iMoms. The defining tenants and behaviors of iMoms revolved around information, investment and intensity.
While much of this still holds true, fast forward six years and a LOT has changed.
Personally, I became a mom in 2022 and it has been the most rewarding, hardest, and best job I’ve ever had.
Culturally, I am seeing the landscape shift to welcome a more open and accepting version of each mom’s definition of the “right” way to mom for their family.
Motherhood will always be full of opposing perspectives by nature of a non-homogenous world, but there’s a fundamental shift in the cultural current taking place.
How is the perception of motherhood shifting?
The invisible mental load is now visible. A French women named Emma published a cartoon series about the invisible mental load of moms in 2017 that crashed onto the scene. It made a lasting imprint on my brain, and opened up so many doors of conversations for married couples about who is scheduling the activities, doctors appointments, buying clothes, taking the kids to activities, etc. There are signs it is shifting in culture too:
Dads are seeing parenthood as a cornerstone of their identity, nearly just as much as moms (57% of dads vs 58% of moms)
Dads are spending more time with kids and on household work than ever before, per Pew Research (and this was from 2016, I wonder what it is now!). Anecdotally, many of my friend’s moms talk about how their husbands never changed a diaper, whereas my husband and the dads in our friend groups have jumped right in shouldering the weight of child-rearing side by side.
Being a mom is badass now. Influencers like Molly Baz are showing off their baby bumps and milk-filled breasts in Times Square, celebs like Rihanna are hard launching their baby announcements like her recent reveal at the Met Gala, and CEOs like Whitney Wolfe made history by having her 1 yo son by her side at the Bumble IPO.
Moms are portrayed as multi-dimensional and not just a mom. A reader in LA and part-time working mom of three shared that “the idea of what a mom physically looks like is different to me now. I used to think of a mom as a bob haircut, focused on their kid, dressing conservatively or not on trend…I guess there was not as much exposure to a mom who is multifaceted (works, has a friend group, still looks amazing etc) - the media fed us only one image of a mom in the 90s and that’s kind of all we had.”
A mom of two in her 40s shared that “I believe that motherhood is being seen more fully as a powerful, and multifaceted role deserving deep respect. The evolution of this role is shifting toward a more broad understanding/acknowledgment that moms are significant contributors and providers to family dynamic.”
Moms’ titles are being thrown out the window, finally! The lines between “Stay at Home Moms” and “Working Moms” are being blurred and completely redefined. Enter Neha Ruch, the founder of Mother Untitled, a movement “to create the world's first collective of ambitious women on career pauses - or downshifts - to reshape the narrative around stay-at-home motherhood and give visibility to the gray area within which many women find themselves during a pause from traditional work outside the home.”
Her work couldn’t have been more perfectly well timed as I gained the new title of mom. In the past two years, I’ve been a full-time working mom, a full-time stay at home mom, and a part-time working mom, and her work has profoundly impacted me. It’s been a wonderful breath of fresh air to see that there’s a third, in-between path, and that you don’t have to subscribe to the binary choice of Stay At Home Mom (SAHM) or Working Mom.
What has resonated the most with me in what Neha has done to change the cultural narrative is two-fold:
Shifting the title of “stay at home mom” to “full time working mom in the house” or “unpaid working mom” because it is a FULL TIME JOB. In my personal experience, being a SAHM is more physically and emotionally exhausting and taxing than being a full-time working mom.
Celebrating career breaks and slowing down at work. She’s masterfully reframed having children as a “power pause”, not a set back. One that will change you to become a better, more successful leader in the work world. (She did work in brand marketing might I say ☺️).
It isn’t all perfect though. A part-time working mom of two and reader in Austin shared that “I’m in some hybrid land and on the one hand, I’m so grateful, and love the ‘balance’, and on the other I feel like I’m failing everything.”
recently compared being a working mom to having your brain severed and I couldn’t agree more. Jumping between the working and momming modes requires next level context switching and nearly breaks my brain on a daily basis.Some of my SAHM friends aka unpaid working moms shared that “To me it feels like being a stay at home mom is not enough anymore and maybe this is just a pressure I put on myself or that it’s freaking hard in this economy to live on one salary…. but I feel this pressure to on top of being a SAHM I need to be doing some sort of side hustle to help financially” and that often people look down on it “or they feel sorry for you and say things like ‘I don’t know how you do that all day.’”
A reader in Brooklyn and mom of two shared that “I’ve seen way more people on LinkedIn being vocal about not being able to ‘have it all’. When I was coming up as a new mother (about 15 years ago), of course it was impossible to keep everything straight. The world is stacked against you in a hundred ways. Juggling being a mom and being ambitious in your career was something you had to suck up, but I feel like new moms these days are wayyy more “WTF???” about being asked to work really hard and invest brain space in your career while being a caretaker for a baby.”
Realism > Perfectionism. Many moms I reached out to talked about how refreshing it’s been that people actually talk about how hard it is to be a mom now, vs. acting like everything is easy and normal. Motherhood is messy and that’s finally being portrayed in the media too.
With that being said, of course for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Cue the rise of Tradwives or “traditional wives”, like Ballerina Farm, who hold tightly the values of homemaking, childcare, and domestic responsibilities, while men are seen as the primary breadwinners. She milks the cows, get their eggs from their chickens, and churns her own butter (I might have made this up but wouldn’t be surprised), while raising 8 children.
Any time I watch this type of content I cannot for the life of me figure out if they are playing one big joke on people or if they really mean it, like Nara Smith who makes homemade sprinkles for her kids when they ask for cookies, while dressed in black tie attire. Or makes a meal from scratch for her husband after an eight hour flight. Either way, the tradwives definitely have an OMG factor and a corner on the moms-looking-for-escapist-content market.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Key takeaways for marketers? Moms do not fit into a stereotypical box anymore. The cultural narrative around motherhood is undergoing a radical shift—from rigid roles and glossy perfection to fluid identities and honest, multifaceted realities. Today’s moms embrace hybrid paths, power pauses, and ambition on their own terms. For brands, this means moving beyond outdated tropes and tapping into the nuance: celebrate the in-between, respect the emotional labor, and represent moms as multi-dimensional humans.
Dinner Party Fodder
Tasty tidbits to talk about. 😋
🗞️ News of the week: Lena Dunham broke up with New York. 🤯
🏎️ Activation of the week: Warner Bro’s + Apple’s F1 movie stunt at the Met Gala was genius. No brand had found a way to actually pull this off until now. Read the breakdown from Dhane here.
🐥 Tweet of the week: Popeyes. 🤣 Also, LOOK at that reach and engagement. 15.4M views on a simple tweet. THIS is why social should be the engine of your marketing team not just the executional arm.
➕ Follow of the week: Neha Ruch of Mother Untitled, obviously.
🥹 Poem of the week: Jessi Urlich’s poems always hit.
👶 Hacks of the week: Moms share their most unhinged parenting hacks. lolllll
🍓 Recipe of the week: Strawberry szn is in full swing and it’s time to break out your box of Bisquick for Strawberry Shortcake. It takes literally 15 minutes to make and wows every guest I’ve ever made it for. And if you have some biscuits leftover they make for a breakfast sandy the next morning!!!
▶️ Ad of the week: I recently posted on LinkedIn about how a B2B ad should be JUST as creative as a B2C ad. What if an ad for Salesforce or Slack or Zoom gave you chills, brought you to tears, or made you feel just as inspired as when you see a Nike ad?? Well, someone at Figma read my mind because they just dropped an awesome ad for their new product Figma Draw that was hilarious. Really leaning into that Millennial nostalgia and I’m here for it. 👏🏼
🤝 Partnership of the week: LTK (LikeToKnowIt) partners with The Bachelor to make the show shoppable. This is SOOOOOO smart! There have been lots of shows who have tried to be shoppable in the past but it’s never stuck bc it requires a clunky QR or weird user experience. I think this might actually work.
🎣 Trend of the week: My friend, Autumn says fishing vests are the new fanny pack. You can carry WAY more and it has chic camping vibes. And after going fly fishing last weekend I’m sold on this concept. Prada released one on the runway last year and lots of TikTok girlies are showing how to style them. Gotta head to a thrift store to snag one soon!
If you enjoy my work I would so appreciate you forwarding this email to a few people you know would like it. It goes a long way to help grow this and I couldn’t do it without y’all!!!
🐝 Michelle