By Natasha Makara
The Anxiety of Modern Motherhood
Motherhood is extraordinary. It’s the weight of a sleeping child against your chest. The fierce love that seems to arrive overnight and quietly rearrange your priorities. The way your world becomes bigger and smaller at the same time. Your heart expands and so does your sense of responsibility.
It is also one of the most profound psychological shifts a woman can experience.
With love comes vigilance. You are no longer thinking only about yourself. You are thinking about safety, about the future and about what happens next. You are the one signing the forms, answering the questions, staying steady when everyone else is wobbling.
For some women, that shift feels gradual. For others, especially those already prone to anxiety, it sharpens everything. The stakes feel higher. The mind works harder to anticipate what could go wrong. The responsibility does not switch off simply because the day has ended.
I co-founded ChaLuMu with Megan after recognising just how many mothers are carrying anxiety alongside everything else, often invisibly.
Both of us live with significant anxiety. Not occasional nerves, but the kind that influences how you plan, how you prepare, how you try to stay three steps ahead so nothing catches you off guard and how you parent. We run a business. We manage suppliers, school runs, cash flow, dinner, deadlines. From the outside, it looks composed.
And in many ways, it is.
But composure does not cancel out anxiety.
We understand the 2am spiral. The thought that starts small and somehow becomes existential. The extra check on a sleeping child. The quiet “What if?” that refuses to settle. The sense that you must always be alert because someone else depends on you entirely.
For me, illness and grief were turning points. They disrupted a life I believed I was managing well and illness and grief are not rare events. They are ordinary parts of being human. Which means anxiety can intensify for anyone. You can be educated, capable, organised, financially responsible, the one everyone relies on and still find your mental health unsettled by life.
That was extremely humbling. It was also the moment I understood that coping and being well are not the same thing. I had been functioning. I had not been supporting myself. I was holding everything together externally while quietly running on adrenaline internally.
Modern motherhood often rewards that kind of endurance. We praise the woman who manages it all. The one who shows up. The one who keeps the household moving. But rarely do we ask what it costs her nervous system to remain in constant readiness.
The Pressure to Be Steady
Motherhood requires composure, whether you feel it or not.
You can feel anxious and still make breakfast. You can be exhausted and still show up at the school gate. You can have a head full of noise and still read the bedtime story as if your thoughts have not been racing all day. Many mothers do exactly that.
But carrying responsibility well does not mean you never feel overwhelmed. It means you continue despite it.
For some women, anxiety intensifies in the postnatal period, when hormones, identity shift and sleep deprivation collide. For others, it emerges later as intrusive thoughts, constant vigilance or a persistent hum of tension that never quite switches off and even years into motherhood, it can resurface during illness, grief or particularly demanding times.
Loving motherhood deeply and feeling anxious within it are not contradictions. When you care that much, your nervous system can remain on high alert, trying to protect what matters most.
From a biological perspective, anxiety is not weakness. It is a survival response. When the brain perceives threat, real or imagined, it activates the stress response. Heart rate increases. Breathing becomes shallow. Muscles tighten. Attention narrows. In short bursts, this response is protective. But when responsibility feels constant, the body can struggle to return fully to calm.
Many mothers live in that subtle state of ongoing vigilance without even realising it.
Why We Created ChaLuMu
ChaLuMu was not born from a trend forecast or a business strategy session. It came from lived experience and a practical question: what would actually help in a real moment?
We did not want something clinical. Nor something that labelled you by your anxiety. We wanted something beautiful. Elevated. Something you would choose to wear regardless.
