The load every mother experiences and talks about, but what do we do?

A Melbourne mum is building something because nothing existed. Here’s why that matters

— and why she needs your help.

It’s 3am.

She’s been awake for an hour. Not because the baby is crying — the baby is finally, mercifully, asleep. She’s awake because her brain won’t stop.

Vaccinations. The childcare subsidy deadline. The school enrolment window. The GP referral she still hasn’t followed up. When was the last time she ate a meal sitting down?

That’s me, by the way. I’m not writing about a hypothetical mother. I’m writing about myself

— and probably about you too.

Who I am:

I’m a 40-year-old Melbourne mum with ADHD, chronic illness, and a history of severe trauma — and none of that shows up on a CV.

Motherhood is the most important role I have ever held. Not a phase. Not a season. The centre of everything. And that’s exactly why I understand, at a cellular level, what it costs a woman to carry that role without support.

ADHD used to feel like a liability. Now I know it’s the reason I can hold an entire system in my head, spot patterns others miss, and build with relentless intensity. It’s a superpower I had to earn the right to use.

The chronic illness piece means I’ve lived the exact problem I’m trying to solve — not from research, but from 3am when your body is failing, your mental load won’t stop, and you’re still the person everyone needs in the morning. I know what it feels like to white-knuckle through a day when everything is working against you and still show up as a mother.

That’s not just motivation. That’s product insight you can’t buy.

What drives me isn’t building a successful company — it’s changing how mothers’ lives are valued. Not just improved. Valued. The women I’m building for have been told their burnout is a personal failing. I know it isn’t.I lived it. I’m still living it. And I’m building something about it — piece by piece, from my kitchen table, in the gaps between everything else.

It’s called togetHER. And it doesn’t exist yet, not fully. But it needs to.

The load nobody sees

That invisible spreadsheet running in a mother’s mind at all hours — it’s not a personality

quirk, and it’s not something she can just switch off. It is the relentless, exhausting work of

tracking everything for everyone, all the time, without end. Nobody gives you this job title.

Nobody puts it on a performance review. It just falls — and it falls almost entirely on mothers.

In December 2024, the University of Bath put hard data to what millions of mothers already

knew in their bones: 71% of household mental load tasks are managed by mothers — 60% more than fathers manage. When it came to cleaning and childcare specifically, mothers were carrying more than double the load.

Nature Mental Health took it further. Research published in 2024 established that the mental load of motherhood has measurable neurological consequences. It is a primary driver of maternal vulnerability to mental illness. This isn’t stress in the colloquial sense.

This is structural damage, happening in real time, to real women.

And in early 2026, The Age ran a piece that named it plainly in mainstream Australian media: “juggling work and family life is still, overwhelmingly, a mother’s problem to solve”

Meanwhile, 65% of working parents report experiencing burnout — and the latest research links parental burnout directly to greater risk of child maltreatment. This is no longer personal wellness issue. It is a public health concern.

The paradox that made me want to build something

Australia is the 9th largest wellness economy in the world, worth AUD $141 billion in 2024, with per-person annual wellness spending of $5,184. The wellness industry is not struggling. It is thriving.

And yet:

Maternal-specific wellness — an entire category serving over 2 million Australian mothers with children under 12 — is almost entirely unaddressed. The maternal healthcare products market alone is projected to grow at 16% compound annual growth from 2026 to 2034.

The services that could help these mothers exist. But they’re fragmented, expensive, hard to find, and almost never designed with mothers actually in mind. There’s a $20 yoga class on one end and an $800 day spa on the other. There’s a mental health waitlist that stretches for months. There’s a government website full of subsidies that no exhausted mother has the bandwidth to decode.

And none of it talks to each other.

I spent years looking for the thing that would help me hold it all together. There wasn’t one.

So I’m building it.

What I’m building:

togetHER is the new village for mums — a place to meet, connect and restore through pregnancy, postpartum, the toddler years and returning to work.

Not another app. Not another subscription you forget to cancel. A trusted destination: one place to find community, access professional support, book restorative experiences, and be guided by an AI concierge — togetHER Voice — built specifically to absorb the mental

load. Here’s how it works.

A mother taps her phone. She talks. She says “I need to book the nine-month vaccinations

and I keep forgetting the childcare subsidy is due at the end of the month” — and togetHER Voice listens, understands, extracts what matters, sets the reminders, flags the deadline, and responds with warmth.

She doesn’t fill in a form. She doesn’t navigate a calendar. She talks — while nursing, while

driving, while lying awake at 3am — and the mental load lifts.

It’s built on three pillars:

Community:

Local mum groups curated by stage of motherhood. Connection events.

Postnatal yoga and pram walks. Peer support and mum-to-mum mentoring. Because

isolation is one of the most consistent and under-addressed parts of early motherhood, and

a mother shouldn’t have to find her people alone.

Support:

A curated directory of maternal mental health practitioners, GPs, lactation consultants, pelvic floor physios, and postnatal doulas. Government resources — parental leave, childcare subsidies, financial entitlements, vetted house cleaners, local support services such as food for new mothers — simplified and surfaced before a mother has to go looking. Return-to-work coaching. Real, practical help.

Lifeline:

Solo hotel nights designed for mothers. Burnout recovery programs. Day spa packages. Sound baths. Quiet retreats. The kind of restoration that goes beyond a bath bomb — because the research is clear that maternal restoration isn’t self-indulgence. It is preventive public health. I will be engaging with businesses to create them for you, whatever your budget. No mother should or will go without.

This is not finished. That’s why I’m asking.

togetHER is still being built. I’m in the validation phase — which means before I pour everything into making this real, I want to hear directly from the mothers I’m building it for.

What’s actually missing in your life right now? What would help? What does restoration even

mean to you, when you’re so tired you can’t think straight? What’s standing in the way?

I’ve built a short survey. It takes five minutes. It is anonymous. Every single response goes

directly into shaping what togetHER becomes.

And if you know a mother who is carrying too much — share this with her. Not because she needs another thing on her list. But because someone is finally asking what she needs, and that question deserves an answer.

“Mothers deserve restoration, not just a bath bomb.”

Take the togetHER Mother’s Voice Survey: https://tally.so/r/gDWXgO

Follow our journey on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/together_village_

togetHER is the new village for mums, being built in Melbourne, Victoria, by a mum who needed connection and support and couldn’t find them in one place. Meet. Connect. Restore.

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Originally published on Substack.