The Conversation That Found Me Twice: The Power Pause
A Recommended Resource: The Power Pause Community by Neha Ruch
In 2018, when my son was two, I stumbled upon Neha Ruch’s words for the first time and they felt like a godsend.
At the time, the cultural conversation was dominated by Lean In and the girl boss era. Ambition meant climbing. Stepping back meant falling behind. The message to women was clear: do not slow down, do not step away, do not let motherhood interrupt the trajectory.
And then here was Neha, quietly and confidently building something different. A space for ambitious women leaning into family life. Not stepping back from ambition. Redefining what ambition could look like.
It was one of the first times I had seen that conversation held with dignity and nuance.
No apology. No shrinking. No suggestion that choosing family over career was a lesser choice.
It felt like a gift.
The Restlessness Arrives
Fast forward to the fall of 2024. My daughter had just started kindergarten. My son was in third grade. I had spent years deeply involved in growing our performance marketing business, balancing motherhood and work in parallel for a long time.
But with both kids finally in school full time, and the intensity of the foundational early years beginning to soften, something inside me began to shift.
Motherhood had changed me. I was not the same person I had been when I first became a mother. And I was also entering my 40s, a season that brings its own quiet reckoning.
The midlife questions were arriving alongside the maternal ones. What is next for me? What else do I want to build? What kind of impact do I want to create from this point forward?
The business we had built together would always be part of my life. But I could feel something else beginning to take shape alongside it, something more personal, more mission-driven, and more connected to who motherhood had made me.
The stakes felt different now. I wanted the work I poured myself into to reflect not only what I was capable of building, but what I most deeply valued.
Everything looked fine on paper. Which made the feeling even harder to explain. Why did I feel pulled toward something more when nothing was wrong?
But the pull would not go away. It was almost magnetic. And living through it, it did not feel like clarity or purpose. It felt like restlessness without a clear destination.
That was when I returned to Neha’s work.
The Breadcrumbs
Neha Ruch built The Power Pause, formerly Mother Untitled, to create a more expansive conversation around ambition, caregiving, and identity after motherhood. At a time when professional success was still largely framed through constant upward momentum, she began articulating a different possibility: that a pause, pivot, or reimagining of work after children was not failure, but a legitimate and often deeply generative chapter of a woman’s life.
Her community has since become a leading platform for ambitious women navigating career pauses and pivots after kids. Her 2025 USA Today bestselling book, The Power Pause: How to Plan a Career Break After Kids and Come Back Stronger Than Ever, gives women practical tools, language, and perspective for approaching this season with greater intention and clarity.
Around that time in early 2025, her book had just come out. I had preordered it, and as many of these questions began surfacing in my own life, I found myself returning to it again and again. Once again, her words made me feel seen in a season I was still trying to understand myself.
One section in particular stayed with me. In Chapter 8, Neha invites women to look at the accounts, people, and conversations they are naturally drawn to as breadcrumbs toward what genuinely energizes them.
When I looked at mine, the pattern was unmistakable. Motherhood. Maternal identity. Women building meaningful work. The intersection of ambition and caregiving.
The stirring finally had a direction.
The Word That Changed Everything
Following those breadcrumbs led me to the word matrescence, the complete psychological, emotional, social, physical, economic, cultural, and spiritual transformation a woman moves through as she becomes a mother.
Finding it changed the way I understood everything I had been living through.
The inner shift I had been feeling was not a problem. It was a signal. Something had been quietly reshaping my priorities, deepening my clarity, and redirecting my ambition toward something that actually fit who I had become.
For the first time, I could see that the disorientation I was feeling was not just about career questions or the logistics of motherhood. It was developmental. Motherhood had transformed the way I saw myself, my values, my ambition, and what I wanted my life to stand for.
Following those breadcrumbs eventually led me to matrescence educator training through Mama Rising. I began the certification in the fall of 2025 and completed it earlier this year.
At the same time, I began intentionally building House of Maya, a maternal leadership platform named for my daughter and rooted in the belief that understanding matrescence has the power to change not only mothers’ lives, but future generations as well.
Earlier this year, I stood in front of Neha’s Power Pause community leading a workshop on matrescence, the very transformation I had been navigating since first discovering her work as a new mother back in 2018.
The woman who once found Neha’s words searching for language and dignity for what she was experiencing ended up back in that same community, this time as the educator.
Full circle does not quite cover it.
The Power Pause Community
If any part of this story resonates, Neha's Power Pause community was built for exactly this season. It is one of the most thoughtfully curated spaces I have seen for ambitious mothers navigating identity, ambition, and caregiving in real time.
What makes it so powerful is the caliber and honesty of the women inside it. Women across every version of the pause and pivot: fully paused from paid work, consulting or freelancing, exploring their next chapter, preparing to return to work, or building something entirely new. All asking deeper questions about work, identity, and how to build lives that actually fit who they have become.
Through the membership, women gain access to multiple expert-led workshops every month, practical career and life guidance, intimate conversations, and local meetups with other women navigating similar seasons.
Her book, The Power Pause: How to Plan a Career Break After Kids and Come Back Stronger Than Ever, was exactly the guide I needed when these questions first began surfacing in my own life. Practical, empowering, and deeply human.
You can find Neha at @neha_ruch and learn more at thepowerpause.com.
What Becomes Possible
The restlessness. The stirring. The inner shift that can feel impossible to explain.
These are signs that something is reorganizing. And it has a name: matrescence.
When women understand that what they are experiencing is developmental, the disorientation begins to make sense. The pull toward different work, deeper meaning, and new definitions of success becomes something to listen to rather than suppress.
What once felt like restlessness was often pointing somewhere.
Motherhood can deepen a woman’s clarity. Expand her capacity. Reorganize what matters. And awaken entirely new ways of leading, building, and contributing to the world.
References
Ruch, Neha. The Power Pause: How to Plan a Career Break After Kids and Come Back Stronger Than Ever. New York: Penguin Random House, 2025.
