The Long Game - A Letter for Mothering Sunday

This week I came across a heartfelt post written by designer Rina Patel on LinkedIn, she described motherhood as a sixteen-year contract. From the day your baby is born, she said, the clock quietly starts ticking. Not a countdown to loss, but a contract with a definite term. Sixteen years of school runs and packed lunches and military-grade logistics, two full-time jobs running concurrently, with only one of them issuing a payslip. 

She is still a mother, she wrote, but she is no longer on mummy duty. That intense season has passed and her business is her prime focus again.

I found it clarifying rather than sentimental. It named something that many of us feel but rarely articulate: that there are seasons within a working life, and that moving through a hard one at reduced speed is not the same as falling behind

The women I work with

Motherhood is the most visible version of this, but it is far from the only one. I work with women raising young families, managing the relentless infrastructure of small children while trying to hold together a creative practice. I work with women whose children are nearly (or actually) grown, but who find there is still work to do holding a grown up family together. I work with women caring for elderly parents, watching capable, beloved people diminish, and discovering how much of that work falls quietly and automatically to them.

I work with women whose partners have demanding careers of their own, whose households require a kind of diplomatic management that is hard graft - gracefully underpinning what might appear to be a gilded life. I work with women whose bodies are in revolt, making old rhythms unreliable, and who, for now, cannot simply push through on will and caffeine the way they once could.

What these women have in common is this: they are doing serious, skilled, important work in conditions that are not optimised for serious, skilled, important work.

They tell me how deeply frustrated they are, going at half speed, sometimes less. And when they look up from the juggle and see someone else flying past on social media with a dream project or a shining rebrand or an enviable commission, they ask themselves:

What is the point? Is it really worth it?

The wrong comparison

There are good business strategy reasons for taking an honest look at the competition, but in this particular respect it really is the wrong move. You don't see your competitor's constraints. You are seeing their highlight reel against your full unedited experience. It's an unfair fight, and you'll lose it every time.

But here's a comparison that is worth making. One that, in my experience, actually helps. 

The older self

I sometimes ask my clients to close their eyes and imagine themselves 10 or 15 years from now - when they have successfully discharged their current obligations. Not an abstract future self, but a specific woman, whose business is thriving. She has clients she loves and work that reflects who she truly is. She has built something that sustains her.

That woman will reflect back at this precise moment. At you, now, in the thick of the juggle. Constrained, tired, uncertain, perhaps a little resentful of the gap between where you are and where you thought you would be by now.

What will she feel, watching you?

Not frustration. Not impatience. Something closer to fierce, grateful tenderness. Because she knows what you do not yet know: that the website you built in stolen hours, the portfolio assembled late at night, the brand identity you sweated over while the children slept, the client relationships you maintained at half capacity rather than abandoning altogether, these were not consolation prizes. They were the foundation.

She is standing on them.

Having a website, a brand, a portfolio, a body of experience, is not nothing. During a constrained season, when you cannot give everything to the business, these things quietly compound. They are proof that you stayed. That you kept your name in the world. That you did not disappear.

Anything at all that you can do now is a head start for her. 

She is already in the room

There is a body of research in behavioural psychology that sheds light on why this matters so much, and why it is harder than it sounds.

The psychologist Hal Hershfield has spent his career studying our relationship with our future selves, and his central finding is slightly disturbing: when people imagine their future self, the neural activity in their brain more closely resembles the activity produced when thinking about a stranger than when thinking about themselves.

We do not experience our future self as us. We experience her as someone else, and consequently, we feel little obligation towards her. Sacrificing her comfort for our present convenience feels less like self-harm and more like mild inconsideration towards someone we'll probably never meet.

His intervention was simple and striking. When he showed people age-progressed photographs of themselves - a vivid, specific image of the person they were becoming - their behaviour changed. The future self became real enough to care about.

This is the psychological mechanism behind what I am suggesting. A vague "future you" has limited pull. But a specific woman, years hence, with a life she is depending on you to build? That woman can change how you make decisions today. She can be your motivation.

What I want to add to Hershfield's framing, though, is this: I don't think she should be thought of as a passive recipient of whatever you manage to send forward. She is not simply waiting. She is already present in the decisions you make now: her interests worth representing, her preferences worth consulting.

Less a beneficiary, more a partner. 

Running a design or architecture practice as a sole trader can be isolating - when you add to this the sense that you are underperforming due to personal constraints, this can be really lonely and demotivating - this "partnership with future-[insert your name here]" is not a trivial reframe. It means you are never entirely without an ally. She is there. She is paying attention. And unlike the competition you might otherwise be watching, she is entirely, unconditionally on your side.

My own motivation for working - through the hard slog of getting the thing off the ground, the responsibility for every decision, through the moments when the effort seems disproportionate to the visible return - is almost entirely driven by this. A visceral desire to provide for FutureJulia. To send her a business that sustains her, a body that serves her, a mind that remains curious and alive. To imagine her enjoying, with ease, some of the things I one day aspire to do. 

What this season is asking of you

It is not asking for your best work, necessarily. It is not asking for the full force of your ambition or your talent. What it is asking for is continuity and consistency. Acceptance and grace. Willingness to stay in the game at reduced speed, to keep the engine ticking, to trust that the season will shift and make peace with your current situation. 

Rina Patel put it well: just enough is enough during these crucial years. Just enough for work. Just enough for parenting. Not 100% to either, because 100% to both simultaneously is a mathematical impossibility, and treating it as a personal failing is both inaccurate and unkind.

The older self watching you now is not judging the percentage. She is simply glad you did not stop.

A different kind of relationship

What I want to suggest, for Mothering Sunday of all days, is that you begin to treat that older self as a friend. Not a distant aspiration or a rod for your own back, but an ally. Someone who knows exactly what this period cost you and is rooting for you with a fervour only possible through hindsight.

Ask her what she needs from you today. Not the grand gesture. Not the complete overhaul. Just the next right thing. The email sent. The portfolio image uploaded. The discovery call taken.

She built her thriving business because you stayed, one small act at a time, through the season when staying was the hardest thing.

Whatever your juggle looks like today, on this particular Sunday, I hope you can feel that.