How to Turn Your Hardest Motherhood Struggles Into a Career With Purpose with Michelle Kennedy

0:07Welcome to Motherkind. We are proudly sponsored by Wild Nutrition Women's Supplements. I am your host, Zoe Blaski, and this is the show that is going to grab you by the hand and be your guide through the wild ride that is modern motherhood. Every week, I bring you world leading experts and thinkers to give us new ideas, new tools, new support, new inspiration for our lives as mothers. We span everything here from work to relationships to mental health and healing to parenting. And I am very happy that you are here. This week's episode is with an incredible woman called Michelle Kennedy. She is the founder of Peanut and she recently has a new book out called It Takes a Village.

0:47Michelle and I unpack our experiences of new motherhood, how it was the loneliness in the early years that felt the most jarring to our pre-motherhood selves. Michelle gives us some incredibly practical tips for how she manages a family and a business, what her non-negotiables are and what she got very, very wrong when she first went back to work. Before we jump into it, a quick ask from me. Please make sure you subscribe. The mental load is high enough as it is. So when you subscribe, you don't even need to think about finding the latest episode of Motherkind. It is just there in your app, wherever you listen to this podcast.

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3:13Oh Michelle, welcome. I'm so excited to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. So if someone has just clicked the little play button in their podcast player, what do you want them to really take away from this episode? That you're not alone. that everything that you're going through is totally normal. And even if it's not normal, you'll get through it and you're not alone. And I think that I wish I'd have known that. Same. It's so easy to feel like I'm the only one. Right. Dot, dot, dot. Absolutely. And I'm abnormal because no one else is talking about it. What did you think?

3:46You were the only one. Oh, I thought I was the only one who didn't know what they were doing, you know, and I felt that I was the only one who was not exactly living motherhood as I thought it was going to be. I definitely had an immediate love for Finn, but what I didn't expect was an immediate rush of fear. I was very frightened of him. I didn't know what to do with him, this perfect little bundle. And I didn't know how lonely I was going to feel. And that was a really, really horrible and vulnerable time in my life that, you know, it could make me emotional now, but I would, I would love for other women to know that we've been there too.

4:31It's so jarring that feeling of kind of out of your depth and lonely because, you know, you're at Bumble, you're at Bumble, you were sort of, you know, big career. I was the same, had a big career in the city, you know, I'd travel everywhere. And I remember in the early months of having my eldest, I didn't want to leave Clapham where we lived. And I was like, how is this happening to me? I used to dart all over London, sometimes all over Europe for work, wouldn't give a second thought. And suddenly I feel actually really afraid to get on the tube, really afraid to go to another zone. It's crazy, isn't it?

5:05How juxtaposing that is. Totally. Sometimes afraid to leave the house. Because things in my head were saying, if he cries, what will you do? And, you know, even as I say that, babies cry. And, you know, when have you ever judged anyone for their baby crying? You never have. But I was so consumed by it, what I perceived to be the judgment that came with it, I couldn't really move past it. I couldn't, I oftentimes couldn't actually get out of the house because I felt like I was just constantly holding him, feeding him, changing him. But on the rare occasion I did, it was a fear. I truly felt fearful.

5:43And do you hear that now? Because you have such an amazing vantage point. I want to get into how you started Peanut, but you have such an amazing vantage point listening to thousands every single day of these threads and stories. Is that a common thread, this sort of fear and kind of anxiety, I guess is what you're describing. It hasn't changed. And that's in the eight years I've been doing Peanut. It hasn't changed. You know, this is a conversation that I see every single day from every woman at a similar kind of period of their life. And that is absolutely changeable. and I think the moment that you know another woman who is going through it or who says me too I thought that was just me it's so liberating it is the most amazing moment where you're like wow I am not going crazy I am not going to be like this forever I am not damaging my child because I've become antisocial all of these things that you kind of go through this weird checklist in your head it is happening the conversations are happening every day and some of that I think is because we're not prepared for this huge thing that is happening in our life no one really tells us until you get there and some of that is because we find it difficult to be really open and honest about that because it isn't a comfortable thing to say as an adult I feel a little bit out of control or I feel scared or I'm not sure that I'm normal or it's normal especially with the fear of judgment and self-judgment that comes from because I think when you're pregnant you have particularly with your first I had all these sort of whimsical ideas of how it was going to be and then it's rarely like that so that that gap of expectation and reality often sits shame and judgment and self-judgment and I think that's what can stop trip so many of us up as well.

7:35Shame is such a really great word and I actually don't think I've ever really articulated it but I did feel shame I felt shame that I couldn't really just run out of the door with my perfect child and, you know, feel like I was really together. I did feel shame that I felt lonely because that made me feel like a bit weird. I did feel shame that I didn't know instinctively what I was doing. Instinct, mother's instinct. Why didn't I have mother's instinct? A lot of those things. So shame is a really great word and something that we just have to own and say immediately. Yes, it's normal and we have that and it will pass.

8:14Yeah. And I think Brené Brown, whose work I love on shame, she says that the only way to really come out of shame is to share it. Absolutely. That it can't, if you share it, it can't sort of grow in the light is what she says. It grows and breeds when you're on your own, when it's dark. And so I think, you know, books like yours and Peanut is just such a powerful way. if you don't feel comfortable to share it with another human, you can read about it or even digitally connect with someone, which is so amazing. It's such an important thing. I think for me, what I didn't have, which I hope every woman has, is someone who I could just say confidently, I feel like this.

8:56Do you feel like that too? Or what do you think? And so I started to harbour lots of feelings of kind of feeling uncertain and feeling nervous and feeling scared and feeling shamed about feeling those things. And so I think what Peanut does and what we write about legitimises it. You can say whatever you want on Peanut, as long as it's kind, but you can say whatever you want in terms of how you really feel. And you know that you're in a whole community of other women who are only there for the same reason you are. So the thought or the the chances of there being judgment is completely through the floor because you're all there for the same purpose.

9:36And that's what I didn't have. Yeah. I didn't have that either, actually. Probably one of the reasons I started this podcast. Absolutely. Purely selfish endeavor. I'm going to start talking about this. Get experts in who can help me untangle this experience because I found it so challenging. Yeah. Made a whole career out of it. Well, so did you. Never did I think that my whole career would be about this. And yet it's the greatest honor of my life. Where does that come from, that passion for women and mothers and community? It's a great question. I love my mum so much. I have an incredible mum and she has been through a lot herself.

10:10And I think she is just so strong and so amazing and inspiring in that way. And it's just always the person who tells me I can. Yes, she can. Of course she can. Why wouldn't you do it? Why can't you? And there were lots of things that I didn't really understand she did when I was growing up that I now understand, obviously, as a mother. They tell you this happens, by the way, and you don't believe it. And then you kind of do. But I do understand. And I think that she actually always just was a cheerleader for other women. And so that was something that was really ingrained in me. I'm an only child, so it's not like I don't have sisters.

10:46And so my friends became sisters and that became, you know, they became family to me. And so I just always have loved women's lives. And I've never, I've always loved being a woman. That's the other thing. You know, there was a period of time where I think we all wanted to be ladettes or, you know, that was certainly my age. Yeah, I never went through that. And I never went through that. I loved being a woman. I've always loved it. And so I've always just wanted us to have the opportunities and to fight and to be vocal about things. But I've, that's something that I've just always had in my life, I think, but definitely started from my own mum.

11:23And when you started, Peanut, did you experience, you know, Mother Kind is not on the same scale. We didn't take external funding, but I had left quite a successful corporate career and I experienced a lot of judgment, a lot of, oh, you're starting a mummy blog, eye rolling, a lot of shaming. And I felt in times that I kind of absorbed that and felt like embarrassed almost that I was in the motherhood space. Did you experience that? What was the feedback from kind of investors and the market? Yeah, I think that at the time that I was building Peanut and I was speaking to investors, there was a lot of like, you're doing what?

12:00Yeah. Why would you do that? Go and do another dating product. You're good at dating. That's a market you understand. What they meant is it's a market they understood. There was a lot less conversation actually around motherhood in the way that we talk about it now. right? Pre your podcast, pre these things. We weren't talking about those things in the same way. And we certainly weren't talking about baby loss, about IVF and fertility challenges, about menopause. None of those subjects were really on the table. And I suppose it was something to do with what I've been doing at Badu and Bumble, where we were challenging social norms there that made me brave.

12:41I thought, you know what, that's the tip of the iceberg. wait till you see what I'm doing at night every, you know, when working all day and building something really cool. And I'm going home and I'm reading, you know, Quora answers from 2008. Like that, that's the reality of my life. And so I felt like I had to build something in the space. And yeah, I think there were a lot of people who were shocked and still people say, you know, Michelle, she's got the mommy app. And, and, and in the early days, I must tell you, I used to, it would cut me. And now I feel like it is the greatest honor of my life to build what I build.

13:22And so, yeah, it's the mommy app and it's also the maybe one day mommy app. And it's also the mommy app for older kids and we do all of it. So yeah, it's the mommy app, but guess what? women control 80 % of household spend. Exactly. So listen up brands, catch up quickly. Right. It's true. And I think there's some, for me, definitely some sort of internalized misogyny that I had to release to feel super proud to work in the motherhood space, which I do now. It sounds like you might've been on that same kind of journey as well of the pride of it. And actually there is no greater job in the world than being a mother.

14:00It is just that society has taught us the complete opposite. It's such a weird thing because we're actually told so many things. We're told that you should build the career, build the perfect family life, have the child, be the perfect mummy, but go back and have the career. But do the career and don't talk about the family life and then do the family life, but don't talk about the career. And so we're constantly trying to work out who we are. And now the generation that we're in, as parents and elders live longer, we're now also carers. And that is, you know, going to be very commonplace for particularly the sandwich generation, where we start to be care for youngers, care for elders.

14:45And so the expectations and the pressures that we face just continue to evolve. And what hasn't really changed are some societal attitudes. and societal infrastructure. We don't have the support that we need in order to wear all of these hats, actually.

15:08How did your identity change as you've been through your two matrescence experiences? Because you said that we're trying to figure out who we are. You strike me as someone who knows quite clearly who you are, that you know your values. And how did, is that true? And how did you get to that place? I think I do now I don't know if I knew who I was certainly I didn't after Finn yeah and I found that really hard I didn't know Michelle the mom at all there I knew who I was at work I knew who I was as a friend as a daughter but I definitely found Michelle the mom that was still some a work in progress I didn't really know that part and obviously as I started to develop not just my career, but the concept of building something that became clearer.

15:54I was going to do this new adventure and Finn was going to be very intrinsically linked. And that was really exciting. And so that became a bit clearer. I think by the time I had Nula, which was many, many years later, it's quite, you know, six years. Yeah, I've got four years. And when I had new, by then I definitely did feel clearer. And I think that's in no small part, because of course my business was focused on supporting these women and these moms at these key life moments. So I was living and breathing the product and using the product because I had Nula and we went into lockdown and I had this little baby at home who couldn't leave the house, who couldn't go to the, you know, the monkey music or.

16:37Yeah, I was the same, exactly the same. And it's really frightening. You're like, well, everything I knew has gone out the window and I'm learning all over again. I now am very clear who I am and the journey I've taken. And it's not for everyone. And I would say that motherhood is absolutely the best chapter in my book, but it's not the only chapter. And that has taken me quite a while to really come to understand that. I am multifaceted. As women, we are multifaceted. And that's a great thing. And you can choose your favorite chapter of your book but it doesn't have to be you know you're not just one chapter yeah exactly and I'm wondering building peanut you know two children yeah holding huge community with with all the mothers you support you know I know you support lots of other female entrepreneurs you know you you hold a lot of things how do you get comfortable with the trade-offs that you have to make?

17:36That's really hard. There's a piece in the book and I really like it because it's from one of the experts. And for me, it really has helped me think about how I approach things, which is you go to the faucet and you fill your glass and then you pour a little bit of that water into every glass that needs the water. And then when yours is empty, you go back and you do it again, fill it back up and fill all the glasses. And actually what you should do is leave the tap on and let your glass overflow and fill into the other glasses below so that yours is always topped up. Well, that's much easier said than done.

18:14I know that. But actually, if you try and keep that in your mind's eye of actually, I can't be all the things unless I'm doing some of the bare minimum for myself. And some of that's unavoidable. We were just discussing, you want to have a night's sleep and a little person appears in your bed and at 3am and that's it you're awake until morning but sometimes there are things that I want to do for me that I feel braver to say that I think historically I would have thought people think I'm selfish or think people think that I'm a bad mommy and now I feel like it's the most important thing I could do so that means that if I need to go and have a shower and close the door and the rule is no one goes into the room while mummy's in the shower I need that I need 20 minutes sing in the shower feel happy again whatever it is do my face routine whatever it is I need that and we all have to respect that and that's the way I can do all of the things and some of the things won't get done and that's okay too what other things like that are your non-negotiables non-negotiables yeah okay in the morning this is a bit weird it's almost like a ritual but in the morning the kids go down and I get ready so I have to shower yeah they wake up at you know six go and get myself ready and then I go down and do breakfast and do everything but I have to have had that 20 minutes yeah just to get myself together I understand if you're listening to this and you've got a baby and you've got a toddler that goes out the window yeah this is when they're a bit older this is when they're a bit older and you get this luxury.

19:53And it is a luxury that I don't take for granted. It's a huge, huge luxury. But if you are in that early stage and that infant stage, I promise you a shower is the most humanizing thing that can happen. And if there is anyone who can hold the baby, hold the toddler for 20 minutes while you shower at any time of the day, it is humanizing and you will come to treasure it. So I treasure my showers. And I really, really, really love to have my Starbucks or other coffee I drink really bad coffee sweetened coffee and I like to have that moment after I've taken the kids to school and just have 10 minutes where I'm just drinking that I do my emails and those are kind of like protected times and then everything else is light to the wall yeah you get no choice chaos a toast just survival what does it what evenings look like for you mad you know also we're at that point now where it's someone's got football practice.

20:51Ours is like a crazy ninja skill. Totally same. And so we've always got, you know, someone's moving around somewhere to do something, some kind of club. I still keep the non-negotiable to the extent that I can that I did when Finn was little. It took me so long to get it that I don't give it up. I like to put my kids to bed and I want to be offline for that hour while I put them to bed. And it took me a very long time when I went back to work when Finn was five months old. For the first two months of that, I missed bedtimes because I was working and I felt I couldn't say it. And it made me resentful and it made me bitter.

21:37And it made me set a really bad example for every other woman in that organization who thought that's what they had to do to succeed. and it took me a really long time to go in and say you can call me don't call me between six and seven yeah or there's I won't answer I exactly I'm your all yours 7 30 onwards call me all night don't care he'll be awake anyway but that time I'm putting him to bed and I want to be with him yep and wherever possible I keep that even now I keep that as well I think it's such a because they can tell as well I think it makes bedtime easier when they know that there's that connection and you're just totally present and phones are downstairs.

22:16That's it. It does make a huge difference. It's almost meditative, by the way, because I, as I think, as a new mum in particular, I loved routine. I really liked rituals and routine. So I liked the idea of doing bath and boob or bath and bottle and bed. And that really, I liked that every night doing the same at the same time. It was good for me to wind down. It's good for me to really enjoy the moment of being with Finn or with Nuala or with both. I loved it and I cherished it and I still do. I love the ritual of it. I like the toothbrush, reading. Finn sits in his bed. Nuala goes, I was going to say to sleep.

23:00She doesn't. She never sleeps. Yeah, neither of mine. Yeah, she never sleeps. It's sort of hilarious to me that I have this bedroom routine because I still do it at the same time. That's it. I'm like, why do I do this so early? My eldest doesn't go to sleep. She'll be like 8.30. I'll start it at six. That's it. it's like what am I doing it's wishful thinking yeah it's also to keep them little and all of those things but I do and then I go into thin and it's when we get to talk about the day talk about their what's worrying them what do they love whatever it might be but it is it's really good for me also it's meditative yeah I think that's true there's definitely something in there and if you could go back yep to that new mum first time around Michelle what would you say to her Or perhaps what would you point at in the book for her to have a reader?

23:44For her to feel better about. For me, definitely it would be to do with feeding. Feeding for me was, it was so hard. Same. We've had lots of parallels. Yeah, it was. I actually feel that feeding was the thing that gave me the most fear and anxiety, actually. And if I really unpicked it, I think that they were very closely related. Also, the type of birth that I had. I didn't end up having a vaginal birth that I really wanted to have. And so there was so much cloaked in all of that, that I think I found those moments really difficult. So I suppose I would want her to go and read those parts of the book to know that, guess what?

24:26Not everyone finds it easy. Most people find it difficult. Most people find feeding an absolute challenge. And yes, sleeping is absolutely rotten and it can be completely depleting and here are here are the reasons why from some expert voices because I always like to know a bit of rationale behind it and then I want to know that this is how other women got through it because I want to know that they did so that's the bit that for me I really needed yeah it was feeding for me too I think because I had I had such an amazing birth experience that I assumed and I'd even done a breastfeeding class while I was pregnant because someone had said to me you need to prep for this I was like okay and still couldn't latch got my stitis far more painful than birth for me it felt like glass was being slowly torn across my nipple I mean the pain was I can't even I mean I feel sick yeah describing the pain yeah pushed through pushed through I was like she I had this block in my head i was like she is not having formula how ridiculous is that so then i pumped every feed really nearly broke myself yeah with my second same thing and i was like right that's it i'll pump for a few months and then she was on formula from and it felt like cheating that it was so totally kind of useful yeah yeah why did i put myself under that crazed pressure that i think it seriously impacted my first matrescence.

25:55Absolutely. I can say categorically, it was a very, very, very strong connection between my own actually emotional and mental well-being and feeding. I thought about it 24-7 and I found this site called Kelly Mom. Oh my God. It was like this breastfeeding site and I would pour, it was before Peanut and I'd pour over these message boards and what to do and all the holds and all the things. I was just reading and reading and reading and it was getting worse and worse and worse. And I was panicking. The panic. And then I actually hired a lactation consultant who was not good and sort of shamed me and said, you need to breastfeed at all costs.

26:35And that was the final straw, I think. Honestly, I think what we put ourselves through. Oh my gosh. And I remember a friend at the time who, all my friends didn't have children. So their view of the world was always very, very practical. And I remember just saying to her, you know, and I'm feeding and I can't, and I was so anxious. And she said to me, I don't think they go to the playground and say, were you breastfed or bottle fed? I only want to hang out with anyone who was on the boob. And I remember looking at her and it was such an annoyingly clever and accurate comment. I was like, why have I lost the ability to see things so clearly in that way?

27:13So I think that that's the other important thing in the book. Every single version. If you formula feed, amazing. If you breastfeed, amazing. If you mix feed, incredible. We don't care. There are so many examples of all of it winning. And I needed to know all of the examples, I think. Yeah, exactly that. That however you do it, as long as you are okay and you feel supported. Yeah, totally. That's good enough, isn't it? Yeah, great. That is good enough. That's what we all need to hear. That's it. That's brilliant. Babies thriving. Amazing. Yeah. What's next for Peanut? Oh gosh, we've got lots of things coming out, which I'm really excited about.

27:52We've got some amazing partnerships coming up with kind of wearable tech, which I think is really exciting. We have some more country launches. So we'll be in France and Germany by the end of the year, which is really exciting. We've just started to really think about localizing the product properly. We did it, we started in LATAM, so it was first into Mexico and Brazil. So this is like our real walk into Europe, which is really, really exciting. And Peanut Grow, which I think, again, selfishly, something that I needed, which is I wanted to just understand what those key milestones were, that, you know, where are we tracking now?

28:31What should my little peanut be doing at um you know 18 months yeah 20 months yeah um so it's just about really understanding where they're at what they should be doing not even should what they might be doing and most importantly what questions women at the same stage had about their life or their kids that's really cool so you can bring the community and the milestones together because that's not been done has it exactly and we have eight years of this data now i know exactly what women were asking in month 22 of their toddler. So I can tell you, and then it all goes back to the same point, which is, is it normal?