Why this exists.

I didn't set out to build an app. I set out to get through my pregnancy without falling apart.

It wasn't planned. And in those first weeks, before we'd told anyone, before we'd really let it land, I was quietly searching for something to hold onto. Meditations that could help me ease my nervous system. Something that matched where I actually was. Not the glowing, grateful version of pregnant. I couldn't find them.

So I decided to write my own meditations and affirmations. Printed them out. Stuck them on the kitchen wall and read them every morning and every evening. Day after day. The full seven and a half months after finding out.

Later, when the news had landed and we were very excited to soon become a little family, a different fear crept in. I wanted to give birth at home, naturally. Not to prove anything, but because the thought of being moved through a medical system where things happen to you scared me more than the birth itself. And again, there was nothing out there for that specific desire and fear. So I wrote more. Kept talking to myself. Kept repeating the words until they were somewhere deeper than my head. Basically training my mind, day by day, so that when the moment came I wouldn't lose control.

When labour started that morning, it was just me. My husband was home, but I wanted space. I moved through the house, he followed quietly and put a candle in whichever room I walked into next. The midwife came by at 8pm to check on me, then left. They'd been called to an emergency. Shortly after they left, at 9:20pm, my waters broke and the urge to push hit so hard I couldn't hold it. My husband called them in a panic. They told him to put me on the phone and we breathed together, so I would hold off on pushing, while they ran to their car. They were at the door ten minutes later. Eight minutes after that, my daughter was born.

That whole day, it was just me. And I never lost control.

I know it was because of those seven months. The wall. The words. The daily, stubborn practice of building the kind of mind you need when you start becoming a mother.

Then came postpartum. I'm a lawyer. You're expected to return to the hours, the sharpness, the version of yourself that existed before. I tried. I was exhausted in a way I hadn't prepared for, emotional in ways I couldn't explain at work, woken so many times at night that the days blurred into each other. Pumping between meetings because I so badly wanted to give that to my daughter for as long as possible.

I needed something I could listen to on my bike to the office. Something short for 3am, when my daughter had woken me and the silence felt too loud. Nothing existed for that either.

So I asked my partner, he's a developer, if we could make them. He started building. This was right when ChatGPT launched and AI became real for everyone. We quickly realised that what I'd always needed wasn't more recordings. It was something that could find the right words for today. My mood, this week, what I was actually carrying. Mine.

The app has been in development since. In that same time, we've been trying for a second child. I have PCOS, so nothing about that is simple or guaranteed. I've used the app every day through it. Through the waiting, the disappointment, the effort of staying calm and hopeful.

I have been my own first user through every single phase this app is built for. Unexpected pregnancy. Labour, alone. Postpartum exhaustion I couldn't show at work. Trying to conceive with PCOS, month after month.

Because I've lived every single stage, with the high highs and the low lows, I know I'm not the only one who needed this. I see it in the women around me constantly. Keeping it together in meetings. Staying hopeful quietly. Laughing at the right moments while carrying something nobody at the table knows about.

They deserve support that actually meets them where they are. My Maternal Mind is for every one of them.