By Liina (Tech Women events sub-committee member).
Five months postpartum, I’m living in a body and mind that swing between clarity and exhaustion — and I’m in my fourth year as a stay-at-home mother, though I’ve never fit that role neatly. I love my children fiercely, but I also feel the ache of wanting more: the guilt of craving something outside of motherhood while knowing how lucky I am to have two healthy kids. I left the workforce before AI was mainstream; by the time I finished my degree and upskilled as a data analyst, the industry had shifted again. Carving out half an hour fortnightly to join a NZ Women in Tech meeting feels like moving mountains — and it took me eight weeks to write this article, which matters to me.
I’m intellectually hungry but physically drained, grateful and resentful in the same breath. This contradictory space is where I live — and it’s the part of motherhood that tech still doesn’t see.
The Invisible Load
When I became a mother, I became the CTO of my household. Every feed, nap, and health sign is tracked in an app. Every calendar sync, travel plan, and financial calculation runs through a system I’ve built to keep my family afloat. Like many mothers, I use tech to help with the invisible load. Huckleberry tracks every feed, nap, and wake window. It lightens the mental load in a way that feels almost life-saving. The invisible load isn’t the tasks — it’s the thinking behind them.
But even the best apps only track the baby or the household. None of them track me. Technology can measure sleep cycles. It cannot measure the weight of being needed by two small humans at the same time. When my toddler decides to sleep without a nappy but keeps wetting himself, I’m not just washing sheets. I’m:
- building his confidence without shame
- coordinating with my husband so we’re consistent
- fitting in a three-hour wash cycle
- remaking the bed while breastfeeding
- recording my baby’s sleep
- solving her contact-napping — the same kind of iterative problem-solving as debugging a distributed system — so I can cook dinner
- figuring out what I can eat with one hand
- trying not to lose myself
This is the cognitive labour no app captures.
Matrescence: The Word That Barely Exists
Becoming a mother doesn’t just change your life — it changes your brain. Matrescence describes the hormonal, emotional, psychological, physical, and neurological transition of becoming a mother: a process as profound as adolescence.
And yet the word barely exists. Autocorrect rejects it, dictionaries ignore it, while slang like “IDGAF” makes the cut. That absence says everything about how little society values this transformation. Matrescence explains why so many mothers feel overwhelmed, judged, or unsure if they’re doing a good job. It captures the constant push and pull between caring for a baby and holding onto your identity and basic needs.
One of its least discussed aspects is social cognition. A mother’s brain becomes hyper-attuned to threat, judgment, and social cues — protective in origin, but in modern life it often feels like:
- anxiety in places that should feel safe
- the sense of being watched or evaluated
- scanning for danger even when none exists
This isn’t fragility. It’s neuroscience. The maternal brain rewires itself to anticipate every possible outcome. Yet tech doesn’t account for it — apps can track sleep, but not the vigilance reshaping a mother’s mind.
Motherhood as a Tech Paradox
Here’s the truth: the invisible load of motherhood doesn’t disappear just because we digitise it. Tech helps me log the baby’s sleep cycles, but it doesn’t reduce the mental strain of remembering to check them. It helps me plan international travel with two small children, but it doesn’t carry the emotional weight of anticipating meltdowns at airport security.
Motherhood in tech is a paradox. We are celebrated for resilience and multitasking, yet penalised for the interruptions that build those skills. The “motherhood penalty” is alive in our industry: missed networking events, slower career progression, constant negotiation between ambition and caregiving.
And yet motherhood sharpens skills that tech desperately needs:
- Systems thinking — orchestrating feeding, sleep, and hygiene routines is no different from managing distributed systems.
- Logistical mastery — planning travel with infants requires the same foresight as project management under pressure.
- Emotional intelligence — reading a toddler’s cues is not unlike interpreting user needs in UX design.
The problem isn’t that mothers lack skills. It’s that tech culture and the wider workforce fail to recognise them.
Closing Thoughts
I wish tech understood that ambition doesn’t disappear when you become a mother. It just becomes heavier to carry.
If we want an industry that truly supports women, we need tools designed with emotional UX in mind — not apps that add to the cognitive load, but ones that reduce it. Imagine a tool that doesn’t just track a baby’s sleep windows but surfaces the right information at the right moment, without requiring a mother to remember to check it. Platforms that respect the fragmented realities of caregiving. Workplaces that see motherhood not as a liability but as a training ground for leadership.
Motherhood doesn’t make us less capable in the workforce. It makes us more. The invisible load is heavy, but it’s also a crucible — shaping women who can hold complexity, anticipate failure, and design systems that work in the real world.
The next time you hear a woman say she’s “just a mum,” remember: she’s also running one of the most complex, high-stake systems imaginable. And she’s doing it with the same skills our industry claims to value.