The Map I Carry

The Map I Carry: A Career Mum’s Story

There are maps no one teaches you how to read.

Not the type made of streets or contour lines, but the kind stitched quietly into your bones maps of survival, motherhood, culture, work, grief, and the versions of yourself you lose and find along the way. If you asked me to point to all the places I’ve been on a page, I wouldn’t know where to begin. But if you asked me what it has felt like to live as a career mum a woman trying to build a life, raise children, and carry culture while navigating systems not designed for us then I could show you every corner of that map.

It begins long before I had children. Long before I was promoted, burnt out, broken, rebuilt, and rebuilt again. Even as a young girl, I learnt that women like us have to work twice as hard, love twice as fiercely, and walk twice as carefully. I didn’t know then that this would become the terrain I’d travel for the rest of my life.

The First Roads: Learning How to Carry Myself

My early adulthood was a crash course in survival. I didn’t grow up with a safety net no trust funds, no backup plans, no one waiting in the wings with a soft place to land. What I had was grit, brains, and the unspoken expectation to make something of the opportunities that rarely came our way.

By my twenties, I had carved out a path in criminology and community work not just as a job, but as a calling. I learnt quickly that systems often see our mob through deficit eyes, and that real change requires more than policies and paperwork. It requires heart. It requires the people who show up, even when the job eats away at them. It requires the ones who don’t give up on their community or themselves.

I didn’t know it then, but these years were shaping the coordinates of the map I’d later navigate as a mother: high pressure environments, advocacy, the weight of responsibility, and the relentless expectation to be strong even when your insides are falling apart.

Motherhood Arrives Like a Storm and a Sunrise

When I found out I was pregnant with Lucas, the first thing I felt was fear not because I wasn’t ready to be a mum, but because I knew the world wasn’t ready for a mum like me. A young First Nations woman. A woman who had already learnt how to survive more than she ever should have. A woman who would soon have to choose between keeping a roof over our heads and being the type of mother she desperately wanted to be.

Motherhood didn’t arrive softly. It arrived like a storm fierce, disorienting, impossibly beautiful. I was working, studying, juggling, pushing myself to exist in two worlds: the one that demanded professionalism and deadlines, and the one that required tenderness, bottles, sleepless nights, and unconditional love.

By the time my second baby arrived, I had mastered the art of functioning on borrowed time. I was that mum answering work emails in the parking lot of day care. The mum chugging coffee on two hours of sleep because a project deadline didn’t care about fevers or tantrums or the endless chaos of raising neurodivergent kids in a neurotypical world.

People looked at me and thought I had it all together. They saw the career achievements, the meetings, the polished reports, the leadership roles. What they didn’t see were the nights I cried in the shower because I didn’t feel like enough not for my kids, not for my job, not for myself.

Motherhood has a way of turning you into both the map and the traveller. You hold the compass while walking roads you’ve never seen before.

The Invisible Load: The part of the map no one applauds

There is a section of my life’s map that is unmarked, but it is where most of my strength lives: the invisible load.

It sits in the spaces between paying for daycare, managing meltdown cycles, chasing GP appointments, fighting for cultural safety in schools, coordinating therapists, making lunches, writing reports, driving to meetings, and still showing up for work with a steady voice and a steady smile.

It lives in the guilt I carry the guilt of not being able to be everywhere at once. The guilt of missing moments because I was busy holding everything else together. The guilt of feeling like I’m failing even when I’m giving everything I have.

But it also holds the quiet victories:

The mornings when Lucas eats a new food.

The days Ivy surprises me with a kindness beyond her years.

The moments when I look at them and think, maybe I’m doing okay after all.

The invisible load doesn’t make headlines, but it makes us who we are.

Mapping Survival: The Cost of Living Era

If motherhood is where my map began, survival is the terrain I know best.

The world changed, prices climbed, and suddenly my story was the story of thousands single mums working full-time, paying more for childcare than some people pay for mortgages, juggling bills and school notes and the endless demands of a life constantly at risk of being pulled apart.

One day I shared openly about how hard it was the impossible maths of working full time with two kids in daycare, the rent, the groceries, the guilt and my words went viral. Not because they were extraordinary, but because they were painfully ordinary. Because so many women were walking the same path and no one was listening.

I learnt then that my voice mattered. That sharing my reality was not weakness but strength. That honesty is its own map one that helps others find their way out of shame.

The Roads I Never Planned to Travel

My map also holds scars the kind left by domestic violence, abandonment, and the long journey of healing both myself and my children. Trauma has its own geography. It lives in triggers, in learned vigilance, in the way your body reacts before your mind understands.

But healing has geography too.

Healing looks like Lucas dancing in his first cultural performance, grounded in Country.

Healing looks like Ivy thriving in her own fiery little spirit.

Healing looks like me a deaf, neurodivergent, exhausted mother learning to rest instead of break.

Healing isn’t a destination; it’s a series of small coordinates that appear only when you look back and realise you’re no longer where you used to be.

Walking Two Worlds: Career & Culture

Being a First Nations professional means living in constant translation.

I navigate boardrooms and community rooms, meetings with executives and yarns with Elders. I write briefing papers and I write cultural protocols. I sit in systems built without us and try to bend them into something that doesn’t harm our mob.

And through it all, I remain Mum.

I am the mum advocating for neurodivergent children.

The mum who explains cultural safety to teachers because our children deserve better.

The mum who has to plan for every sensory overload, every school transition, every meltdown, every new medication, every fight for access.

I walk these two worlds not because it is easy, but because my children will walk them too and I want the path gentler for them.

The Sacred Centre: My Children

If my life is a map, then Lucas and Ivy are the centre the unmovable coordinates that everything else must orbit around.

Lucas, with his gentle spirit, his connection to animals and Country, his level 2 autism and ADHD that makes the world both too loud and too magical.

Ivy, the firecracker, the boundary tester, the girl who knows exactly what she wants and will grow into a woman who takes no one’s nonsense.

They are my reason for working hard.

They are my reason for slowing down.

They are my reason for fighting systems that still don’t understand kids like them.

They are my grounding and my undoing and my purpose all at once.

Motherhood is the only map where the destination is love, and every detour is worth it.

Where the Map Leads Next

Some days I feel like I’m still making the map as I walk it.

Some days it feels like I’ve already climbed mountains I had no right surviving.

Some days I look at my children and know with a certainty deeper than bone that everything I’ve done has been for them.

A career mum is not a woman split in half. She is a woman expanded stretched, tested, strengthened. She is a strategist, an advocate, a nurturer, a keeper of culture, a leader, and the anchor of her home.

My map is not neat. It is not symmetrical. It does not follow a straight line.

It winds through burnout and breakthroughs, poverty and promotions, grief and love, cultural pride and cultural battles, parenting wins and parenting failures, endless appointments and endless laughter.

But every part of it is mine.

And when my children grow up, I hope they look back at the map I carved and see not the struggle, but the strength. Not the chaos, but the courage. Not the moments I broke, but the moments I kept going.

Because this is the truth:

A career mum does not walk one path she builds the path as she walks it.

And that is the greatest map of all.