In Singapore, men and women participate in the workforce at nearly identical rates through their twenties. The gap only opens when women hit their thirties, which is to say, when children arrive. After that, the lines diverge and they don't come back together.

I know this because I'm inside that gap.

After I had my second child, I stepped away from work to be the primary caregiver for my kids. I had already started fractional work a few years ago, finding the work that fit my life, the ones that could bend around school pickups and fevers and the general unpredictability of small children. But while I rebuilt my career and myself, there was something nagging at the back of my head.

It was only natural that I wanted to find others who traveled the same path. Maybe it was for reassurance, that I wasn't crazy to choose this. Instead, I found that I rarely read about mothers going fractional, and for mothers that rebuilt themselves and built businesses, the messy middle was glossed over. I wanted to read about mothers who had stepped away and come back on different terms. The version with the doubt still in it, the four-year pause. I wanted the version where the woman is still figuring it out and building anyway (because we're strong and tenacious!).

The pieces I found had been polished into something aspirational, which made them harder to trust and harder to learn from. The mess had been edited out, but the mess was the part I needed to see.

At the same time, I also received many well-intentioned questions, "so when are you going back full-time?" As if my life is measured in productivity and contribution to society. As if after childbirth, it's back to status quo. Any parent that has gone through it knows it changes you irrevocably, right down to identity. And yet the expectation is that you come back the same.

So I started asking women directly. I wanted to know what happened when mothers build their work around their lives. The meaningful work that happened between someone's school run and someone else's nap window.

In my conversations, I saw new shoots that grew. One built a business from the materials of her life. Another lost her job and instead rebuilt a new business on her own terms. And another continued to lean into her passions, moulding her life gently around her family. For many, I learnt about how they build clarity inside a life that seemed to be rearranging itself around the needs of others. It's about holding onto the thread of what you're building when your whole day folds in on itself and the thing you were working on has to wait another week. And that's where most of it lives.

Building in the margins is not easy, and the hardest part, for me at least, was the professional isolation. The infrastructure for community is built for a different life. Meetups are in the evenings (bedtime). Conferences are on weekdays (school). Networking events assume you can turn up at 7pm, which is exactly when you're negotiating pyjamas and reading one more chapter of the same book for the eleventh night running. You lose the shorthand. You lose the casual "how's your project going" that used to happen in an office kitchen. Even coffee with a friend falls apart when your kid wakes up with a fever and your whole day rearranges itself around a thermometer. And yet these women keep deciding, over and over again, that what they're building is worth continuing. That's the part that gets me.

What I've found, now that I've been asking, is that the women inside this gap are already building. Quietly, stubbornly, from living room floors and kitchen tables, between drop-off and laundry and the eleventh reading of the same bedtime book. And when you ask them about it, they describe it as being almost surprising. As if the building happened while they were paying attention to something else.

That's what I want to make visible. The thing that's already happening, in the lives of women who are doing it without a stage to tell it from. That was enough to keep going. And enough to start asking.

I'm still working on it, so I can't share more than what I have already, but I hope you'll continue with me as I explore life outside the salaried 9 to 6.