From Heartbreak to “Watch Me Build My Life”

Picture this.

You're 24. You're somewhat convinced you're living your best life. You have a stable job, you have great friends, spend your money on whatever you want, make plans, go out, sleep in whenever you can, ultimately only caring for yourself.

Life isn't perfect, but hey... you're young, you're beautiful, you're full of life and at the peak of your existence...You've got time.

You're focusing on your relationship, making plans for the future and assuming that life will more or less continue along the path you've imagined for yourself.

And then...

BAM.

You're pregnant. Single. And suddenly responsible for an entirely new human being.

Plot twist.

One minute you're worrying about what you're doing this weekend, and the next you're Googling things like “is it normal for a newborn to scream and cry their guts out?” at 2 a.m. in the morning and wondering how on earth you're supposed to know what you're doing.

And yes, I had people around me. I had family. I had friends. I had people who loved me, supported me and wanted the best for me. But there is a particular kind of fear that comes with realizing that you are now responsible for another little life.

And then there was the fact that the person I thought would be beside me through it all... wasn't. The baby daddy aka 'the sperm donor' had exited the building. And suddenly, the future I'd pictured for myself looked nothing like the one standing in front of me.

I won't lie. I was scared. Actually, scared doesn't quite cover it. I had so many questions.

What am I going to do?

How am I going to manage this?

What happens to my career?

What happens to my dreams?

Who am I now?

Because becoming a mother doesn't just bring a baby into your life, it introduces you to an entirely new version of yourself and at the beginning, I didn't know her very well. I was learning how to be someone's mom while simultaneously trying to figure out how to still be me.

There were hard days. There were exhausting days. There were days when I genuinely wondered whether I was ever going to feel like myself again. But somewhere between the sleepless nights, the little smiles, the chaos, the tears and learning how to do things I had never done before...

I started changing, not overnight, not in some dramatic movie montage where suddenly everything makes sense.

Slowly.

I started realizing that I didn't want to simply survive my life. I wanted to build one. I wanted more. 

More for myself.

More for my son.

More experiences.

More knowledge.

More confidence.

More money.

More freedom.

More adventure.

More stories.

I started thinking about the things I'd always wanted to do but kept putting somewhere in the imaginary folder labelled “one day.”

And I started wondering:

Why not now?

Why couldn't I learn about investing?

Why couldn't I learn how businesses work?

Why couldn't I create something of my own?

Why couldn't I make money doing something I actually enjoy?

Why couldn't I travel?

Why couldn't I write?

Why couldn't I build something that belonged to me?

And that's when something shifted. I stopped looking at my life as something that had happened to me and started looking at it as something I could actually create. Because here's the thing about heartbreak. At first, it can make you feel like you've lost everything.

But eventually, if you let yourself heal and actually take a good, hard look at your life, you will realize that losing the wrong person can also create space for finding yourself. And I found myself becoming much more ambitious than I had ever expected.

Thinking about the kind of life I want my son to grow up seeing. And somewhere along the way, I realized something incredibly important:

Nobody was coming to save me.

And strangely enough... That became empowering. Because it meant I had to stop waiting.

I could save myself.

I could build myself.

I could choose myself.

I could become the woman I wanted to be.

And my son became a huge part of that motivation. Not because I want him to grow up thinking his mother had everything figured out. Quite the opposite. I want him to see what it looks like to start somewhere, make mistakes, learn, keep going and build something from nothing. I want him to see that your circumstances don't have to become your identity.

That you can change direction.

That you can dream again.

That you can start over.

That you can decide you want more and then actually go after it.

And now, here we are two years later and I'm still figuring things out. I absolutely do not have a magical five-step plan to becoming a millionaire. 😂 I don't have a giant business empire. I certainly don't wake up every morning at 5 a.m. drinking green juice while simultaneously closing million-rand deals. I'm just a woman who decided that she doesn't want to spend the rest of her life simply going to work, paying bills and waiting for weekends.

I want to create.

I want to write.

I want to learn.

I want to build businesses.

I want to understand money.

I want financial freedom.

I want to travel.

I want experiences.

I want to create opportunities not just for myself, but eventually for other women too.

And most importantly...

I want to build something I'm proud of.

That's where MILF Money Mindset comes in, this isn't me pretending to have all the answers. It's the opposite, it's is me documenting the process of figuring it out.

• The business ideas.
• The money experiments.
• The things that work.
• The things that spectacularly fail.
• The books I'm reading.
• The lessons I'm learning.
• The motherhood stories.
• The funny moments.
• The uncomfortable moments.
• The goals.
• The glow-ups.
• The setbacks.

The random ideas that may or may not turn into something.

Everything.

I'm starting from where I am and seeing how far I can take this. Because maybe the life I imagined at 24 wasn't the life I was supposed to have. Maybe the story simply needed a rewrite and perhaps that's the best thing that ever happened to me. I thought I was waiting for someone to come along and make my life a fairytale.

So, welcome to MILF Money Mindset

I'm 26. I'm a mom. I'm ambitious. I'm figuring it out.

And I'm building my way forward.

Turns out...

I was the one who had to pick up the pen.