Celebrating Moms Showing Up Online

Every day, people talk themselves out of showing up online.

My life is too full. The algorithm is not what it used to be. If only I had started during COVID. I am always tired. There is no room.

And honestly? Those feelings are valid. Showing up online consistently takes energy, creativity, confidence, and time. Things most people feel they don't have just enough of.

Which is exactly why moms who are building businesses, raising children, running homes, and still finding ways to show up online deserve every bit of recognition. They have the most genuine reasons not to show up. Every excuse is available to them. And they do it anyway.

In honour of Mother's Day, we asked six moms to tell us the real story. What made them start, what they thought it would look like versus what it actually looks like, whether they have support or are figuring it out as they go. The things most people never say out loud.

We hope you see yourself in at least one of these stories. And we hope it inspires you as much as it inspired us to tell them.

These are the stories of Jumi Odumosu, Tess Hartmann, Oluwakemi Alimi, Laura Nurse, Eposi Odagwe, and Kelly Ryan.

(Click any name to jump straight to their story)

You would hear a lot of people say, "I don't want to show up on social media. I'm not sure if I'm ready or qualified enough. And who would even care?" Jumi was one of those people.

She is a wife and a mother of two teenagers, with over twenty years of experience in Human Resources, currently completing her counselling psychology internship and supporting individuals and couples through some of the hardest chapters of their lives. Her faith in God is the anchor for everything she does. The question was never whether she had something to say. The question was whether she felt ready to say it online.

Her turning point came from a cold reach-out. While researching her counselling psychology programme, she messaged a counsellor named Latoya Newman on Psychology Today. At the end of their conversation, Newman told her: "Don't wait until you graduate before you start showing up online."

"Fear gripped me," Jumi said. "What if I said the wrong thing? What if I wasn't knowledgeable enough? What if I was judged, misunderstood, or simply ignored?" She hesitated for a long time. But the women around her, including Damilola Oluwashola, Tolulope Akerele, and Ogaga Johnson, who loved her enough to keep pushing, refused to let her stay hidden.

She keeps what she calls a book of ideas, a running collection of thoughts and moments she captures as they come so she is never starting from scratch. And during seasons when her academic programme demanded everything, she gave herself permission to be inconsistent and came back when she could. What she will tell you, refreshingly, is that showing up has never felt like a burden. It has felt like a pause, something lighter than everything else on her plate.

What surprised her most wasn't the audience. It was the private messages from strangers who told her something she posted on an ordinary day met them exactly where they were. "I thought I was just showing up to share, but it has actually deepened my own clarity, helping me process what I'm learning, refine my voice, and grow into the work I'm stepping into."

Tess spends her days helping new moms navigate one of the most emotional, exhausting, and life-changing seasons of their lives. And while she pours so much of herself into helping other women feel seen and supported, she admits that showing up online does not come naturally. She compares it to her yoga practice, something she falls in and out of constantly, but every time she returns, she remembers why she started.

Years ago, she shared a post about postpartum rage, explaining that struggling emotionally after birth does not make you a monster. Three moms approached her afterward and told her they desperately needed to hear those words. She never forgot that. Take away the algorithms, the reels, the trends, and the pressure to constantly create, and what remains are real people being helped by what she shared.

Before she started showing up consistently, she thought successful people on social media had something special she didn't. Over time, she realised the most success comes when she shows up as her authentic self, even though that feels scary sometimes.

Her content process shifts with the season she is in. Ideas come during client sessions, during parenting, in quiet moments. She keeps a running Google note filled with thoughts so she is never forcing creativity from nothing.

One of the hardest parts has been the vulnerability. "As a doula, I'm so comfortable holding space for others. But turning the camera on myself? That felt vulnerable in a way I didn't totally expect." There were moments she wondered if she sounded too pushy, too much, or not enough. Eventually, she learned that imperfect and inconsistent is still better than invisible.

For the longest time she felt like she was talking into a void. Then people would message her about something she posted weeks ago, or mention a story she forgot she even shared. "Silence doesn't mean nobody is listening." And the posts you almost don't share? Those are sometimes the exact words someone else needed most.

To anyone still hesitating, Tess says it plainly: "There is someone out there who needs you specifically. Not a polished version of you, not a less busy or more put-together version of you. You, as you are right now."

Kemi runs an event design business on top of a full-time job. Her Fridays and weekends are fully booked, and being an event designer means she shows up long before the first guest arrives and stays long after the last one leaves. Finding time to show up online in the margins of that schedule feels almost impossible, but she makes it work.

There was no single moment that triggered her decision to start. She simply realised her work deserved to be seen beyond the people in her room. "I thought it would be easier," she said. "Like post and grow quickly." The reality was consistency, patience, and showing up even when it felt like nobody was watching.

Most of the time, she is doing it alone, late at night, in whatever free moment appears. No team, no strategy. When asked what habit has helped her most, she didn't name an app or a platform. She named consistency itself. "Even when I don't feel like it, I try to show up in some small way."

And what she found on the other side of that surprised her. "People connect with my work and trust me without ever meeting me first." She is building something she wants her family to be proud of, and that bigger picture is what keeps her going on the hard days. Her advice: "Start where you are, with what you have. Your life being full doesn't disqualify you. It actually adds to your story."

Laura builds websites from her kitchen table. She is someone who loves calm, order, and things working the way they are supposed to. She plans outfits like a strategy project and finds genuine satisfaction in making life a little smoother for the people around her. That instinct is exactly what drew her to web design: so many great businesses had websites that didn't reflect how good they actually were, and she knew she could fix that.

But knowing you can help people and actually letting people find you are two completely different problems. She described her decision to start showing up online as a "slow and begrudging" realisation that no one was going to find her if she stayed quiet. So she started without a strategy. Just her phone in whatever spare time she had, sharing thoughts, commenting on posts, explaining her work in plain language. Thirty minutes every day before school pickup.

She had a version in her head of what showing up online was supposed to look like: constantly posting, always online, chasing trends. That version didn't feel sustainable with kids and a full workload. So she didn't do that version. She showed up in a way that was actually manageable instead.

The clients didn't come flooding in through a single viral post. "The ROI is not linear," she says. But people started to know her name and understand how she thinks before they ever reached out. Connections turned into referrals. It's just her, and if she is deep in a client week, she might not post at all. She lowers the bar to what is actually doable. "Wimpy? Maybe. Effective? Yes, much more."

Her most unexpected discovery wasn't the business growth. It was finding her voice. "I thought showing up would be about marketing. But it actually helped me get clearer on what I think, what I value, and how I explain myself and my work." And the people. She didn't expect that either, how many smart, generous, interesting people she would get to know just by showing up.

Eposi got her real estate licence in April 2025 while on maternity leave, a mom of two recovering from childbirth and caring for a newborn, with so much already on her plate. Faith sits at the core of who she is. Born to a Cameroonian dad and a Nigerian mum, she will tell you that one of her greatest joys is worshipping God through song, and that same spirit of showing up wholeheartedly carries into everything else she does.

During her maternity leave, she joined the BOLD course at Keller Williams, where trainer Eddie Donley challenged the group to show up consistently online. "It stretched me in ways I didn't expect," she said.

Her first videos were unedited and unpolished. She posted them anyway, without waiting to feel ready. On the hard days of balancing nursing shifts, real estate, a newborn, and community commitments, she held on to the feedback. "Messages like, 'Thank you for this, I found it very educative,' kept her going."

Now she has support with design and production, which has elevated the quality of her content. But the consistency came first, long before the support.

Her most unexpected win? "Creating valuable connections I would not normally have had access to if I wasn't on social media." Opportunities came because she was visible, not because she went looking for them.

To anyone sitting on the sidelines, she says: "Start, start, start. If I can do it, you can too."

Kelly started posting before she had her qualifications, sharing from school because she wanted people to get excited about what she was learning. That alone tells you something about who she is. She is the Head Nerd at Nerdy Nutrition Corporate Wellness, bringing health education into workplaces in ways that actually make people want to engage. Before all of this, she spent years helping tired moms find their energy again. Then she had two kids of her own and realised she had to follow her own advice.

The "nerdy" in Nerdy Nutrition is not just a brand name. A few years ago, Kelly realised she genuinely missed that side of herself, so she started playing video games, Magic: The Gathering, and Dungeons and Dragons again. She even runs D&D games for her kids and their friends. It is that same unapologetic enthusiasm she brings to everything, including her business.

Her early days were not glamorous. Her youngest was still a baby when she was building her first business, working in whatever tiny gaps appeared between feeds and naps. "Flying by the seat of my pants," is how she describes it. Now her calendar runs everything. If something is not in it, it basically does not exist.

She navigates all of this alongside ADHD and perimenopause. On low-energy days, she relies on content prepared in advance to keep showing up when she can't summon the effort to create something new.

She has tried fancy sales techniques and tactics that promise conversion. What actually works best is being exactly who she is. Her most unexpected win? Not a campaign or a revenue milestone. It was the people who walk up to her and say they have heard of Nerdy Nutrition from her posts. "You never really know who you are reaching until they tell you."