Motherhood in Motion - The Podcast for Mothers with Ambition

Motherhood in Motion

Motherhood in Motion explores what happens in the moments of movement between roles, identities, seasons, and geographies, when mothers are actively navigating what it means to build lives that work for both their families and themselves. Ambition does not halt after motherhood. It recalibrates. It clarifies. These conversations in our podcast surface patterns, connect research to real stories, and contribute to redesigning the systems that mothers and families actually need. This is not about doing it all. It is about defining what your “all” means, and finding the support to get there.

Episodes

  1. Jul 9

    She Kept Moving Anyway: Our Season One Finale

    For the first time, Anushka and Constanze sit down in the same room to close out Season One, a season recorded across continents, time zones, and a regional war. They named this season's arc "she kept moving anyway," and in this finale they trace how it played out: two very different situations, one that froze and one that grew, and the survey work that pulled ambition back into view. They revisit the moments that stuck, from Liying's "my ambition is not rushed" to Lucy's have the joy, drop the guilt, then show how they turned that research into something real: the in-person Nannies & More event where the survey findings became a live panel and roundtables on the infrastructure mothers actually need. They close on Season Two, "the problem she couldn't unsee," and its founders who saw something missing and built it, gentle and fierce at once. Motherhood in Motion is the podcast for mothers with ambition, hosted by Anushka Kalyanpur DeLuca and Constanze Munz.

    She Kept Moving Anyway: Our Season One Finale

  2. Jun 11

    You Cannot have Joy If you are holding guilt with Lucy Bruce

    Lucy Bruce came to Dubai at 21 with a plan to teach for a year. Twenty-six years later, she's the co-founder of Homegrown Nursery — one of Dubai's most loved early years schools — and the founder of Harmony House, an NGO in India supporting 1,200 children with education, nutrition and welfare services. In this episode, Lucy talks about the journey from corporate life to nursery founder, what it really takes to run a business with your best friend, and why Beverly and I have had exactly one argument in 15 years. She shares how Homegrown navigated the Dubai floods, why they've turned down every investor who's come knocking, and what it means to build a business around joy instead of growth. Lucy also gets honest about the guilt that follows working mothers everywhere — and why letting go of it is the single most important thing she wishes she'd done sooner. "You cannot have joy if you're holding guilt."

    You Cannot have Joy If you are holding guilt with Lucy Bruce

  3. Jun 4

    Ambition, Alignment, and What We Model to Our Kids by Harriet Mandak

    What happens to your ambition when the version you've been handed no longer fits? This week, Constanze and Anushka sit down with Harriet — Dubai-based coach, strategic advisor, and founder of the Connected Collective — who walked away from her corporate career after becoming a mother, only to discover that the drive didn't leave with the job title. What followed was a deeper question: what do I actually want to build, and what do I want to model to my children? Harriet talks candidly about the expectation-reality gap that hits so many mothers, why she believes ambition — properly understood — is a gift to your children rather than a trade-off, and how most conflict (at home and at work) comes down to a values misalignment. She also shares why she thinks we shouldn't be questioning whether mothers should be ambitious at all — we should be questioning the version of ambition we've inherited. "Ambition isn't a job title. It's not a business. It's the decision to live a life on purpose, whatever form that may take."

    Ambition, Alignment, and What We Model to Our Kids by Harriet Mandak

  4. May 28

    Stability from within: Liying Tay on motherhood, geographic motion, and ambition that is not rushed

    What holds you steady when geography, ambition, and motherhood all keep shifting? Co-founder of Crunchmoms and mother of two, Liying Tay has been an expat since the age of eight. She has spent a lifetime rebuilding home wherever she lands. In this episode, she brings that lens to motherhood: why stability lives inside you and not in your address, why ambition is most sustainable when it is unrushed and aligned with your values, and why intergenerational living gives a child something AI cannot teach.

    Stability from within: Liying Tay on motherhood, geographic motion, and ambition that is not rushed

  5. May 21

    Clarity, Strategy, Support: Taking Control of Your Money When Everything Feels Uncertain — with Kalyani Seth Soni

    39% of mothers in our recentfollow-up survey said they are experiencing financial anxiety as a result ofthe current UAE context. In this episode, Constanze and Anushka sit down with Kalyani Seth Soni — founder of She Invests, coach, and advocate for women's financial confidence — to talk about what money really has to do with ambition. And the answer is: everything. Kalyani grew up watching the women in her family hold the wealth — managing, protecting, and growing it — whilequietly not counting that as worth. Her own journey through redundancy, a new baby, a misaligned business, and eventually finding herself in the financial markets taught her something she now teaches others: money isn't the goal.Worth is. Clarity comes first. We talk about why women only reach for their finances when a crisis arrives — and why that has to change. We talk about the three basics every mother should have before she thinks about investing. And we talk about what ambition looks like when the ground shifts underneath you. As Constanze says in this episode: ambition doesn't stop. It freezes. It doesn't surrender.

    Clarity, Strategy, Support: Taking Control of Your Money When Everything Feels Uncertain — with Kalyani Seth Soni

  6. May 14

    Don't Wait to Be Invited: A CFO on Ambition, Motherhood, Mental Load and Redesigning the Workplace From Within

    Laura has spent 22 years in the corporate world, nine of them at a major media group where she is now CFO. She is also the mother of three, an expat in Dubai with no family support nearby, and someone who has quietly redesigned the system from the inside. In this episode, she speaks to what our research found starkly: when the current context hit, it fell almost entirely on mothers. She saw it in her own team and pushed back hard. She also talks about why balance is a myth she stopped chasing, how she learned to put herself at the centre of her own week, and what she would tell any woman looking to re-enter the corporate world after a pause. Her advice is direct: find the companies where women are already leading, reach out to them before you sign anything, and stop waiting to be invited to the table.

    Don't Wait to Be Invited: A CFO on Ambition, Motherhood, Mental Load and Redesigning the Workplace From Within

  7. May 7

    Built It Anyway: AI, Ambition and Motherhood with Irmak Atabek

    What does it mean to build a startup while raising a child alone, through COVID, through crisis, through connectivity dropping mid-sentence? Irmak Atabek, founder of Kids.ai and single mother of one, built anyway. In this episode, Irmak brings her lens as a media professional, AI researcher and solo parent to three questions we keep coming back to: how AI actually changes the workload (spoiler: it increases efficiency, not ease), what it means to prepare your children for a world you're still figuring out yourself, and why her daughter is her moral compass for every professional decision she makes. Our research shows that 80% of mental load was already on mothers before any crisis hit. Irmak's story is what it looks like when ambition refuses to freeze.

    Built It Anyway: AI, Ambition and Motherhood with Irmak Atabek

  8. Apr 30

    No Lost Time: Leilani Rooks on Ambition, Partnership, and Holding Steady Through Uncertainty

    What does ambition look like when the season shifts beneath you? Family counsellor and mother of three Leilani Rooks has spent her career working with the relationships inside families: between partners, between parents and children, between who we are and who we’re becoming. In this episode, she brings that lens to the current moment in Dubai: why crisis exposes the gaps in partnerships that calmer times let us ignore, why ambition in motherhood is more feeling than deliverable, and why no time spent steadying a family is ever truly lost.

    No Lost Time: Leilani Rooks on Ambition, Partnership, and Holding Steady Through Uncertainty

  9. Apr 23

    The Community Is the Infrastructure

    What holds mothers together when everything else shifts? Not systems. Not institutions. The people who show up. Doula, community builder, and mother of four Lala Langtry White has spent over a decade building the invisible networks that carry mothers through their most vulnerable moments: birth, NICU, loss, the raw early weeks. In this episode, she brings that lens to the current moment in Dubai: what the current situation reveals about who we rely on, why community is not a nice-to-have but a load-bearing structure, and what it actually means to ask for help before you desperately need it.

    The Community Is the Infrastructure

  10. Apr 14

    The Care Redistribution: Magnified During Crisis

    Motherhood in Motion is built on one core finding, ambition doesn’t disappear after motherhood. For most women, it stays the same or grows. But what happens when crisis hits? When routines collapse, support systems are stretched, and the mental load intensifies? Our initial mini series will explore exactly that. We’re opening with the structural lens. Every crisis follows the same pattern. The care burden snaps back to women. To mothers. To whoever was already holding the most. Gender in emergencies specialist Isadora Quay has documented this across fragile and conflict-affected contexts worldwide. Together, we explore what that framework reveals about Dubai in the current context in March 2026: resilient and well-resourced, and yet the redistribution is happening here too. What does that tell us about how structural this problem really is? And what does it mean for mothers navigating this moment?

    The Care Redistribution: Magnified During Crisis

  11. Apr 10

    Motherhood in Motion: The Podcast for Mothers with Ambition

    Motherhood in Motion explores what happens in the moments of movement between roles, identities, seasons, and geographies, when mothers are actively navigating what it means to build lives that work for both their families and themselves. Ambition does not halt after motherhood. It recalibrates. It clarifies. These conversations in our podcast surface patterns, connect research to real stories, and contribute to redesigning the systems that mothers and families actually need. This is not about doing it all. It is about defining what your “all” means, and finding the support to get there.

  • 11 Episodes

About

Motherhood in Motion explores what happens in the moments of movement between roles, identities, seasons, and geographies, when mothers are actively navigating what it means to build lives that work for both their families and themselves. Ambition does not halt after motherhood. It recalibrates. It clarifies. These conversations in our podcast surface patterns, connect research to real stories, and contribute to redesigning the systems that mothers and families actually need. This is not about doing it all. It is about defining what your “all” means, and finding the support to get there.

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