“Just focus on being a good mother.”
I was 36. Eight months postpartum. I knew then that work filled me up in a way motherhood didn’t. What I didn’t know is that there’s a reason for that. A neurological, physiological, provable reason.
A mother’s brain runs on two completely different reward systems. Work activates one. Motherhood activates the other. They were never supposed to feel the same.
. . .
She didn’t like being photographed. I knew that walking in.
Sarah Michelle Gellar was standing on the other side of my set and I was nervous. A little starstruck if I’m being honest, but mostly the kind of nervous that comes when the margin for error is almost zero. Not the kind that stops you. The kind that means you care. I knew this could go very well or very badly, and that which way it went was entirely on me.
I introduced myself, looked her in the eye and said “I’m a fast shooter. We’ll get what we need and we’ll be done.”
She relaxed slightly. Just enough.
I picked up my camera and just like that the nervousness dissolved. Because this — the viewfinder, the light, the moment before the shot — this was the one place in the world where I always knew exactly what I was doing.
. . .
It was a regular Monday afternoon standing in the Costco checkout line. Cart full, phone in hand when I heard it ding. An email came through from a PR agent. Violinist Lindsey Stirling was hosting the YouTube Music Awards and they wanted one of my images on a billboard.
In Times Square.
Every part of me wanted to burst. I wanted to grab the woman behind me by the shoulders. Announce it to every stranger pushing a cart in that building. Instead I stood there grinning at the screen like an idiot while the cashier scanned my paper towels completely unaware that something extraordinary had just happened.
This is what the work gave back. Immediately. Measurably. Mine.
. . .
Then I became a mother.
It was like Groundhog Day on repeat: wake, feed, change, walk, sleep, wake, feed, change, park, swing, feed, change, nap, wake, feed, change, playroom, bath, book, bed. Check on her once. Twice. Then sleep — briefly — then start again.
Nothing on that list was ever done. Every task was just a pause before the next version of the same task. There was no moment where I could look at the day and say — finished. There was only reset.
The naps weren’t mine either. They were a differently shaped obligation. And just when I thought I had a handle on things, the rules changed again. Sleep was the biggest joke — figure out the schedule, here comes the regression.
Then Em laughed.
The first time was in front of a dressing mirror. I was holding her, saying something completely unfunny, “who’s there?” to her own reflection, but she thought it was absolutely hilarious. I yelled for my husband to come upstairs.
“OMG SHE LAUGHED!”
Her laugh. Then, later, now — is still my favorite thing in the world.
Somewhere in there she started becoming a person. And the stakes shifted.
Millennials will know this — we grew up with parents who said whatever crossed their minds.
“You’re so dramatic.”
“Stop being so sensitive.”
“You need to toughen up.”
Said with love. Absorbed as damage anyway. Mine were no exception.
So I parented with a filter running constantly in the background because I knew what landed wrong and stayed. The more she understood language, the finer that filter got. Every reaction. Every word. Every moment I felt something rise up in me — I paused. Sometimes successfully. Sometimes not.
And there was no finish line. No moment where something inside me said, done. Good. You got it right. Just the quiet daily work of trying. With no way of knowing for years — maybe decades — if any of it actually landed.
Recently Em, now seven, was invited to an Easter egg hunt playdate. It was a drop-off which meant four peaceful hours to myself.
We drove there along a small road lined with palm trees and bursts of bright bougainvillea. She was quiet, just looking out the window. Then she turned to me.
“Mommy, how much longer till we’re there?”
“Three minutes.”
“Only?” she said, a little quieter. “I’m not ready to say goodbye yet.”
My heart.
She hopped out of the car excited, hugged me tight and went on with her life.
I pulled out of the driveway and onto the road. And then it hit me. A wave so warm and so sudden my eyes filled with tears. I missed her. Barely two minutes apart.
But none of that mattered.
The love doesn’t arrive and depart — it just lives there. Constant. Inexplicable. Taking up most of the space in my chest.
Always.
“Just focus on being a good mother.”
I spent years thinking something was wrong with me. Turns out the reward systems were just doing exactly what they were designed to do. Both of them. All along.
I’m a good mother. I love my work. There was always room for both.
Kate Szatmari is a celebrity photographer and writer exploring motherhood, the nervous system, and the slow work of reparenting yourself while raising a kid. A Hungarian immigrant based in the US, she writes through lived experience with a sharp eye for cultural patterns most of us were never given language for. She publishes on Substack at kateszatmari1.substack.com.
