Feminist Project Management and Motherhood: Reflections from a first time mom

Hi folks,

It’s been a while since our last blog post, but from this month onwards we’re back with a monthly rhythm. We’re restarting with a two-part blog series that brings Feminist Project Management (FPM) into conversation with care, life changes, and diapers.

This post is the first in a two-part series in which Janna Visser and Laura Dix reflect on motherhood through a FPM lens. These reflections are written from our own voices and experiences. While this series speaks explicitly about motherhood, the reflections offered here extend far beyond parenting alone. The lens of care, interdependence, and invisible labour is equally relevant to other forms of care work: caring for family members, partners, communities, movements, and ourselves.

Five months into motherhood, I have been thinking a lot about project management. Not in the conventional sense of timelines and deliverables, but through the lens of FPM: work shaped by relationships, care, and constant adaptation.

The early months of becoming a parent are defined by uncertainty. Plans shift daily, learning happens on the go, and flexibility is required. Needs (those of the baby, yourself, and your partner) are continually evolving. This period has required ongoing prioritisation, adjustment, and emotional labour, alongside a renegotiation of roles and identity.

Seen through this lens, motherhood (or parenthood) and broader household work are a form of project management. They involve planning and re-planning, managing risks, coordinating schedules, and allocating limited resources (sleep being one of the most obvious). They also require ally management: balancing the needs of a baby, a partner, family members, and work responsibilities. Much of this labour remains invisible precisely because it is framed as natural or instinctive. FPM challenges this by naming care work as skilled, political, and structurally shaped labour.

The core practices of FPM become especially visible in everyday care work:

Care is not a side task; it is the infrastructure that holds everything together. Caring for a baby, caring for one another as partners, and caring for oneself are deeply interconnected. When care is deprioritised, the entire system becomes fragile.

Communication is constant and essential. Parenthood demands ongoing conversations about needs, capacities, expectations, and boundaries. Unspoken assumptions quickly lead to tension; clarity and openness create space for resilience and mutual support.

Collaboration is central. “It takes a village” is not a romantic notion, but a recognition of interdependence. Accepting help, sharing responsibilities, and relying on others are not failures, but necessary and collective practices of care.

Reflection allows for adjustment and sustainability. The transition into parenthood reshapes identities, relationships, and dynamics. Making time to reflect, individually and together, supports learning, emotional wellbeing, and more conscious choices about how care and labour are shared.

What might change if we took these lessons seriously in our organisations, projects, and movements? What if care, communication, collaboration, and reflection were treated as core elements of effective project management, rather than as soft or optional concerns?

Motherhood does not exist outside professional or political life. It exposes the limits of extractive, efficiency-driven models of work and points towards more feminist, humane, and sustainable ways of organising how we live and work together.

We’d love to hear from you: how do FPM practices show up in your work and daily life? Are there ways you’ve seen these emerge outside of traditional “projects”, in your home, community, or organisation?