When Shakila Jerome became a mum, she discovered just how lonely motherhood could feel. After moving to London without family nearby and finding herself spending long days without speaking to another adult, she realised there was something missing: a genuine village for mothers.
That experience inspired her to create Mère + Me, a community built around connection, friendship and making space for women beyond their role as mums. From small local events and weekly walks to creative workshops and The Mère Collective, Shakila is creating a place where mums can meet, belong and feel supported — with their babies welcome too.
From Motherhood Loneliness to Building a Community for Mums
You’ve described Mère + Me as something you built because you couldn’t find your own village. Can you take us back to those first few months of motherhood? What were you experiencing that made you realise something was missing?
There wasn’t one moment. It was just the same day, over and over.
I did the same walk every day. The exact same walk I’d done all through my pregnancy, then the same one again with the pram. And there were whole days where I didn’t speak to another adult. Not one.
I’d moved to London from Leeds six years ago and none of my friends had children. My family were two hundred miles away. I have a partner, but he worked far out and long hours, so the days were mine to get through alone. And I felt like I couldn’t ask for help anyway, because I was supposed to know what I was doing. I didn’t.
There was one day my daughter cried and cried and would not stop. I tried everything. Nothing was wrong with her that I could find. In the end I just sat down and cried with her, because I had run out of things to try and there was no one to ask. My partner wasn’t home until seven.
I felt like I’d failed. I thought a mother should know how to stop her own child crying, and I couldn’t. What I really wanted was my mum, and she was two hundred miles away.
That was the day I understood that nobody was coming.
You’ve said that so much of what you found was “built for the baby”, rather than the mother. Why do you think mothers’ needs can so easily become secondary once a baby arrives?
Because the baby is the thing everyone can see. There are milestones, red books, weigh-ins, all these visible measures of how a child is doing. Nobody weighs how the mother is coping.
There’s also a very clear point where the support stops. You get a six week check, you’re signed off, and the door closes behind you. But postpartum doesn’t end at six weeks. Matrescence, the shift into becoming a mother, takes far longer than that, and it’s physical, emotional and psychological all at once. The support map assumes you’re finished when you’ve barely started.
And I think mothers do it to themselves as well, because we’re taught to. When you finally get a free hour you spend it on something for your child, because that feels like the responsible use of it. Choosing something purely for yourself can feel indulgent, when actually it’s the most sensible thing you could do.
I want to be careful here, because there’s a lot of good provision out there and I’m not knocking any of it. The question is what sits alongside it. There was very little that treated the mother as the person who’d walked through the door.
Was there a particular moment when you thought, “If this doesn’t exist, I’m going to have to build it myself”?
Yes, and it’s such a small thing.
I’d finally found the courage to start going to a council-led stay and play near me. Everyone was standing around not really talking, so I asked the woman running it whether we could put teas and coffees out. She said there was no budget for it, but I was welcome to do it myself.
So the following week I did. I spent about ten pounds on tea and coffee and I baked homemade sugar cookies and brought them in. And the room completely changed. Mums stayed longer. They actually talked to each other. Some of them took cookies home.
Ten pounds and some baking. That was all it took to turn a room of strangers into a room of women having a conversation. I remember going home thinking, if that’s the difference it makes, then somebody should build this properly. With the mother in mind from the start rather than as an afterthought.
I didn’t have a business plan that day. I just knew nobody else was going to do it.
Starting something while caring for your daughter full-time is no small undertaking. What did those early days of building Mère + Me actually look like behind the scenes?
Unglamorous. I have no nursery and no childcare, so everything was built in nap times and after bedtime, laptop balanced somewhere, one eye on the monitor. I was doing the house, the cooking, the washing and my daughter, and running a business in the gaps. I still am, if I’m honest.
The first events were tiny. A brunch, an afternoon tea at a mum-owned place in Barnet, a wellness morning. I ran a plate painting workshop that got two bookings. Two. I remember thinking, well, there’s my answer. But those two mums had a lovely morning, and that taught me more than a sold out event would have.
I also did the unglamorous groundwork. That first autumn I ran a survey across Barnet, fifty three mums, asking what was actually missing, what stopped them coming to things, what they’d pay. I wanted to build from what mums told me rather than from what I assumed.
The thing that made it possible is that I was never trying to escape motherhood in order to do it. My daughter has been at almost every event we’ve run. She’s part of it.
More than 400 mums have now found their way into the Mère + Me community. What have you learned from the women who have walked through the door? Has anything they’ve shared surprised you?
We’ve connected with more than 400 mums across Barnet and Enfield in our first year, and there are 389 in the community right now. Mums join, some drift away, some come back. In year one we ran around seventy five events.
What surprised me most is how many of them weren’t first time mums. I’d assumed loneliness was a first baby problem, something you solve once and then you’re sorted. It isn’t. Women arrive on their second or third and tell me they still don’t have anyone. Isolation doesn’t care how experienced you are.
The other thing I’ve learned is that this only works if it isn’t mine. Three of our four weekly walks are already led by mums from the community, in their own areas. And from this autumn mums will be leading workshops too, teaching something they’re genuinely good at with their babies in the room.
That was never the original plan. It’s just what happens when you give women a space that’s genuinely theirs. The village gets built by the village.
One of the mums wrote something in our group back in February that I’ve never forgotten, and nobody prompted it. She said: “This is what a real village looks like. Motherhood can feel lonely sometimes, especially when you don’t have many friends nearby, so having this group really means a lot.”
That’s the whole thing, in her words rather than mine.
There’s a lot of pressure on mothers to create their own “village”, but finding genuine friendship as an adult, especially as a new mum, can be surprisingly difficult. Why do you think it’s so hard?
Because nobody teaches you how. Asking someone to be your friend is a thing you do at school, not something adults do, and suddenly you’re expected to build a whole village from scratch at the point you’re most sleep deprived and most vulnerable.
I went to a free birthing session at my local hospital. I walked in on my own and everyone else was there with their partner. Mine was at work. I got talking properly to one woman, same stage of pregnancy, same area, because the class was run by the local hospital so we were practically neighbours. And I really wanted to ask for her number.
You could see she wanted to ask for mine too. There was this awkward pause where we were both clearly looking for a way to stay in touch, and neither of us said it. We just left.
I never did become the one who asks. But someone did it for me.
The very first time I went to that stay and play, the one I mentioned earlier, I was so nervous I opened the door slowly and peered round it before I went in. Everyone had formed their little circles already. And there was one mum sitting on her own who looked up, gave me a huge smile, waved, and told me to come and sit with her.
She felt exactly as I did. She just used the moment differently to how I had at that birthing class. She’s now one of my closest friends. Our children are weeks apart, and she was there through the whole of building this business.
So the fear of rejection is far worse than the asking. I know that because I didn’t ask, and someone asked me, and it changed everything.
What do you think makes the difference between simply being in a room full of other mums and actually feeling like you belong?
A room full of mums isn’t the same as a room where you belong. You can be surrounded by people and still end up standing at the edge of it holding your coffee.
The first difference is what the room is for. Ours are built around the mother. Reformer Pilates, floral arranging, things where you make something or feel something for yourself. Babies are always welcome and always looked after, and we work with brands we genuinely trust for that side of it, BabyBjörn for our Pilates sessions and Etta Loves for sensory bits at events. But the event itself isn’t for them.
The second is that belonging often starts before anyone walks in. Our WhatsApp community talks about everything, and not only baby things. Where to get a massage, who does good
nails, how everyone’s actually doing. So mums often arrive already half knowing each other.
The third is that nobody should have to be brave. Mums tell me they’ve been nervous about coming because they’ve been to things before where no one spoke to them. So I greet everyone myself. If someone’s new I introduce myself, and then I take her to someone. There are mums in this community I know so well that I can put anyone with them and know she’ll be looked after.
It isn’t left to chance. Somebody once did that for me and I’ve never forgotten it.
You’ve also created The Mère Collective for mums who are building businesses or figuring out how to return to work. Why was it important to you to make ambition part of the conversation around motherhood?
The Mère Collective wasn’t planned. It came out of the events.
Once we’d built a space where mums talked about themselves rather than only about their babies, what came out was careers, hobbies, ideas. So many women were sitting on a business idea, or already running one, and felt there wasn’t room for that alongside a baby.
What really did it was realising who was already in the room. Mums come to my events who run brands I genuinely look up to. In my head those brands had a marketing team and a whole operation behind them. Then you find out it’s one woman working from her kitchen while raising her children. That reframed everything for me.
So the Collective is a room where you can be a mum and be ambitious at the same time, with your baby welcome alongside you. Nobody has to choose which version of herself to bring.
I always say that in motherhood we go through the same things in different ways. That’s true of building a business in this season too. And in that room, whatever stage you’re at, everyone wants the others to win.
Do you think we’ve moved beyond the idea that becoming a mother means putting your ambitions on hold. Or do women still feel they have to choose?
I moved to London for a corporate career and that was the whole plan. Becoming a mum changed it completely, but not in the way people assume.
Mère + Me didn’t start because I wanted to prove I was still ambitious, or because I saw a way to monetise motherhood. I was on my own for those first four or five months. Then I finally found the courage to go out, and I met a handful of women in the same room who felt
exactly as I did. Five or six of us in a group chat. It grew from there, mum by mum. Conversations in cafés, conversations in parks, one mum telling another. The village was built by the village, and it still is.
What I’d say is that ambition doesn’t disappear, it gets redefined. I used to measure success in job titles. Now I measure it in flexibility. Being able to work around my daughter. Being able to go to the gym in the middle of the day if I need to. That isn’t a smaller ambition, it’s a different one.
My daughter comes to everything. Every event, every meeting. So no, I don’t think we have to choose. But I’d stop short of telling women they can have it all, because that’s just another standard to fail at. What we need is for it to be possible, and that takes support, not willpower.
What do you hope a mum feels when she walks into her first Mère + Me event? Particularly if she’s nervous, new to the area or feeling completely alone?
That she belongs, straight away, exactly as she’s arrived.
Some mums come dressed up because it’s the first time in months they’ve had a reason to. Some have rushed out having just about managed to brush their teeth and their hair. Both are welcome, and I hope neither feels she’s turned up wrong.
I say to the mums in our WhatsApp community that you can be part of this and never say a word. Just be there. Being part of something counts, however that looks for you that week. There’s no minimum you have to give to deserve a place.
And I hope she leaves with her cup a bit fuller than when she arrived. That someone made an effort for her. Not for her baby, for her, as a mum and as a woman in her own right.
That’s the whole thing really. I wanted a room where nobody has to earn their place in it.
And finally, best (and worst!) things about being a mama?
Best: I love being her mum. I’ll be honest, I wouldn’t describe myself as someone who loves motherhood, which sounds contradictory given what I do for a living. But I love being her mum specifically. Watching her develop, watching her grow. And I love that I’ve built something with her right beside me. I haven’t missed a stage.
Worst: not having my family nearby. They’re two hundred miles away. We have friends, and we have the village we’ve built, and it’s real. But it isn’t the same as being able to say to your mum, can you watch her for twenty minutes while I go to the shop. Or go to the gym. Or just sit somewhere on my own for a bit.
That’s the bit no amount of building fixes.
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