I Thought I’d Be a Badass Working Mom. Instead, I Sought Comfort in a TV Cop Show

There’s a viral quote that makes the internet’s rounds every so often about how mothers are expected to work like they have no kids and parent like they have no job. The moment I was close to having one, it started to feel like I was losing the other.

My ambition had taken me from Toronto to London, England, five months postpartum with my first child, working as a digital commissioner at a broadcaster’s headquarters in Oxford Circus. It was everything I thought I had ever wanted—when I thought being a journalist was as much as I was allowed to want, the culmination of decades of graft, grit, and sacrifice.

At the same time, I was caring for a baby, and every single notion I had about myself was crumbling. My previous desires and drive slipping through my fingers like a child’s neon-coloured slime.

When we’d moved, I’d had a picture of myself as a badass, girlboss, workin’ mom who wears cool suits and goes to the office like la dee da, then picks up her baby with ease after a hard day at work and a casual glass of wine with colleagues.

I’d said yes to the job thinking that, while motherhood had given me new insight into myself, I didn’t need to let it completely change or unravel me. I’d deluded myself that to be undone by as profound an experience as childbirth was a choice, one that I could easily make by going back to work after only a few months.

I took the Tube from the very top of the Victoria line to Oxford Circus every day—a long, hot, horrible commute. I’d not witnessed a father like Matt before, who was present, engaged, and loving. He was as equitable a partner as you could ever want while taking on an entirely new person, someone you’re responsible for night and day. Still, it was extremely hard to leave him and the baby in the mornings, knowing they’d be enjoying each other’s company while I took the long ride into work.

I was still breastfeeding to assuage some of my guilt for going back so soon. I pumped in a nursing room at the office. I was trying to wrap my head around the new job, meet people at work, navigate an entirely new culture, and be a good mom. I felt awkward leaving my desk every couple of hours to pump, especially if I forgot any part of the complicated ritual that would make the process less comfortable.

Nothing felt or fit right; my body was still leaky and round in places I wasn’t used to. I often wore jumpsuits to the office because they were baggy and the only things that fit, so I’d be half-dressed, like a peeled banana, splayed in this dark room, praying no one else in the building had to relieve their engorged breasts at the same time as me.

One day, when a deadline was looming, I took my pump off in a hurry to get back to my desk and spilled an entire bottle of breast milk as I was packing up. I felt bile rise up my throat. I couldn’t fathom the cost of what I’d just knocked over, liquid gold pooling on the dirty floor of the nursing room. There wasn’t time or milk left to pump, so I just mopped it up and went back to my chair empty handed, sick to my stomach with sorrow for the baby I’d just let down.

The constant push and pull between work and mothering was breaking me, turning me into something far less than I was, than I could be. I felt like I was pretending to be good at both but failing miserably.

When I would finally get home, I’d nurse Sommerset to the dulcet tones of the jazzy intro to Amazon Prime’s Bosch, a noir detective show with the kind of hard-boiled anti-hero who sips whiskey after closing a case. He does what he wants, and he has a fantastic view of the Los Angeles skyline.

I became obsessed with the show, from the jazzy intro to the way Harry Bosch carried out his duties so independently, always so fulfilled by his work. I found myself comparing Bosch’s independence and calm approach to my own hurried schedule, feeling so disconnected from the work I was supposed to be doing, anxious that this would be it for the rest of my life.

Bosch was right out of an LA noir, gravelly voiced and plaintive, sifting through the city’s seedy underbelly, solving its violent crimes, and forever searching for his dead mother’s killer. Everything he did, he did with a sense of purpose, and his work was tangible; the pieces of the puzzle were always there—he just had to fit them together. At night, he’d drive up the windy canyon roads to his glass-walled, mid-century bachelor pad overlooking the moody LA skyline and listen to jazz records, satisfied that he’d done a good day’s work. I was obsessed with how uncomplicated Bosch’s relationship to his life was. He was himself at home and at work. He seemed free. I wanted to taste that feeling, that wholeness of self, since I’d been slowly pushing down all the parts of me that were rough or bad or broken, even before the baby, and now they were all threatening to explode out of me like a cartoon geyser.

I watched every night like I was bearing witness to a sacred text. It seemed, at times, like I was being beckoned to a new religion—joining the flock of Bosch.

I was drowning, and Harry Bosch was the only thing keeping me afloat.

I blame TV in general for convincing a very impressionable young me that my work, and by extension my life, required a very specific arc, something to reach for that would readily signal to others that I’d achieved accomplishment and success. That new moms don’t leak at work. That precious breast milk never gets spilled in the nursing room.

I desperately envied the creatives I was commissioning, and they envied my proximity to power, my ability to reject or empower them. The whole enterprise felt like a losing game. I started to feel like a punishing daily commute and an eight-hour emailing marathon weren’t worth the sacrifices.

It all felt a bit like dying.

I didn’t know what I wanted. Should I try leaning further into the job we’d uprooted our entire lives for? My fantasy of what I was supposed to do and be was colliding hard with the reality of who I had slowly become after the baby.

It had already been a year of killing myself, and I felt like I had less than I started with. Part of me also yearned for another baby, to have more of the joy that being with Sommerset was bringing me.

It didn’t feel impossible. Lots of women at work were coming and going from maternity leaves, though one had come back early and talked to me about a new breast pump she’d found that you can wear in your bra and pump right at your desk. She said it like I should be excited about the prospect, but I just thought about how the darkened pumping room had been my daily meditation, a chance to be alone. I wasn’t sure I wanted to give that up so I could soothe my engorged breasts at my desk, beside my boss and a kindly woman who always asked me how I was but never listened to the answer.

I asked to work from home on Fridays so I could stay home with Sommerset one day a week. On days I had little work, it was lovely. When I had to take care of a toddler and answer emails and take calls from my boss, it was like my brain was on fire. I felt, in those moments, that I was deeply failing at both conceits.

I was examining the sacrifices I had made on either side and questioned why the balance seemed so off. Maybe I’d gotten everything I was supposed to want, but I wasn’t getting to experience any of it fully. I was a whisper at work, a ghost at home.

The worse I felt, the better Bosch made me feel.

I became a zealot for the show, telling everyone how much they had to watch it, only to feel insane when I started to describe the premise and realized I was pitching something far more personal and vulnerable than a corny detective show. One day, my boss came in and said she’d put the show on and had to turn it off. She looked at me askew after that. As my job became increasingly tedious, I started asking myself why I was sticking it out at something that was making me so miserable that I’d started obsessively dedicating my precious time off to an Amazon Prime show for dads. Bizarre as it seemed, Bosch’s passion and singular focus had unearthed my own desire to get closer to the thing that gave me a sense of purpose, to actually pursue my own passion.

I’d only ever felt that way when I was writing, but I was terrified to quit my stable job to do it because I’d never had a way to afford to pursue a creative career. But as Sommerset grew, and the demands on my time became more intense and more at odds, I felt far more selfish and protective of where that time was spent.

After months of agonizing over whether to stay or leave, what it would mean for where we lived or how we’d live, I decided to take a tentative step off the ledge I’d been standing on.

One Sunday, Matt and I were walking with Sommerset along Regent’s Canal near our flat. We’d moved here because of my fixation on where I thought I “needed” to be rather than where I was, and now I was going to turn to him and tell him that I was wrong. I wanted to quit my job. I had to quit my job. I’d negotiated some freelance contracts working with production companies that would pay well while I started pitching my own articles and essays, wading back into the writing world.

I already knew that without his support, I couldn’t or wouldn’t do it. It would put extra pressure on him and alter our household income. And all this as we’d started fertility treatments for another baby.

There is a world in which I stopped with Sommer and went on to have a lucrative and exciting career doing whatever that version of myself would have done.

Only, I didn’t want “less baby or even less work,” I told him. In fact, I wanted more of both but not in the way I’d been doing either.

We stopped so I could feed the baby, and sitting there, bathed in the fuzzy light of a London spring, I finally said out loud, “I’m quitting.” I didn’t dare look at him, fearful of his reaction. Matt had always been the practical one, the one who kept the train on the tracks. I was sure he’d be upset about my sudden turn. I told him how life and death and baby and Bosch had all come crashing down on me over the past couple of years, and after being flattened by all four, what was left was the screaming desire to be completely and utterly myself in my work, to find the purpose that was so clearly missing in what I did, what I had been doing for so long. That meant finally writing, not as a hobby or a side hustle but as the thing that propelled me forward.

When I finally turned to face him, I could see immediately that none of my fears about his support or lack of support were real. He’d watched me struggle over the years to fit myself into the narrow boxes so many of my old jobs demanded, how unhappy I still seemed to be, despite how much I’d thought I’d wanted this. He told me to go for it. He’d have my back.

We watched the houseboats on the canal bouncing gently along the water, an occasional arm popping out a small, round window with an empty wine bottle. Relief and anxiety and love and excitement and panic all washed over me as we sat watching Sommer play.

Once I gave my notice at work, I started trying to set up freelance work right away and landed a few writing assignments and a weeks-long contract at a production company that would help tide us over financially. When I began freelancing, our initial plan was to stay in London—a city we had grown to really love—as long as we feasibly could. While I pitched and job hunted, I went for fertility treatments at a clinic for another baby.

One day, I was walking back home from the production company and realized I’d had a headache all day and that I couldn’t stop yawning. It was not like me. On a lark, I stopped at a pharmacy and bought a pregnancy test, just in case.

I picked up Sommerset from his nursery and then went home and stared at the test.

At this point, I really didn’t know what I wanted it to say. We could probably muddle through the exorbitant day care fees and the London rents if we stayed a family of three. Most of my freelance writing work was coming from Canada and the United States, though, and once I swapped the middling fees to pounds, it was hardly worth the time, as much as I loved it.

Matt had also grown desperately unhappy in his own job, which had become a sinking ship. The pressure was depleting him. With no family or friends to help us in London, we weren’t able to take full advantage of the city.

If the test was positive, we could start a conversation about moving back to Toronto, where my mom and sisters now lived.

We’d moved to London for my idea of a dream job. Would it be crazy to move back to Toronto for what was actually my dream? After all, what would Bosch do?

It was mid-December 2019, and I was pregnant with my second baby, when we decided to fly back to Toronto for good at the end of January.

When we returned to Toronto, we lucked into a cheap apartment above my mom, not far from where our old apartment was, which would make the transition back a little easier.

Being in such close proximity to my family after living far away from them for so many years was also making me itchy, like I was back in that wool sweater from the Gap that I’d shrunk in the wash just a month after I’d saved to buy it. And our apartment was unbelievably small and freezing cold or boiling hot depending on the hour of the day.

Sommer loved it, though. He would wake up, barrel down the very short hall to our room, and ask to “go downTAIRS.” He loved being with my mom and sisters after two years of just Matt and I in our damp flat.

In my head, we’d stay in that apartment just a few months before we found something bigger and more permanent, definitely ahead of when the baby would arrive in May. But by mid-February, COVID-19 had killed tens of thousands in Italy, and the death toll was mounting. The stuff we’d had shipped from London, the entire contents of our lives to that point, was on the last boat out of the United Kingdom before they shut the borders down.

All of my reluctance about living above my family disappeared. We were able to bubble with my family as a household during the isolation orders, and Sommer got to have some human contact that wasn’t just Matt and me.

At night, I would lie awake thinking about what would have happened if we’d decided to stay in London and both been furloughed and lost our work. Or how sick we both could’ve gotten commuting into the office every day until things did shut down.

I joked to Matt that Bosch might have just saved our lives.

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There is something especially solitary and lonely about the images that spring up around the word “mom” for me—“mom” is an all-consuming identity, something you are instead of something you do. A parent’s role is blurred: part-time epidemiologist, full-time juggler, all-the-time Lego builder.

The mom is ever prepared, swallowing her desires for the sake of her family, the unshakable vision of grace, the consummate nurturer. It brings to mind the momfluencers in matching baby-and-me nap dresses, rigorously committed to maintaining an illusion of perfection, even in the face of complete upheaval and, often, as the wine moms can tell you, at the expense of themselves.

For every Instagram or TikTok in my feed of a giant, impossibly clean, sunlit home with a placid mom in the centre extolling the virtues of gentle parenting, I thought about my perpetually messy apartment, wall-to-wall with plastic toys, nipple pads, and the screams threatening to swallow me and my milk-encrusted T-shirt alive.

The “mom” label conjures up a certain kind of woman: wealthy, put-together, white. I am none of the above, so I often felt my identity as a mother shore up against the limitations of that word. Yet my experience of parenting was so often defined by it, even as I found myself shrinking away from its expectations of me.

The word “mother” feels like a closer approximation to what I do, encompassing more of my relationship to this role, both active and present, yet separate from the other parts of myself that pulse and thrive and demand to be carved out.

Sometimes, in the midst of my kids’ cries for “mom,” I wonder who they’re talking to. Are those little hands really searching for me? In my darkest moments, I fear that the version of mom they’re looking for is someone very far away from who I am. Although, the steadiness of their love assures me that the one standing right in front of them is exactly the one they want.

Adapted from Life After Ambition: A “Good Enough” Memoir. Copyright © 2026 Amil Niazi. Published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.