Michele Akester-Marsh spent her birthday this year in a Dundee hotel.
No husband. No children.
Three days of nobody needing anything from her, which was the entire point.
The 46-year-old from north-east Scotland has two boys, aged 14 and 10, and a marriage she’s happy in.
READ MORE: I gave up on men and proposed to myself – now they pay me £10k a month to flex my MUSCLES
She also has a rule she repeats often enough that it’s become a kind of household law. Me first, mum second.
“It doesn’t mean I love my children any less,” she told Creatorzine.
“It’s actually the opposite.”
The morning that started it
The shift came in 2017. She was renovating a house, raising two young sons, working, and looking after her husband Garry through a period of ill health.
All at once. The maths didn’t work, and she knew it.
“I was so fed up with waking up every morning exhausted, wondering how I’d get through the day’s logistics and wishing I could be teleported back to bed at the end of it,” she said.
“Life had become so serious and stagnant. Even the fun things weren’t fun because I was too tired.”
By 2019 she’d had enough of running on autopilot.
The fix started small. Five minutes of yoga. A cup of tea before any chores.
A short time-out when the stress climbed. None of it dramatic. All of it deliberate.
The cleaner she couldn’t afford
The harder boundaries came later, and they cost money she didn’t think she had.
“One of the hardest things was deciding to hire a cleaner, even though we couldn’t afford one,” she said.
“I felt like I had to justify it to my husband as he was usually worried about money.
But deep down, I’d already made the decision that we were getting one.”
She was working six days a week at the time and spending the seventh cleaning.
The cleaner gave Sundays back to the family. Garry came round to the idea fast.
Mauritius, and the permission she didn’t get
The real test was a flight. A friend living in Mauritius invited her out, and Michele’s first instinct was to ask Garry whether she could go.
His answer is the best line in the whole story.
“I remember my husband saying, ‘I’m not going to give you permission, you have to decide for yourself.'”
So she went. The boys didn’t fall apart. The house didn’t burn down.
Garry and the kids had a good week without her, which was the evidence she’d been quietly waiting for.
“It solidified that it’s safe for me to live ‘me first and mum second’,” she said.
“I’d carried this belief that if it wasn’t me holding everything together, somehow it would all fall apart.”
Since then she’s added solo trips to visit family in Dorset, regular massages, yoga retreats, and the three-day Dundee birthday, which was only meant to be two nights until Garry and the boys told her to make it three.
These days she tells her husband she’s going rather than asking.
The judgement
Not everyone approves, and Michele has noticed.
“There’s been a theme of ‘why should Garry help cook dinner when he’s been at work all day’ – and my response is that I’ve also been working all day.”
She also hears women tell her that her husband must be more helpful than theirs.
Her view is that most partners are more capable than they’re given the chance to prove.
“Our partners and children aren’t mind readers,” she said.
“They can only learn when we give them the opportunity. When we stop carrying everything alone, everyone benefits.”
She says the change has been visible at home. Garry takes more breaks and works himself into the ground less often.
The boys, she reckons, handle friendship trouble at school better, because they’ve learned not every problem is theirs to absorb.
Why it matters
Michele now does this for a living.
She works as a self-leadership mentor for working mums under the name Unshakeable Mama, which means her own household has become both her message and her marketing.
For creators building businesses around personal philosophy, that’s the model now.
The life is the product, and the audience is buying the proof that it works.
The “me-time” message also lands in a moment when burnout content, soft-life messaging and anti-hustle takes are filling parenting feeds. Michele’s spin has a sharper edge than most.
“We were told we could have it all,” she said,
“but somewhere along the way, we started believing that meant we had to do it all, all at the same time.
That’s one of the biggest ways I believe feminism backfired for women.”
Expect more of this. The working-mum wellness space is crowded, and the creators cutting through are the ones willing to say something other mums will argue with.
Michele has found hers, and she’s not asking permission to keep saying it.
