Episode #29
Berenice | From Postpartum Loneliness to 2,000 Moms: The Story Behind Mom Walks
What happens when a pregnant woman in a foreign country, with no friends nearby, watches three moms laugh together by a swimming pool and thinks — I need that? She builds it from scratch. Berenice is the founder of Mom Walks, a free community movement that started with 2 moms on a freezing February morning by Lake Lausanne — and has grown to over 2,000 moms across 25+ cities in Switzerland. No registration. No fees. Just show up. But this episode isn't just about a beautiful initiative. It's about what Berenice did a few days after we recorded. She reached out to correct an answer she had given me. Because in the moment, she had said everything was fine. And it wasn't. So she came back — and told the truth. "I don't manage it at all as well as I would like. It's very slow. And somehow, for me, that's okay." In a world that praises mothers who do it all — the business, the fitness, the perfect presence, the effortless everything — Berenice chose honesty over optics. And that decision shapes everything about this conversation. In this episode: We talk about the 70–90% of postpartum moms who feel lonely (yes, really — UK Red Cross puts it at 90%). We talk about the village we used to have and no longer do. We talk about husbands who find Mom Walks and quietly push their wives to join because they can see them drowning. We talk about the identity shift of becoming a mother that no one warns you about. And we talk about the phrase that stopped Berenice mid-scroll: "Hard doesn't equal bad." She also shares the moment she knew Mom Walks had to become a nonprofit, how the City of Lausanne awarded her the highest grant in the program's 10-year history, and why — after modeling, film, and entrepreneurship in Paris — motherhood turned out to be the thing that finally gave her a sense of purpose she had been searching for all along. This episode is for you if: — You're in the postpartum trenches and wondering why no one told you it would feel this isolating — You've ever scrolled Instagram and felt behind, overwhelmed, or simply not enough — You want to launch a Mom Walks group in your own city — You believe that honest conversations between women can change things Find Mom Walks: Instagram Website Follow Viridiana for more: Instagram
