The cover came to me on the floor.
I was lying on the thin mattress in my kids’ room, the way I do most nights — because I bring all three to bed at the same time, every time. The baby was still next to me. The room had finally gone quiet. And in that small, ordinary pocket of stillness at the end of a very full day, the image just arrived.
Not a peaceful one. The opposite, actually.
The scene on the cover
Picture school pickup. I’m heavily pregnant — all 185 centimetres of me — pushing an oversized men’s road bike that is far too big for anyone, let alone me. Two of my kids are perched on it. Bags are swinging off the handlebars. My work backpack is digging into my shoulders. We’re making our way home through the Singapore heat, and I am sweating, a little ridiculous, and somehow holding the whole thing together.
That’s the cover of my book. And it’s the cover for a reason — because that picture is the message. Real life isn’t tidy. It doesn’t wait until you’ve slept, healed, or figured everything out. Strength doesn’t live in the polished, after-photo version of your life. It lives right there in the mess.
Where it actually started
The first ideas came near the end of my last pregnancy.
If you’ve been pregnant, you know the worry that creeps into those final weeks. For me there was an extra layer: I was about to step away from my clients for a couple of months — arranging cover, making sure the women who trust me were properly looked after while I was gone.
I’ve shared the deeper why behind this book before — the three pregnancies, the deliveries that went nothing like I’d planned, the gap nobody warned me about, the hundreds of women I’ve coached who deserved better answers. (That’s the previous post in this series.) This was the moment it tipped from a feeling into a plan. Lying low in those last weeks, the ideas started to come — and the book became the thing I could build while my body did its work. A way to keep creating, and keep showing up for women, even when I couldn’t be in the room with them.
Written in the pockets
I’d love to tell you I wrote it in long, focused mornings with a coffee and a clear desk. I didn’t.
I wrote it in the pockets. Waiting on the sideline at my oldest’s soccer. Letting my second stay ten more minutes with her friends at pickup, because the ideas were landing and I wanted to catch them before they slipped. On that same floor mattress at night, after the three-at-once bedtime, baby beside me.
Which is the most fitting thing in the world, really. This is a book about finding your strength inside a life that refuses to pause for you. Of course it got written that way too.
And there it is
You might have already seen the cover. Now you know the whole story behind it.
That sweaty, overloaded, bike-pushing school run — born one quiet night on a bedroom floor, written in the pockets between soccer practice and pickup — is now a bold, flat illustration with clean outlines and warm colour fills. The kind of image that makes you feel something before you’ve read a single word. And now, when you look at it, you’ll know exactly what it means: this isn’t the polished, after-photo of motherhood. It’s the real thing. Too much to carry, carried anyway.
The writing is done. The cover is here. What’s left are the final checks before it’s printed — the quiet, unglamorous work that turns “a book I’m writing” into “a book you can hold.” Nobody romanticises this part. But I’m here for it.
Almost there
Strength Through the Messy & Beyond covers pre-conception, pregnancy, postpartum, motherhood, and perimenopause — not as separate problems to fix, but as connected phases of a life in motion. It launches on Amazon on 19 August 2026, and you can pre-order it now or add it on Goodreads.
The mess is still here, of course. The bike is still too big. The mattress is still on the floor. But that was always the point.
More soon.
Daniëlle van der Leest
Women’s Strength & Wellbeing Coach | Founder of ActiveWomen | Mum of 3
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