Our Story

It was 4 a.m. The baby was finally asleep. And I was sitting there in the dark doing that maths you do at that hour. When did I last feel like myself?

For months, that question had an answer attached to it. Soon. Once I’d slept. Once things settled down. I was going to find my way back to her, the woman I was before all this.

That night, I understood that she wasn’t coming back.

It wasn’t dramatic. It was much quieter than that. More like finally admitting something I’d known for a while and had been too tired to look at directly.

Here’s the part I still find hard to explain: it wasn’t sad.

What I miss is being my own person. That sounds harsher than I mean it. But when you become a parent, you physically stop belonging only to yourself. Every hour has you in it and this little human of yours, and that doesn’t switch off.

It isn’t a sad story, though. It’s a nostalgic one. Like your favorite drink, or the candy you loved as a kid. You can go and buy it today, and it still isn’t the same.

And I don’t want to go back. I love where I am now, through the hardest and most challenging parts of it. I want to be where I am.

Bittersweet is the only word I’ve found that holds both of those at once.

So then what?

You don’t get the old version of yourself back. You still have to get through Tuesday.

What I wanted by then wasn’t my old life. It was something much smaller: to feel a bit more like a person inside the life I actually had.

So I started trying things. I saw my physician, and came away taking more supplements. I leaned on coffee and tea for energy, the way you do.

But I’d just had a C-section, major abdominal surgery, and more than anything I wanted a gentle healing process. So I went looking for something I didn’t have to swallow.

That’s when my husband and I landed on the idea of transdermal patches, the kind you wear on your skin.

I already knew what a patch was. In the country I grew up in, nicotine patches were everywhere; everyone seemed to be trying to quit at the same time. What I hadn’t realized was that patches had found their way into wellness at all.

So I made my own, which sounds far more decisive than it felt at the time.

I had them made in the UK, plant-based and steady-release, because the test I kept applying was simple: would I hand this to someone I love and feel good about it?

Let me be straight with you about what a patch is, though. It won’t give you back the person you were before. Nothing will. It isn’t sleep, and it isn’t someone taking a turn with the baby.

It’s a small thing. Small on purpose.

I made it for the woman sitting in the dark at 4 a.m., the one who’d just worked out she wasn’t getting herself back. She didn’t need fixing. She needed one thing in her day that asked nothing of her.

There’s one more piece of this, and it starts in that same dark room. So here’s the part that isn’t on the label.

I’m an astronomy nerd. My favorite star is Sirius, the brightest one in the night sky, and the first thing I look for when the winters get dark.

Sirius is about eight and a half light years away. So the light reaching your eye tonight left it eight and a half years ago, which means you never quite see the star itself. You see where it was, and how bright it was, the better part of a decade back.

That one stopped me when it finally landed. It was exactly what I’d been doing in that dark room: looking at a version of myself that had already moved on without me. Still bright. Still arriving. Just not there any more.

And here’s the part that actually helped. The star hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s still burning, right where it should be. It’s just further along than the version you can see.

So was I.

That’s where the name came from. Not reach for the stars. Something quieter than that. A fixed point you can find again after everything else has moved.

A quiet constant in a chaotic day.

It’s also why there’s a different constellation on every pouch. Each one gets its own patch of sky. Nobody asked me for that. I just couldn’t help myself.

If any of this sounds familiar.

You don’t have to have had a baby for this to land. People arrive here from all sorts of directions, and most of them have nothing to do with newborns.

But if you’ve ever caught yourself waiting to feel like you again, and then quietly worked out that you’re waiting for someone who isn’t coming, you already understand why I made this.

I’m really glad you’re here.

P.S. If you want to see what I made, the patches are here. Have a proper read of what’s in them and decide for yourself.

Come say hello on Instagram. @oheyitsirena ↗