Kayla Monetta on Creative Work, Femininity, and Becoming a Mother

by Jessie Wiener

I met Kayla Monetta for coffee in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband and son, Ellis. Over the next hour and change, we talked about music, emergency cervical surgery, breastfeeding, Berlin, tennis, vintage markets she still occasionally sells at, and the strange experience of suddenly feeling more connected to womanhood after spending much of her life trying not to lean too hard into it.

Before motherhood, Kayla had spent years moving around. San Francisco to New York. New York to Los Angeles. Almost Berlin. Music had always been the throughline, even if the path into film and television wasn’t straightforward. After college, she worked at record labels, wrote about music, signed artists, and eventually found her way into music supervision through advertising before transitioning into film and television work.

“It was always the goal,” she says. “I just took a really roundabout way to get there.”

During the pandemic, she and her husband got rid of their apartment, quit their jobs, and prepared to move permanently to Germany, only to be stranded in New York when entry restrictions suddenly changed.

“We were just suddenly like, okay… I guess we live in New York again.”

Instead of slowing things down professionally, the detour accelerated them. Her husband’s career in production design took off, while Kayla started landing larger music supervision projects. Eventually, family and work pulled them back to Los Angeles.

Around the same time, she and her friend and colleague Alison finally launched MOMO.FM, the music supervision company they had spent years talking about starting together after spending most of their careers working under men.

They launched right before the Hollywood writer and actor strikes, when nobody was working and everyone suddenly had time to meet. The timing ended up helping them establish themselves quickly.

“We were able to introduce ourselves to everyone as a duo before things picked back up.”

Now the company works across films, television shows, and advertisements, including projects with Netflix, A24, Hulu, and NBC. She lights up talking about her work: the pacing of television, the intimacy of indie films, and the exciting challenge of getting people to take creative risks.

The Pregnancy She Thought She’d Have

Kayla had convinced herself that getting pregnant would take a long time. Watching close friends navigate fertility struggles made her worry she might face the same thing herself.

Instead, she got pregnant almost immediately.

At first, pregnancy felt exactly as she had imagined it would. She kept playing tennis, stayed active, planned outfits around the bump, and genuinely enjoyed the physical changes happening in her body.

“I had this whole vision of being fit and pregnant and wearing all these cute clothes.”

Then, during a routine 24-week scan, doctors discovered her cervix was dilating and told her she needed surgery the next morning.

The shift from normal pregnancy to medical crisis happened instantly. One day, she was working out and planning travel; the next, she was awake during emergency surgery, listening to her baby’s heartbeat while doctors inserted stitches to prevent early labor.

Afterward, she was placed on modified bed rest, a directive that quickly became all-consuming because nobody could fully explain what “modified” definitively meant. She remembers trying to parse what was actually dangerous versus what simply felt dangerous, while simultaneously feeling like every decision she made could somehow affect the baby.

“You could go out to dinner, my doctor told me,” she says, laughing now, “but you shouldn’t walk from the parking lot to the restaurant to get there.”

At night, she spiraled through Reddit threads trying to figure out what was actually necessary and what wasn’t. Every decision suddenly felt loaded with consequence.

“I spent half my pregnancy terrified I was going to go into early labor, and if I did, it was somehow my fault.”

At the same time, the creative life complicated everything further. Her husband had to turn down a film job out of town that would have given him the union hours to qualify for health insurance because he needed to stay home and take care of her while she recovered. 

Looking back now, she talks less about the surgery itself and more about how quickly everything happened once she entered the medical system: decisions moving fast, explanations sometimes feeling incomplete, and fear filling in the many gaps.

“I feel really strongly now about women’s health education,” she says. “There were so many things happening that I didn’t fully understand, but I was terrified.”

Learning to Ask for Help

Kayla describes herself as someone who historically struggled to ask for help, even when she clearly needed it. During the hardest parts of her pregnancy, she mostly tried to push through things alone. She avoided therapy, isolated herself a bit, and spent a lot of time trying to research her way into feeling calmer.

Then a friend convinced her to hire a doula named Roxy, who changed everything for her. More than anything, Kayla says, she helped slow things down enough for her to understand what was happening as it happened. Before decisions were made, Roxy would explain what doctors were recommending, what questions Kayla could ask, and what her options actually were. In a moment that otherwise felt fast and clinical, that clarity mattered.

“She gave me agency over what could have been a really traumatic experience.”

When Ellis arrived early, the experience continued to feel intensely medical. Because he was treated like a preemie, doctors constantly monitored his weight, feeding, and development. Breastfeeding immediately became painful, stressful, and emotionally loaded. Hospital lactation consultants accidentally bruised her while trying to help. She developed an oversupply, leaked constantly, and felt enormous pressure to feed correctly while doctors remained hyper-focused on Ellis’s weight gain.

“All the pressure is on you,” she says. “You’re getting messages from every direction.”

Another unexpected challenge was how emotionally different breastfeeding felt from the version of equality she and her husband had always imagined for themselves. Their relationship had always felt fifty-fifty, something that was deeply important to both of them. Then suddenly there was a baby whose needs were physically tied to her body in ways that couldn’t really be divided equally.

“As much as you go into it wanting everything to be equal, it still becomes all on the birthing mother in certain ways.”

At first, Kayla resented that. Especially at night, when Ellis wanted her specifically, not just food. But once breastfeeding stopped hurting and her supply regulated, the emotional experience shifted, too.

“I actually really love doing this,” she says. “I tried to stop, and I couldn’t.”

At the same time, she talks about how supported she’s felt by the people around her, especially her husband, close friends, and the larger creative community they’ve built over the years. So many people in their lives work freelance or project-to-project, too, which meant there was already an understanding that schedules shift constantly and that caregiving sometimes has to move fluidly alongside work. 

Becoming a Mother

Before motherhood, Kayla spent most of her life distancing herself somewhat from what was deemed feminine. She grew up around boys, worked in male-dominated industries, and learned early how to position herself professionally as adaptable, easygoing, “one of the guys.”

“I always felt like I had to be the dude.”

Motherhood disrupted that in ways she didn’t expect. The experience itself felt so physical, instinctive, and tied to her body in a way nothing else in her life had before.

“Nothing has made me feel more like a woman than giving birth,” she says. “And I mean that in a really powerful way.”

For much of her life, Kayla says that she unconsciously associated femininity with weakness, even while knowing that was, of course, untrue. Motherhood forced her to examine that programming even more closely. Instead of making her feel smaller, it made her feel more grounded in herself and more comfortable taking up space.

Before Ellis was born, she worried constantly that she wouldn’t know what she was doing. She researched everything, tried to anticipate every possible outcome. Then he arrived, and some part of her became unexpectedly calm.

“When the baby’s crying, I know what to do.”

That instinct—and the confidence that came with it—surprised her. She describes herself as someone who normally overthinks everything, yet motherhood made her trust herself more, not less.

“I really shock myself every day with how calm I am.”

She also talks about feeling newly connected to other women in ways she hadn’t experienced before. Mothers stopping her while she’s out getting coffee. Quick conversations in public. Small moments of recognition between strangers holding babies.

“It feels like I unlocked some secret society.”

Still Herself

A month after giving birth, Kayla found herself pumping in the corner at one of those vintage markets because she missed dressing up, putting on makeup, talking to people, and feeling recognizable to herself outside of motherhood.

“I so badly wanted to feel normal.”

That tension runs through almost everything she talks about now: wanting motherhood to transform her without consuming her entirely. Wanting to stay connected to herself while also fully surrendering to this enormous physical and emotional experience.

She forces herself to do certain things now—tennis, walks with Ellis, vintage markets, getting dressed even when she’s exhausted—not because they feel relaxing exactly, but because they reconnect her to herself outside of caretaking. At the same time, her career continues moving quickly, too. She and Alison are still building MOMO.FM, while she and her husband continue navigating two creative careers alongside parenthood in real time.

And yet, for all the complexity and contradiction she describes throughout motherhood, she talks about becoming a mother with surprising certainty.

“Everyone told me this before, and I didn’t believe them,” she says. “But for me, becoming a mom really felt like what I was meant to do.”

A lot in Kayla’s life still looks the same from the outside. The work is still there, along with the ambition and the version of herself she built long before motherhood entered the picture. But becoming a mother seems to have widened the scope of what feels important to her now, especially around the ways women move through work, healthcare, caregiving, and recovery.

Throughout our conversation, she kept returning to how little women are actually told before becoming mothers, and how quickly that realization changed the conversations she now finds herself having constantly—with friends, women in creative fields, people thinking about having children, and other moms trying to make sense of experiences they weren’t prepared for either.

The version of Kayla that existed before motherhood is still fully there. She’s building ambitious creative work with her partner and collaborators and thinking about what she wants to make next. Motherhood just seems to exist alongside all of it now, influencing not only how she moves through the world, but also what she pays attention to and what she finds herself wanting to share with other women.