What happens when the village you grew up with simply isn't there anymore?
Our founder, Gabriela Gerhart, recently joined Peter Santry on On The Entrepreneur's Journey for a conversation that started with that question and kept circling back to it. Fittingly, she took the call from the Czech Republic — home, where the whole story begins.
We're grateful to Peter for the invitation, and grateful to the Houston families who have made 26 years of this work possible.
Here's a little of what she shared.
A childhood with no word for what she was doing
Gabriela grew up in a small mountain village in what was then Czechoslovakia. Entrepreneurship wasn't something she aspired to — it wasn't visible enough to aspire to. As she told Peter, nobody was an entrepreneur, because you simply couldn't have a business.
That didn't stop her. As a child, she collected paper and glass to turn in for money, and learned from her father how to properly skin the family's rabbits so she could take the pelts to the collection site. She had no idea there was a word for any of it.
She trained as a pediatric nurse and physical therapist, and worked in a pediatric emergency room before an au pair position brought her to Houston in her early twenties.
The phone call that started everything
Her au pair year put her in an American household with four boys — the youngest, Cooper, was 10 days old when she arrived. She was the caregiver from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and the contrast with home was immediate.
"This is very different than my village, where if my cousin wants to go to a grocery store, she can essentially drop off her baby with anybody — because everybody is kind of family."
Houston was then the fourth-largest city in the country. The village atmosphere, as she puts it, was not quite there.
After her au pair year ended, she married her husband, Gary — 27 years ago now — and started looking for nursing work. Her Czech credentials didn't transfer. It was rejection after rejection, and the advice was always the same: go back to school. In her early twenties, in a language she spoke perhaps 10 percent of, that wasn't the answer.
Then a friend of a friend called her husband. Gabriela recalls the message almost word for word: we just got home from the hospital with a newborn and have no idea what to do — and we've heard that your wife does.
She spent a couple of weeks with that family, mostly overnights. They called her a baby nurse. They referred her to another family, who referred her to another.
The goodbye that became a business plan
The referrals told her there was a market. What told her there was a need was how every assignment ended.
This was 26 years ago — before Google searches, before mommy groups, before any of it. Beyond a nonprofit community center or a hospital childbirth class, there was almost nowhere for a new mother in Houston to turn. So when Gabriela packed up to leave, the mother she'd been supporting was usually in tears, asking the same question: what am I supposed to do now?
She had no good answer. So she built one.
If you've ever felt that particular absence — the sense that there should be more hands around you than there are — you're not imagining it, and it isn't a shortcoming on your part. Modern parenting really did lose something that older generations took for granted. Everything at Motherhood Center is an attempt to put a version of it back.
A business nobody knew how to categorize
Gabriela opened in 2000 with multiple services running at once — education, massage, prenatal fitness, newborn care, and eventually nanny placement. Peter asked why she took on so much at the beginning.
Her answer was about trust. Referring a client somewhere else meant putting her name on a service she couldn't vouch for, and in most cases there wasn't anywhere comparable to refer them to anyway. Everything essential, under one roof, from a team who all know your family — that was the concept.
It also made it difficult for her to file. She told Peter that when she went looking for business insurance, the brokers couldn't work out what she was. A yoga studio, but more than that. A massage business, but more than that. An educational facility, but more than that. They eventually had to send the policy to Lloyd's of London.
What 26 years actually looks like
Gabriela doesn't smooth over the difficult stretches: maxed-out credit cards, money borrowed from family, a painful legal dispute with a former partner, and a pandemic that shut down much of the business overnight. When COVID hit, she called her team one by one to ask whether they could take a pay cut, promising to repay them, and telling anyone who couldn't that she understood completely.
She's also honest about the cost of pushing too hard for too long, and about learning — slowly — that stepping back is part of the job rather than a failure of it. Anyone who has been told to rest and found it nearly impossible will recognize the tension.
What's kept her going is easier to name. She describes families who came to her as new mothers 20-some years ago and now attend our Grandparent Refresher class, while the babies from back then bring their own pregnancies through our doors. A third generation, in the same building on West Alabama.
"After 26 years in business, there is still not one day that I'm not excited to go to work."
Looking ahead, she's recently moved from president to CEO, and she's thinking about what it would take for other cities to have a Motherhood Center of their own. As she notes, the village is thinning everywhere — even in the Czech Republic, where her own cousin now lives hours from family and has to hire the help that relatives once simply provided.
You can watch the full conversation below.
Looking for support for your family in Houston?
Whether you're expecting your first, finding your footing in the fourth trimester, or somewhere in between, our team in River Oaks has been walking families through it since 2000 — seven days a week, because babies don't keep business hours. We'd be honored to support your family.
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