Some women build a life. Julie Cole built six of them — and a company — all at once.
You know her work even if her name is new to you. If you have ever ironed a small laminated label onto a water bottle, a lunch box, a snowsuit bound for a school lost-and-found, you have met Mabel's Labels: the basement start-up Julie co-founded more than two decades ago and grew into an award-winning company and a movement — something the whole country recognizes. She was a lawyer once. Then her eldest son was diagnosed with autism at three, she left the law, and she set out to build a business that would bend around her family rather than break it.
What follows is Julie in her own words. We asked about the chaos and the recoveries, the front row seat and the six C-sections, the guilt and the grace. Read her slowly. There is a whole philosophy of mothering folded into these answers, and she hands it over like it is nothing.
The life she chose
Tell me what it's really like raising six children while building one of Canada's most recognizable companies.
People always want it to be one of two things: either a fairytale about following your passion, or a cautionary tale about doing too much. The reality was neither. It was just life, full and loud and exhausting and mine.
Six kids means the chaos never fully stops. Someone always needs something. Someone is sick, someone has a game, someone is asking a question at 11pm that absolutely cannot wait. You get used to functioning on fragmented sleep in a way that would have seemed impossible before you had no other option. Coffee stops being a preference and becomes structural.
And at the same time, you're building a company from scratch. When we started Mabel's Labels, we didn't have investors or a runway or a tidy plan. We had an idea, we had each other, and we had a lot of kids whose stuff kept going missing. The business grew the same way the family did: messily, constantly, never quite on schedule.
The honest part is that the lines blurred all the time. You'd be in a meeting while mentally running through who needed to be picked up. You'd be doing bedtime while your brain was still problem-solving something at work. There wasn't a clean separation. There was just you, doing the thing in front of you, then the next thing, then the next.
What kept it from being unbearable was that I wanted it. Not in some abstract "following your dreams" way, but genuinely. I wanted the big family. I wanted to build something. I wasn't doing either thing out of obligation. That matters more than people acknowledge. The same life can feel like abundance or like drowning depending on whether you chose it.
So yes, not enough sleep. Too much caffeine. Constant noise. Some days I ran on pure stubbornness. But it was also watching something grow that we made, surrounded by people I loved most. That's not sugarcoating. That's just also true.
"The same life can feel like abundance or like drowning depending on whether you chose it."
Kid number one, kid number six
Kid number one versus kid number six. What changed the most — and what never moved?
My oldest daughter has a theory that I was fully present and on top of everything for the first three, and somewhere around kid four I started coasting. She's not entirely wrong.
With the first one, everything felt significant, especially because of his autism diagnosis. There was an intensity to early parenting that I think a lot of first-time mothers recognize: the feeling that you are responsible for getting every single thing right.
By the time the sixth came along, the bar had shifted considerably. Not because I cared less, but because six kids and a growing company had thoroughly cured me of caring about things that don't matter to me. A clean house was not a top goal ever, and became more of a fond memory with every additional child. What other people thought didn't keep me up at night. There just wasn't room for it.
What never changed was the stuff that actually mattered. Schedules were non-negotiable, because with that many kids, structure isn't a preference, it's a survival strategy. Development, milestones, making sure each kid felt seen stayed constant. I was always paying attention to the important things. I just stopped white-knuckling the rest. I was able to be imperfect without catastrophizing. The youngest kids grew up with a mother who had figured out what was worth her energy.
You also don't have six kids unless you have a fundamentally relaxed relationship with uncertainty. A highly anxious person stops at two. The fact that I kept going was its own kind of answer about who I am. My oldest might say I lost the plot a little by the end, but it was worth it.
Which of your parenting rules did you eventually set down?
There wasn't a real shift there. I always follow through, I don't bribe, I say what I mean, and it's because these fundamental boundaries make good children. I'm sure I got more relaxed about screen time and protein intake, but mostly because I learned that no one is getting scurvy and the kids are OK.
What I never let go of was the bigger frame: knowing where they were, who they were with, showing up for the things that mattered to them, making sure they knew they were loved and that the expectations for how they treated people were real. The small stuff I released. The foundation I held.
The front row seat
What has been the best part of motherhood — and the hardest?
The best part and the hardest part are often the same thing, just depending on the day you're having.
The best part is the front row seat. You get to watch people become who they are. You see the whole arc, from the kid who couldn't tie their shoes to the person sitting across from you at dinner with actual opinions about the world. Nothing else gives you that.
The hardest part is that it asks everything of you, at every single stage, and just when you've figured one stage out, it changes. Babies are hard in one way, teenagers are hard in a completely different way, and adult children come with their own category of complicated. It never gets easier. It just gets different.
What I learned, usually the hard way, is that the antidote to the hard parts is perspective. When I had six kids in hockey and we were basically living at arenas, I made a conscious decision to be there for it rather than just endure it. Those early morning drives, the cold rinks, the equipment that never quite dried out — I told myself that one day I'd have no one to take to a game, and I'd miss every bit of it. That thought was genuinely useful. It didn't make 5am easier, but it made it meaningful.
The hard parts pass. Every single one of them. The phase that's breaking you right now has an expiry date, even when you can't see it. And the parts you think you'll be relieved to leave behind are often the ones you mourn the most once they're gone.
So the job, as best I can describe it, is to stay present enough to actually enjoy the ride while you're on it. Love them loudly. Listen more than you talk. Show up, especially when it's inconvenient. The rest has a way of sorting itself out.
The pull that never fully resolves
How did you live with the constant pull between building something and raising a family?
I'm not sure the pull ever fully resolves. You just get better at living with it.
There's a version of this conversation that ends with a tidy framework about boundaries and calendars and being fully present in each domain. My experience is that when you're building a company and raising six kids simultaneously, the lines get blurred and bucking the mom guilt is a constant struggle.
The honest answer is that I stopped trying to achieve perfect balance because perfect balance isn't real. What's real is that some weeks work needs more of you and some weeks the family does, and your job is to pay attention to which is which and respond accordingly. Balance over time, not balance every day.
What helped was letting go of the idea that being a good mother meant being physically present every single moment, and letting go of the idea that being a good entrepreneur meant being always available and always on. Neither standard was sustainable or necessary.
Schedules helped. Having a co-founder team that understood the reality of our lives helped. A certain amount of ruthlessness about what actually needed my attention versus what just felt urgent helped enormously.
But the pull is real. You're at a school concert thinking about a deadline. You're in a meeting thinking about whether someone remembered their lunch. That's just the texture of that life. At some point I decided the pull wasn't a sign that I was doing it wrong. It was a sign that I cared deeply about both things, and there are worse problems to have.
The kids didn't need a perfect mother. They needed someone who showed up, who loved them unconditionally, and who modelled what it looks like to build something and work hard and care about more than one thing at once.
Six children, six kinds of attention
With six children, how did you make each one feel seen — without burning yourself to the ground?
Honestly, if you value "me time" and sleep, I would not recommend having six kids and starting a business. But it's also important to really understand what your children need. Some of the most connecting moments are not concocted. A kid in the passenger seat with your full attention for twenty minutes can feel more significant to them than a whole planned afternoon. Some kids need to talk. Some kids need you to show up and watch. Some kids need to know you noticed something specific about them that week. When you have six you become a student of each of them out of necessity, and that skill, really seeing who each individual person is, turns out to be the whole job.
I also think my kids grew up understanding that mum had a lot of balls in the air. That wasn't damage. That was an education in how life actually works. They didn't expect me to be endlessly available, and in not expecting that, they learned something about resourcefulness and independence that served them.
The goal was never for each child to have all of me. The goal was for each child to never doubt they were loved and that I was in their corner. Those are different things, and only one of them is actually achievable.
"The goal was never for each child to have all of me. The goal was for each child to never doubt they were loved and that I was in their corner."
Six babies, six recoveries
One thing you wish someone had told you before your first C-section — and no one did.
"Honestly? Make sure they do the catheter after your spinal or epidural, not before. Also, the sooner you get up after your C-section, the better your recovery will be."
What did postpartum actually look like for you?
"Because I had six C-sections, each one got more challenging, but only because there was one more small human at home wanting my attention. It's hard to take time to recover, but you need to accept help, ask for help, prepare your older toddlers and children for independence, and cut yourself some slack for letting your toddlers watch too much screen time and have cereal for dinner."
Six babies, six recoveries. Did postpartum get easier — or just different?
"Each C-section was different and not necessarily harder. You have to be organized so that the other kids are managed while you are recovering. Also, I had to deliver the last few two weeks early to avoid labour, which could lead to a uterine rupture because of the number of C-sections."
A woman is reading this the night before her first C-section. She's frightened, unsure. What do you want her to know?
"Make a birth plan and advocate for it, but remain flexible enough that you are OK with a change of plans. The goal is a safe delivery. You are in good hands — and keep your eye on the prize: that beautiful baby!"
The prize was always the people
That is the whole of it, really. The labels and the company and the arenas and the recoveries are the texture. The prize was always the people.
Julie Cole did not set out to build a balanced life. She built a chosen one — loud, full, imperfect, hers — and she stayed present enough to watch it unfold from the only seat that ever mattered.
The front row.
