Mathilde Gøhler on growing up wild, motherhood, and finding love again
Ahead of welcoming her third child this November, model Mathilde Gøhler shares her story with To The Moon, Honey – from a childhood in Northern Jutland to building a blended family with her fiancé Frederik.
“My sister and I grew up in Northern Jutland, and there’s a running joke in our family that we were called ‘the Rockets’ — we were always wild, always climbing trees, competing over who could get highest. I wasn’t afraid of anything as a child. But underneath all that, I was actually a very shy child too. I think when you have a sister that close in age, you lean on each other – she was one thing, I was another.
I was recently back up there with my own children, and coming back to that wild, quiet landscape, everything just moves so much slower- the cars drive slower, people talk slower. My parents were quite hippie-ish; we each had a horse, and we kept pigs and hens for our own use. My mother was almost obsessive about what we ate. Sweets and soda were rare treats, never a given, and she made sure we understood exactly what we were putting into our bodies. I used to look at the neighbour’s kids and think, that must be so nice – but she filled us with good values from the very start, and she never wavered on it. I think I’ve carried a lot of that groundedness with me, that same instinct for what you choose to consume, into how I run my own brand today.
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My parents divorced when I was six, and I think that’s part of why I learned early to stand on my own two feet. By seventeen, I moved to Aarhus to live with my boyfriend at the time. I already had three jobs alongside school, so nothing about it worried me, or my parents – I’d basically been independent for years already.
It was during that time that I got scouted for modelling, completely by chance, at a Christmas party. Within a week, it had gone from a side thing to nearly a full-time job. Being pulled out of school for shoots in Copenhagen, for money I’d normally earn in two months. It was a hard balance to strike as a teenager, but I finished school regardless.
I became a mother for the first time at twenty-three, the same age my own mother was when she had my sister. I wanted to give my daughter everything I felt I’d needed as a child myself: to always feel completely welcome, completely chosen.
It had always been a dream of mine, and I remember feeling so much calm through the pregnancy and birth – almost naively so. There was nothing where I thought, this will be hard, or this will be difficult. I just trusted, completely, that it would be wonderful, and that I could handle it. It was a dream pregnancy, and a dream birth – I caught her myself, and she was just so mild from the very start; she barely made a sound, just slept peacefully through that first night. We kept looking at her, waiting for her to wake up and cry, but she just slept, content.
What no one really prepared me for was the time after – a few days in, I called my own mother and asked her why she’d never told me how hard it was. My body felt weak and tired in a way nothing in the pregnancy had.
A few years later, her father and I separated while I was pregnant with our second daughter, Lelou. It was a strange, layered time – grief over the relationship ending, sitting right alongside real happiness about the child we were about to have. I remember feeling both incredibly vulnerable and incredibly certain at once. I went through a period of therapy that helped me put that grief somewhere, and find acceptance. I knew, deep down, that we were simply better apart than together, and that acceptance came surprisingly fast – it was actually a very undramatic separation, which helped. And then Lelou arrived, almost like a happy ending folded into a new beginning. Holding her for the first time, I remember feeling this rush of love that was somehow completely separate from everything else going on – as if she’d arrived exactly when we needed her most.
Watching Kenya become a big sister, and seeing how much the two of them adored each other from day one, was one of the most moving things I’ve experienced. I ended up loving being a single mother of two – there’s a kind of simplicity in it, even though it takes everything you have.
But making a co-parenting relationship actually work takes real, ongoing effort – it doesn’t just happen because you want it to. I went in with a kind of stubbornness that our own needs would never come first – it had to be about the children, always. I think a lot about how I felt as a child myself, looking up at my parents and wondering how they could not think of me in all of it. That memory has shaped how deliberate I’ve tried to be with their father – plenty of family therapy, plenty of conversations, always circling back to what’s best for the girls rather than what’s easiest for either of us. It’s not something that resolves itself once and stays resolved; it’s something you keep choosing, again and again.
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Then Frederik came into my life. We met, and things started quite slowly between us – he has two children of his own from before, so neither of us was in a rush. At some point, I was heading off on a holiday with my daughters, and I suggested, half-jokingly, that he come along too. Our kids ended up meeting by the pool on their own, without any of us steering it, and from there it just unfolded at their pace – could we see your room, can we order room service and watch a film together. By the end of that trip, they were already planning to spend New Year’s together. Bringing two families together isn’t simple. When you’re on your own with your children, things already work – so if you’re going to bring something new into that, it has to work at more than a hundred percent, otherwise it’s not worth disrupting what you already have. But watching our four children grow so close to each other has been one of the greatest gifts.
Being a stepmother is something I’ve done before, and something I also had on the other side of the equation as a child myself. My own father remarried when I was young, and his partner became one of the most important people in my life – completely different from my own mother, but so stable and present. She chose me, again and again, in small ways, and it taught me that an adult who isn’t your biological parent can still play an enormously important role in a child’s life. I’ve carried that with me into my own role with Frederik’s daughters. It’s never felt like a competing position, or like I’m stepping into something that already belongs to someone else — it’s simply that I know what I have to give, and I’ve seen how much it means to them to receive it.
Building financial independence entirely on my own has meant a great deal to me too – it’s a big part of my sense of security in life. I’ve proven it to myself, year after year, that I can pay for everything myself, and that gives me real peace. It’s not something I take for granted, and I think it’s shaped how stable I feel my life will be going forward, regardless of what else happens.
Now I’m expecting our third child together, due this November. This pregnancy feels different from the others – calmer, more grounded. I know Frederik so well by now, as a partner and as a father, and there’s a kind of trust in this one that I didn’t have the first two times around. Even though it’s my third pregnancy, so much of it feels new.”
Meet´n´greet
Mathilde Gøhler is a Danish model and entrepreneur. She’s the founder of her own haircare brand Blid and is mother to two daughters, with a third child due in November alongside her fiancé Frederik.
