Here’s what you need to know about Mara Martin: she wasn’t trying to make history. She was just feeding her baby.

Back in 2018, the model and mom stepped onto the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit runway in Miami wearing a gold metallic bikini, her long hair loose, and her infant daughter nursing at her breast. The moment went global. Reporters in Australia called. Inside Edition came knocking. Good Morning America wanted her on the couch. For something she describes simply as a mom doing what moms do, the world had a lot to say about it.

“I was just feeding her,” Martin told Scary Mommy in a recent interview. “It wasn’t this big statement.”

Eight years later, Martin is still modeling, still showing up for her daughters, and still bringing them along for the ride. She also runs her own PR company, Vyral PR, where she helps other women find their voice and build their identity. And if you scroll through her Instagram, you won’t find the burnout posts or the exhausted mom content that fills so much of social media these days. What you’ll find is a woman who genuinely loves being a parent.

“I actually do really enjoy being a mom. I actually like being around my kids,” she said. In the summer, she skips the camps and keeps her girls close. Her husband, by her own account, occasionally has to remind her that adults-only time exists. Her response? She likes having them around.

That attitude carries over into her work, too. Martin brings her daughters to runway shows and interviews when she can, treating her career as something her kids can see and learn from rather than something that happens behind closed doors while they’re somewhere else. Her personal rule is pretty simple: if the invitation doesn’t say no kids, her kids are probably coming. She joked that people might want to specify upfront, because she’s not going to assume they aren’t welcome.

As someone who walks these streets and hears from parents at every school pickup and soccer sideline, that attitude resonates. There’s a pressure in suburban family life to keep everything in its lane. Work goes here, kids go there, and the two don’t mix. Martin pushes back on that without making it a crusade. She just lives differently and lets people see it.

What makes her story stick, especially for millennial moms raising families right now, is how ordinary she makes it sound. She isn’t performing wellness or packaging a brand of perfect motherhood. The scheduling conflicts are real. The school breaks seem to outnumber the school days. The chaos is front and center. But so is the joy, and she refuses to let one cancel out the other.

Her viral moment launched a bigger conversation about women carrying multiple identities at once. Mother. Professional. Individual. The image of a model on a runway, doing her job and feeding her child at the same time, hit people hard because it was honest. It didn’t ask for permission or apology. It just showed up and did both things simultaneously.

That’s the thread running through everything Martin has built since. The PR work she does through Vyral PR centers on helping women find and use their voices. The way she parents keeps her daughters close to the work that drives her. The way she talks about motherhood skips the martyrdom entirely.

For suburban families navigating the spring stretch between spring break and the end of the school year, Martin’s approach is worth a second look. The juggle is real. The interruptions are constant. But her version of the story says the juggle itself can be something to lean into rather than survive.

I checked with plenty of parents over the years who say the same thing in different words: the moments you drag your kids to, the ones where they sit in the corner at your work event or tag along to something you planned for yourself, those tend to be the ones they remember. Martin seems to already know that. Her daughters are watching, and she’s fine with every bit of it.