Issue No. 6: If you've lost your way in motherhood...

Let's find it again. Together.

If you’ve felt lost in motherhood, but are ready to reclaim yourself… Then today’s impromptu essay is for you.

Because I’ve never really understood where I fit or what I should be doing. I’ve always felt kind of like an alien… with a masters degree.

Motherhood, then, simply stripped me of that last thread of naivety. This idea that I had any idea what I was doing. That life’s accomplishments were linear, and if I just followed the formula, happiness would be guaranteed.

But suddenly, where I used to seek validation from toxic relationships, or try to find purpose in and emulate the careers and lifestyles of those whose values never really resonated with me, the whole thing fell flat. And once I became a mom I could not un-see it.

And the price of this misdirection was just too high. The relationships that made me feel so, so small and invaluable, the hollowness of those aspirations and the company they kept… It left me with a baseline of emotional dis-regulation.

Right now there’s a TikTok circulating where a group of mothers is asked whether they would kill for their child.

Some of the moms hum and haw. Honestly, that blows my mind. Because if there is one thing I would do for my kids it’s, well, it’s anything. I’d literally do anything to ensure their well-being.

But that “anything” has, over the last handful of years, transformed into a pathological need to shield them from trauma. In fact, it has become my absolute and singular mission to give my kids something different than I got.

How noble, right? Well, martyrdom isn’t the god I want to pray to, either. But sometimes, one way or another, we find ourselves so fucking caught up in the whole unrelenting task of breaking generational trauma that we let it consume us.

And, even by accident, our every move becomes about something other than ourselves.

Which, of course, serves no one. Not our kids and most especially not ourselves.

God, ourselves. Right? That idea of a thing that’s been stomped down and crushed by this greater purpose.

This is quite literally why we try to find purpose, often in commerce (and also, yes, the need). But it’s why MLMs reign supreme and #girlboss culture was able to so slickly co-opt and create mommy feminism.

We need more than this in a system that is constantly –constantly – failing us.

So I have a proposition for you, but it’s a little simple. It’s that you are so much more than you’ve ever allowed yourself to believe. That your value transcends what you have to offer, even to your children and especially for money.

Now I don’t really know how you think of yourself, so getting on board may take some suspension of disbelief. But I want you to, for a moment, believe that at your core, you are a creative being with a gift to offer the world.

It’s how I wish to see myself. And I think it’s why I decided to pick up a book that I put down ten years ago.

Walking, while working, on my treadmill, I was suddenly overcome with this impulse to get off and grab a book from the shelf behind me. It wasn’t electric or poignant, just automatic.

I reached out and found myself holding The Artist’s Way.

A book that had found its way to me a decade before I was ready.

A book that told me I had a reason to be on this earth. A book that, before postpartum depression and then depression depression, told me I mattered and could bring something beautiful and valuable to this temporal plane – even if it didn’t make money or even get seen.

And here it is, again, in my hand, simply because I’ve had moments where my choice was to keep going. To keep trying. To keep asking the question of what could be. So I’m going to re-start the process of The Artist’s Way.

I know if you’ve read this far it’s probably because you know motherhood has given you a lot of meaning. But if you are also left feeling like, maybe, you’ve also lost yourself in it… Then I invite you to come on this journey with me.

Order the book, it will arrive tomorrow if you order it now.

And we begin Sunday. A chapter a week. Let’s do it together.