Nobody told you about this part of motherhood

Somewhere before you ever held your child, you were handed a script: be patient, be grateful, be endlessly giving, and above all never let anyone see that you are struggling. And when you could not keep to the script, when the exhaustion and the grief and the unexpected fire rose up in you anyway, you were quietly led to believe that something in you was broken. Nothing in you is broken. The script was only ever half a story.

I call it the motherhood split. Long ago, in cultures all over the world, the Great Mother was honored in her wholeness, both the light that nourishes and the dark that ends, and then slowly she was divided. The soft, selfless, ever-smiling half was lifted onto a pedestal, while the half that rages and grieves, that says no and lets go, was sent beneath the earth to wait. Mothers have been living inside that division for thousands of years, and it is no small wonder that so many of us feel as though we are failing at a role that was never fully described to us.

What I have learned, by way of my own unraveling, is that the part of yourself you have been taught to hide is very often the part holding the gold.

When a life falls apart, it may be falling into place

Loss, burnout, the slow disappearance of the woman you used to be, a grief that will not lift and a rage you cannot explain: I do not see these as evidence that you have gone wrong. I see them as an initiation, a descent into the underworld of the psyche where an old self is laid down so that a truer one can rise. It is rarely graceful and almost never convenient, and it is also one of the oldest stories the human soul has ever told.

How I work

I am a mother of five who has walked into the dark and found her way back out, and I bring three lanterns to the descent.

Depth psychology helps us turn toward everything that has been buried, the shadow and the instincts and all the parts of you that were once called “too much,” until rage and numbness and overwhelm reveal themselves as messengers and gifts rather than malfunctions.

Archetypal astrology lets us read the sky as a mirror of the season you are moving through, serving as a map of which forces are stirring in your life and what they are asking of you.

Mythology gathers you into a long lineage of women, Inanna and Demeter and Persephone and Kali among them, who went down into the dark and returned carrying something no one else could give. Your story is not new, and that turns out to be a great comfort.

Who you are becoming

A whole mother: one who can love fiercely and let go, who can give and also receive, who can hold joy and sorrow in the same hand without needing to pretend that either is the whole truth. Not the perfect mother, but the real one, who is far more interesting and far more free.

If you are in the midst of a hard transition, or feeling far from yourself, or honestly unsure of who you are anymore, you are standing exactly where the story says you should be.