I'm Melissa. Mother of five, wife, and Mythopoetic & Depth-Oriented Maternal Practitioner.

But before any of that, I am someone who is wildly, irreversibly in love with being a mother.

This is the truth I want to start with, because it gets lost in the harder parts of the story, and I don't want it lost. Five children. Five entirely distinct souls who arrived and immediately began teaching me things I could not have learned any other way. The particular weight of a newborn against your chest at 3am, that smell, that impossibly soft skin, that helpless and absolute trust, I have been given that five times. I have watched five children take their first steps, say their first words, become fascinated by things I would never have thought to notice. I have been the one they ran to. I have been the one they needed. There is nothing in my life that has matched the magnitude of that gift.

I love the ordinary holiness of it. Breakfast chaos. Teenage humor that catches me completely off guard. The moment a child brings you a drawing and you can feel how much they want you to love it. Bedtime rituals, inside jokes, the particular way each of my children laughs. Watching a small person become a larger person and recognizing, in them, something you have never seen before and could not have invented. I love my children with a love that has no ceiling and no floor.

And motherhood also took me apart.

Not in spite of that love. Because of it. Because when you love something this completely, you are opened in ways you cannot anticipate and cannot close back up again. I have birthed and buried babies. I have known the kind of love that breaks you open alongside the kind of loss that scorches you to the root. I have been the mother sitting on the bathroom floor wondering what happened to the woman she used to be. I have felt the ache of watching children drift into their own lives, the distance that grows as it should and still costs you something. I have endured heartbreaks that felt like annihilation. I have stitched myself back together in the dark.

I am still stitching. And I have come to believe that both things are true at once: motherhood is the greatest joy of my life and it has required the most profound transformation of my life. These are not contradictions. They are the two faces of the same enormous love.

The Descent

The moment that cracked everything open came when my three older boys from a previous marriage— eleven, thirteen, and fifteen at the time — came home and told me their father was moving and they were going with him.

In a single instant, the life I had built collapsed. The role through which I had understood myself for over a decade, the daily structure, the identity, the very shape of my days, all of it gave way. I had poured myself into being the most present, devoted mother I knew how to be, and still, my boys left. What followed was not a crisis I could manage. It was a descent. A genuine underworld. The grief was bottomless. The disorientation was total.

And in the dark, something began to find me.

What Found Me in the Dark

The dark side of the Goddess came in the nights when my heart was split open and I was certain I was losing my mind. She came as Kali: fierce, compassionate, cutting away what I had confused for love but was really possession. As Inanna dragging me through seven gates, asking me to lay down every layer of who I thought I was. As Ereshkigal, the queen of the underworld, demanding that I stop fighting the grief and simply be with it.

These were not comfortable visitations. But they were meaningful ones.

Archetypal astrology arrived next, a rope I grabbed in the dark. I had resisted it. I associated it with surface-level predictions and simplistic identity labels. What I discovered instead was a symbolic language for the living, patterned intelligence moving through time. When I learned that I was at the height of a Pluto transit in direct conjunction with my natal Moon — the archetypal planet of death and rebirth making contact with the seat of the mother, the child, the instinctual self — something shifted profoundly. The pain did not lessen. But it became intelligible. It belonged to something.

Depth psychology gave me a framework for the rest: for the shadow, for the integration of opposites, for the understanding that the psyche moves toward wholeness not by eliminating darkness but by learning to hold it alongside the light. It helped me see how much of myself I had split off in order to maintain the idealized image of the "good mother,” and how the rupture had forced those disowned parts back into consciousness.

Mythology braided it all together. Persephone descending. Demeter grieving the earth into winter. Inanna rising, marked by the underworld, carrying knowledge of both realms. These were not stories about other women in other centuries. They were maps I was living. And suddenly I was not alone in my descent. I was part of a lineage of mothers who had gone under and come back carrying something new.

What I Came Back With

I came back with grief that had become my most potent source of transformation. I came back with the capacity to love my children and let them go; to hold both at once without collapsing into one or the other. I came back with boundaries I had never been able to find before, with a clearer sense of what love actually requires, with an instinctual authority I had spent years suppressing. I came back with more presence.

And I came back with a deep, embodied knowing that the darkness many mothers are living is a sign of initiation.

The joy did not go away. It deepened. Because joy that has been through the underworld and come back is not the same as joy that has never been tested. My love for my children is larger now than it was before. My delight in the ordinary moments lands differently. Because I know what it cost. I know what it means. I know that it is not permanent, that it passes, that every stage of this is a gate, and that at each gate something must be surrendered.

I am still a mother. While my teenage boys have flown, I now have two little ones with my soul mate. Still in it. Still learning. Still undone and remade on a regular basis.

And I would not choose otherwise.

The Credentials

If you want the official record: I hold a B.S. in Natural Resources, an M.A. in Integrative Health, an M.A. in Psychology, an M.A. in Philosophy and Religion, and certifications in Nutrition, Yoga, Integrative Wellness Coaching, Herbalism, Treatment of Eating Disorders, Transformative Imagery, Patient Navigation, and Compassionate Inquiry. I am currently completing graduate work at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where my research focuses on maternal individuation, archetypal cosmology, and the mythology of the descending mother.

But the deeper truth is this: my real credentials are the five children who made me a mother, the nights I did not think I would survive, the myths that resurrected me, and the story I came back carrying.

I work with mothers who sense that what they are moving through is larger than any clinical category can hold, and who are ready to meet it with depth, curiosity, and symbolic imagination.

If that is you, I would be honored to walk with you.