Motherhood took me apart, and then it put me back together more whole

I’m Melissa: mother of five, wife, and a mythopoetic and depth-oriented maternal practitioner.

I like to say at the start that I am completely in love with being a mother. Five entirely different souls have come through me, have slept on my chest with their hearts beating with mine, and are now growing into whoever they are meant to be, and I would not trade a single minute of it. And also, motherhood took me apart.

I have been through many descents throughout motherhood, sometimes minor earthquakes and sometimes complete destruction, and with these the identities I had built my life around, the role and the routines and the sense of who I was, fell apart. I have birthed babies and I have lost babies. I have been the mother on the bathroom floor wondering where the woman I used to be had gone, and I have been through a divorce and found myself asking what ever happened to “happily ever after.” I have experienced grief deeper than I knew existed, and in these places of darkness, I found the medicine I needed. Now, this is the medicine that I bring to other mothers, because I know the difference it can make.

What I came back with

I came back with grief that became my most potent teacher, and with the ability to hold love and release in the same breath without collapsing into either one. I came back with boundaries I had never been able to find, and with an instinctual authority I had spent years burying, and with a knowing that lives in my bones that what so many mothers fear is falling apart is actually an initiation.

I no longer ask whether I am a good mother or a bad one. I ask instead whether I am becoming a whole one, and I accompany other mothers as they ask it too.

The official record

My official stats: a B.S. in Natural Resources, and M.A.s in Integrative Health, Psychology, and Philosophy and Religion. Certifications and trainings in Archetypal Astrology (CIIS), Transformative Imagery, Compassionate Inquiry, Integrative Wellness Coaching, Treatment of Eating Disorders, Nutrition, Yoga, Herbalism, and Patient Navigation. I am currently completing doctoral studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where I research maternal individuation, archetypal cosmology, and the mythology of the descending mother.

But my truest credentials are the five children who made me a mother, the nights I was not sure I would survive, and the myths that carried me home.