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

And I am completely in love with being a mother. The gift of being able to experience five entirely unique souls enter the world through me, be fed by me, sleep on my chest with our hearts beating together, and grow through the years into who they are becoming is something that I am forever grateful of. Yet this isn’t the only part I am grateful for.

I am also grateful for all of the ways in which motherhood has brought me to my knees, and led me into the realm of the underworld. Yes, motherhood has brought tremendous joy.

And motherhood also took me apart.

It seems that when we love something this completely, we are opened in ways we cannot anticipate. I have birthed and buried babies. I have known the kind of love that breaks us open alongside the kind of loss that scorches us to the root. I have been the mother sitting on the bathroom floor wondering what happened to the woman she used to be and no idea of where she is going. I have gone through divorce, and wonder what ever happened to “happily ever after.” I have felt the ache of watching children drift into their own lives earlier than expected, the distance that grows as it needs to and still aches in the depths. And I have stitched myself back together in the dark.

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. She came as Persephone descending and Demeter grieving. 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 gold.

In the depths, archetypal astrology became a symbolic language for all that was moving through time. I saw that my challenges were divinely planned, part of my own unfolding. The pain did not lessen. Instead, it became intelligible and meaningful. It belonged to something vast. This was no mistake. I found every descent I had ever gone through could be mapped in the sky.

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 suppressing 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. It showed me that within my very pain was the medicine I needed.

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 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 doctoral studies 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.