From Maiden to Mother: An invitation to your own awakening
While this story is through the lens of my journey from Maiden to Mother through the portal of physically birthing babies and choosing a path of Motherhood, I honor there are many women who desperately want children and struggling to conceive, or can’t have children, or choose to be childfree by choice. No matter where you are in your journey from Maiden to Mother, children or no children, this is a journey for all of us as women to move from Maiden to Mother. To embrace our ability to create and birth, even if just metaphoric or creatively is a gift and a journey into the deepest parts of our soul.
Here is a glimpse of my story. May you write your own.
Smothered.
Utterly and completely smothered by everyone else’s needs but my own. I didn’t know where everyone else ended and I began. This was my first awakening. Motherhood. The most brutiful (beautiful meets brutal as initially heard used by Glennon Doyle) initiation of them all. Two living children and a baby lost to miscarriage, my soul had been initiated by this journey of motherhood and I was terrified.
My early journey as a mom made me twitchy, restless, and anxious. I was like a ticking time bomb waiting to explode over a dropped cup of milk or one touch too many. I was resentful, angry, and frustrated. I was grieving and didn’t know it, or even understand why. Wasn’t motherhood supposed to be blissful? Full of love, snuggles, and unconditional connection? Wasn’t it all supposed to be more beautiful than this? "I seriously missed the mark somewhere I thought." I resisted as long as I could, thinking I could somehow get the upper hand and it would just start to come naturally, but it never did.
Finally, when my youngest daughter was about to turn 2, I couldn’t take it anymore. I realized I needed help and I wasn’t even sure what that meant, but knew I didn’t have the tools I needed to cope with this level of life and show up in the way I longed to. It was time to acknowledge that I didn’t have it all together and I needed help.
I had a good friend who had been in therapy for herself and she recommended her therapist to me. “What the hell?” I thought, I had nothing to lose. I knew continuing on in my current way of life was not sustainable. Plus, what more could this be besides a little motherhood blues?
So I gathered up my courage and dove in.
At first, I spent many sessions in therapy talking all around the issues, focusing all my energy on everyone else, and rarely truly asking where I was in all of this, how I was feeling, or what I needed. It took my therapist asking many times…
”What about you?”
This is when it became clear that codependence had been a behavior I learned as a way to cope from a very young age and it was keeping me stuck in an unhealed Maiden energy. It had kept me from truly taking up space. It had made me convenient, low maintenance, and not needy. Perfect…until I realized it was keeping me stuck in survival and not allowing me to step fully into my sovereignty.
Once I started to realize I had needs, wants, desires, and deep deep longings I freaked the fuck out.
As I was building awareness around all of this, I had absolutely no idea how to claim it. I felt powerless and afraid. I was so afraid that if I truly let my needs, wants, desires, and longings be known, I would not be loved because I would be seen as "too much." I had spent my whole life trying to not be "too much." I had judged so hard anyone else that was high maintenance and swore to myself that would never be me.
The Mother’s Journey
As I have been doing this wild mother healing work for the past eight to ten years now, I have begun to realize how the journey of Motherhood really is a mirror to the Hero/Heroine’s Journey as coined by Joseph Campbell who is quoted as saying “A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.” I cannot think of a better way to describe mothers than this, though most of us would not consider ourselves heroes, we are still on the same path. What I have come to realize is that in order for us to truly claim ourselves as Mother, we must walk the path of the hero’s journey, which I have now titled The Mother’s Journey. I have laid it out below.
Motherhood is an awakening. The more we resist it, the harder our journey will be. When we can surrender to the many ebbs and flows of motherhood and moving from Maiden to Mother as a sacred initiation, the more sacred joy we will uncover in the process. So let’s break this journey down even further.
Invitation to Adventure
The invitation to adventure in non-motherhood circumstances is usually a significant life event (death, disease, divorce are common ones) that propel us into the hero’s journey. What I have discovered is that the moment we realize we are being called to the journey of Mother, even before conception, we are being initiated. We are being asked to let go and surrender because even the journey of conception and sustaining life in your body is an adventure with many unexpected twists and turns. I was shocked at how much control I was trying to have over this process and then when we had a miscarriage at 8 weeks, the grief that unexpectedly ensued and flooded me for months.
Realizing Motherhood isn’t what you thought
It is hard for many women to admit Motherhood isn’t what they thought it was going to be. We are bombarded with everyone’s motherhood highlight reel. The beautiful pregnancy pictures leading up to the golden birth story photos to the serene postpartum moments and beyond. I too didn’t share the most realistic version of my journey because I felt shame for admitting it wasn’t this beautiful experience like I had been sold. I thought something was deeply wrong with me because I wasn’t finding joy in the journey and felt so smothered.
Meeting a mentor and finding a tribe
This can be challenging as a new mom. I had such a hard time feeling like I fit in with other moms. I had a hard time verbalizing and sharing my lived experience and story with other moms who seemed to have it all together while I was over here struggling everyday. In looking back, this is what inspired me to want to create safe and sacred spaces for moms to come as they are. To admit being a mom sucks sometimes and to connect with other moms who get it. I did eventually find one or two friends who let me just be myself as I was grieving motherhood, but it was not easy. Feeling so challenged to find a community in my own motherhood journey led me to create my initial Empowered Mom Accelerator Program and Magic Mama Collective Mentorship and Membership.
Surrendering to the Process
This is where the Mother’s Journey initiates us a bit into the underworld or shadow and deeper inner work that going from Maiden to Mother calls us to. Learning to honor our trials and failures as moms and women is a huge part of this initiation. Claiming our story, all parts, and not just the good parts is the medicine. This is how we come to realizing we don’t have to do it all on our own and we can heal the part of us that feels like we must be the Martyr. Motherhood is not Martyrdom and it will challenge very bit of codependent behavior in your bones if you let it. Motherhood is a door to own our shadows and an invitation to heal the deepest parts of ourselves so we can live liberated in abundance, joy, and a continued lifetime of growth alongside our children and community. This is the part of the journey that if we skip, we will get stuck in Mother and not allow ourselves to move to Crone. It is also the part that keeps us stuck and projecting on everyone else, including our kids.
Embrace the Birth, Death, Birth Cycle of Life
Honoring that I am like the butterfly: from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to glorious goddess, metamorphosis is part of the journey. Motherhood also bringing with it a million little griefs as our children move from stage to stage. May they teach us that nothing ever stays the same. The beautiful moments and the painful ones all fleeting. When we become willing to release what no longer serves us over and over again, to die to the parts of our life, our ego, and all we thought we knew, living many tiny little deaths, this is what will rebirth us with each cycle and seasons is part of the journey. When we cling, we miss out on all that awaits us ahead.
Revelation and Reclamation leads us to new ways of being
Allowing all of our experiences to awaken us over and over again is the gift to aliveness. Embracing our wholeness and the fact that we get to embody this life and learn as we go. The goal is not mastery, but the continual devotion to seeking mastery through the mystery. To stay so curious and open and to feel alive in the process is all there is. When we resist, we close our hearts to all that is. What makes you feel alive? For me, it’s realizing that I have the power to truly co-create the life I desire. To live empowered and at any moment to know I am sovereign and an expression of the divine. This allows me permission to not stay stuck and to refuse to play the victim. Honor the challenges and lessons yes, but don’t let them take you under.
Integration into daily life and Awakening to the Gift
When we learn to hold it all, we learn that anything that is for us won’t miss us and every part of our journey here in this earthly timeline is meant to inform us more and more of our true and beautiful essence, or the Magic we are here to embody as I call it. We we heal and realize our innate birthright is one of joy and pleasure, we stop trying to prove our worth by being a human doing and we simply become a human being. A soul having a human experience and allowing our creations (children if we have them and other creations as well) to do the same. You realize that everything is energy and you can be a master of energy which includes time, money, and any other resource your heart could possibly desire to work with.
Returns as the Goddess she is to lead, inspire, and turn her magic all the way on
From Smothered to Mothered. This new empowered way of being won’t be complete. Healing is a spiral and so, you will continue to cycle through the journey at many points in your life. If you have physical children, partnerships, or other relationships, they will continue to challenge and grow you. They will continue to mirror a deeper healing journey until you receive the lesson in full. You will continue to embody birth, death, and rebirth over and over again because you are a cyclical being just as Mother Earth. What I need you to know, and what distinguishes you from Maiden to now Mother is your ability to hold and embrace yourself through these many ups and downs. To know you are not broken or doing something wrong. You are a sovereign being on your way to crone and Queen. You no longer chase, you attract.
Live free dear one.