The Mother Is Born Too
On becoming, unraveling, and being held through motherhood
There’s a moment no one really prepares you for.
Not the birth itself, though that is its own threshold.
But the quiet moment after, when everything has shifted and nothing quite fits the way it used to—your pants, your identity, the shape of your life.
The moment when you realize the baby isn’t the only one who’s been born.
You, the mother, have been born, too.
My path into motherhood wasn’t linear. (Is it ever? No.)
It wasn’t clear, envisioned or even desired.
There were so many layers of becoming I didn’t expect. Seasons where I felt like I was holding everything, and seasons where I could barely find the ground beneath me. Where I felt I was beneath the ground itself.
Becoming a mother asked me to meet parts of myself I hadn’t known before. It softened me in ways that were beautiful and disorienting, and it also demanded a kind of strength I didn’t know I carried. A capacity to be with myself I’d never cultivated.
There is no clean edge to this transformation.
Motherhood is not something you step into and then “figure out.”
It’s something that works on you, through you, in the depths of night.
In the early days, I remember feeling like time had changed its texture.
Everything slowed down.
The hours were long, but they weren’t empty. They were full in a way that felt almost too much to take in. There was love, yes, but also grief. A quiet grief for the version of myself that no longer existed. A stretching into something new that didn’t yet have a name.
I think this is something many mothers feel, but few are given language for.
Because we’re not taught to see motherhood as an initiation.
We’re taught to see it as a role.
But initiation asks something different.
It asks for surrender.
It asks for presence.
It asks you to stay, even when you don’t recognize yourself.
And most of all, it asks you not to rush the becoming.
There is a way that postpartum is meant to be held.
Not just managed or survived, but honored.
A threshold where the mother is tended to as carefully as the baby. Where she is given warmth, nourishment, rest, and time to integrate what has just happened to her.
But so many of us move through this season without that kind of support.
We are expected to return to the lives and roles we occupied before.
To function.
To be “back.”
Back to what?
What I’ve come to understand is this:
There is no going back.
There is only forward, into a deeper, more rooted version of ourselves.
And that path is not meant to be walked alone.
I felt this most strongly in the moments when I was held by other women.
Not fixed.
Not advised.
Just held.
Seen in my mess, my falling apart into a new pattern.
There is something incredibly powerful about being witnessed in your rawness without needing to explain it. Something that allows the nervous system to soften, the body to exhale.
It changed the way I understood support.
It changed the way I understood what mothers actually need.
And somewhere in the midst of all of this, I found my way back to my voice.
Not in a polished or performative way.
But in a way that felt honest.
Necessary.
Alive.
Song became a place where I could bring everything.
The beauty and the breaking.
The love and the overwhelm.
The parts of me that felt whole and the parts that were still searching.
I didn’t have to make sense of it.
I could just sing.
And when I began singing with other women, something shifted even more.
There is a moment that happens in circle where the voices begin to weave together, and it feels like you’re stepping into something that has always existed.
Something ancient.
Something that doesn’t belong to any one person, but moves through all of us.
In those moments, I’ve felt what it means to belong without effort, without proving.
To be held without needing to be anything other than what I am.
This is why I create the spaces that I do.
For mothers.
For women.
For the ones who are in the thick of becoming.
Because I know what it feels like to be there.
And I know what it feels like to be met in it.
Motherhood is still working on me.
It is still softening me.
Still stretching me.
Still asking me to listen more deeply.
But what I trust now is this:
There is an intelligence in this process.
A wisdom that lives beneath the surface of all the noise and expectation.
And when we slow down enough to hear it, when we support mothers in being held through it, something begins to shift.
Not just in us.
But in the way we care for life itself.
The baby is born.
And the mother is born too.
And both deserve to be held.
I had the privilege of being interviewed recently on two podcasts on the themes of motherhood, postpartum care and song.
Listen/Watch here:
my beloved sister-friend Em’s wonderful new podcast “Em & 8” : Spotify / YouTube
my dear sister-friend Mira’s podcast “Into Healing” : Spotify / YouTube
This is powerful witnessing to the truth of the initiation of "motherbirth". So grateful that you are bringing this truth forward.
This is so beautiful, Kate!