Some of us rage. Some of us weep. Some make themselves small. Some go blank. Some can’t shake the intrusive thoughts. Some wonder if they will ever go back to who they were. Some wonder if they will ever recognize themselves again. There is nuance and ambivalence in Motherhood that is not often given voice. Words build worlds. They are a pathway to discovery, understanding and, often, healing. As American novelist, Ursula K. Le Guin, put it: “We are volcanoes… When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.” Let us come together and find that place that the world has asked us, or perhaps forced us, to hide away. Let us share with one another. Release the shackles of individualized trauma and find collective healing. Let us remember our inherent worth and power. Let us erupt! “You young Mount St. Helenses… I want to hear you. I want to listen to you talking to each other and to us all: whether you're writing an article or a poem or a letter or teaching a class or talking with friends or reading a novel or making a speech or proposing a law or giving a judgment or singing the baby to sleep or discussing the fate of nations, I want to hear you.”
Motherhood, in all its complexity, is the thread that runs through my work. I believe the act of creating (whether through words, movement, or images) offers a way to hold both the beauty and the rupture of care. My own path began with artmaking as a form of survival, a way of making sense of what felt unspeakable. During pregnancy and in the first year of motherhood, I came face-to-face with the invisible systems and expectations that shape our experience of care. That season cracked me open. It was both disorienting and clarifying and it set me on the path of studying motherhood not just as a personal journey, but as a social construct.
In that search, I found expressive and social emotional arts as powerful tools of regulation, reflection, and healing. Over time, what began as my own practice of survival grew into a practice of expression and connection. Not only for myself, but as a way to open space for others.
As an Expressive Arts Facilitator, I guide mothers and caregivers toward this same possibility: to use creativity not as performance or product, but as a living tool for release, resilience, and self-understanding. Through poetry circles, embodied writing, and practices rooted in social emotional arts, my work reframes the narratives of mothering, centering nuance, ambivalence, and strength.
How I Got Here…
The rigged system at work…
With more than 100 years of feminism behind us and 50 years of second-wave feminism, it seems motherhood has mostly been forgotten. It’s still relegated to the private sphere. That very gendered place of home, hearth and bonbons. Mothers are underpaid, exploited, undervalued, overlooked, isolated, and made to feel as if they are to blame for all of this. Add on layers of marginalization and it’s even worse.
Any grievances about these conditions are likely to be met with criticism of you, the mother. Evidence that you’re just not good enough. We are a society that sanctifies motherhood in its talk but abandons mothers in its action. Nothing feels more rigged.
Mothers are doing too much and society is not doing nearly enough.
We don’t get angry at the system, at our government, at the lack of support, at our workplace. We internalize. We assume no one else is experiencing this in the same way or to the same severity. When we experience the trauma of becoming a mother alone, it becomes even more traumatic. We feel guilt and shame. We try to do more. To be better. We think it’s all our fault. We silence ourselves and strive to be the perfect mother. The cult of the perfect mother has to end. It’s an impossible ideal that is meant to keep us struggling. Alone, isolated from other mothers. Struggling in silence. Individualizing our own trauma. It is by design. That is the rigged system at work.
I imagine a world where mothers are free from the rigged system, put into place and upheld by our patriarchal society. I imagine a society that holds and supports mothers. I imagine a world free of the impossible to attain perfect mother myth. There is an individual and a collective shift that needs to happen in order for this world to exist. We need to stop silencing ourselves. As Sarah Menkedick says in her book, Ordinary Insanity: “Mother’s stories are a missing piece in our culture, an ache we can’t pinpoint, a void papered over with platitudes or warnings about danger and risk, a lack and ossified desire felt early in the experience of becoming a mother. Yet stories of motherhood are elemental as bone and teeth.” Let our words erupt and create new worlds. We are here to hold space for individual and collective healing. For individual and collective transformation.
“When we have a lack of language, and don’t know how to articulate our experience and to put into words what we’re feeling, it makes the process incredibly difficult. We need words to heal.”
— Dr. Aurélie Athan