Documenting Your Creative Motherhood
You are the niche!
Before I forget! The Winter Workbook is now out for monthly and annual subscribers.
🥰 Everyone is invited to the free 1 hour Winter Workshop: Rest & Reality (link is below)
➡️ Perfect for anyone wanting to talk about motherhood, high expectations, the need for rest in a time of societal business, and more.
This will be a pretty down-to-earth group reset for a restful winter while everyone else is pushing themselves to do more with less. Please show up!
Time: Jan 20, 2025 01:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada) (4pm EST)
You Can Be Creative With Motherhood — A Pep Talk
I’m sharing images of motherhood that make me pause, make me proud, or remind me that everything only lasts for a season.
These are images I cherish that show me creating —not in spite of motherhood but— within the context of motherhood.
Despite the narrative I readily accepted (that motherhood would be separate from my interests and hobbies and work) I found that motherhood infused a desperate need to be creative.
In fact, it is what lead to this newsletter.
Motherhood Minute helped me release my creative expectations of what creating and working as a mother should look like. It helped me let go of the need to be in a neat niche.
I AM the niche (a mantra I learned from
). As I grew a child in my womb, I grew into an artist, a creator, an author, and more.I didn’t need to be a mother in order to accomplish these things but the experience of matrescence was so profound that I grew into myself more with a force I couldn’t achieve of my own will.
For years I felt shame that I didn’t want to be a mother and then quiet shame that I couldn’t conceive when I actually did want it.
I felt shame not completing a book or fluttering between creative interests. I felt shame for moving along too slowly. I felt shame for so many things.
We do not need to waste our energy on shame. We can create for joy. We can talk about motherhood. We can talk about how hard it is and how it is also good.
You are the niche. You are constantly changing and growing and learning.
I hope this inspires you to pause and consider your own moments in motherhood. In the growing of you as a creative and a parent. You are so complex. It is ok to appreciate the hard moments within the blessings.
What struggles have you had with rest or creativity in motherhood?
Where can you celebrate growth right now? In the past three years?
In Case You Missed It
One of my new favorite pieces I’ve published here:
The time zones don’t quite work for me this time but I really appreciate this post. Like you, it was in becoming a mother, and passing through Matrescence that I was confronted with wanting to create again/return to creativity again (whilst acknowledging that growing a human is a hugely creative process in and of itself!).
With each child I’ve had, the need to create for myself has grown. I soon realised that waiting to create wasn’t going to work! I had to learn to create around the edges of motherhood or I wouldn’t be creating at all; I wasn’t willing to put my creativity on hold until some time in the future — life has shown me that we aren’t all gifted time on this planet — so create I do and create I must!! it’s messy and scribbly and fun and draining and scary and full of possibilities. Much like Parenthood 😊
I appreciate this post! I've been wrapped up in outlining and editing my WIP, in starting a new corporate job, in the holidays, in my kids 3rd January birthday, in in in in...the list goes on. I feel immense shame for not truly completing anything and for not getting on Substack enough or being inspired to write here. I need to pause and document.