Mothering in May: Three Truths I’m Still Standing In
May was spiritually heavy. I have been in a season of uncomfortable clarity — feeling like a woman sorting through revelations that arrived without warning and demanded attention anyway. God does not waste time with me. When He has something to show me, He shows it. This month, He showed me three things.
Truth 1: I mother the way I wished I was mothered.
It came to me one afternoon in the kitchen, meal prepping for the week, listening to a podcast. The conversation was about upbringing, about anger, about who we become as mothers because of — or in spite of — where we came from. And somewhere between chopping and listening, I had my own revelation. I am raising my daughters the way I wanted to be raised. Not because my mother was a bad mother. She was not. She was a fantastic mother who did the best she could within her circumstances, her season, her financial reality, her emotional capacity.
Our parents are given the opportunity to do what they can do. And what they can do is always shaped by where they are.
But I live a different life than my mother did at my age.
I did not go back to work after having Ariyah during COVID. I did not need to. I breastfed as long as possible. I was the one teaching them everything. And for the last six months, since temporarily closing my practice in November and moving to Texas, it has been my daughters and me out in the country, with no distraction, no nanny, no one else. The bond between the three of us is inseparable. They need me, and I need them. And in that need, I found my revelation: some of what I call devotion is actually a healed version of a fear I have been carrying. The fear that they will turn to someone else the way I once did, and get hurt. That realization gave me knots in my stomach. And truthfully, I have not done much with it yet. I have simply become aware of it, and I am telling my inner child that she is safe. That she has a mother who loves her, and that she (I) became a mother worth being proud of.
Truth 2: Becoming a mother has cost me something — and I am still reckoning with the price.
There is a version of motherhood that women arrive at after years of putting themselves last, where they finally declare, "I am done sacrificing; I am putting myself first.” I understand that moment. I am more aligned with starting with yourself from the beginning. But I will be honest: I have not fully figured out what that means once my children are awake. I am blood type A. Chaos is not my friend. Overstimulation is not my friend. And motherhood, especially combined with building a business, is relentless stimulation.
The psychological and neurological cost of shedding your identity as a single, independent, spontaneous woman and stepping into the full weight of a family is something most people do not discuss with honesty.
I wake before my children. I have my prayer book, my Bible, my lemon water, and my time. But after they wake, I am still learning what it means to start with myself first. At five and three, I am not sure that is fully possible. And I am taking ownership of the role I chose. I do not think you become a mother just to say you have a child. You become a mother to help a child make a difference in the world. I signed up for that. Most weekends, I still want to press pause. And I am asking God for the wisdom to know when I am doing too much and when scaling back is the most responsible thing I can do for my family and my health.
Truth 3: Healing my relationship with my own mother has required me to get curious about who she was before she was mine.
This one is tender. And it is the one I have been sitting with the longest. I was never a girl’s girl growing up. I ran track, and I danced. Both demanded that you be number one. My peers were my competition, and on the days I let someone cross the finish line ahead of me, I’d be told I knew better. I had an older brother, no younger siblings until I was twelve, and a sister who arrived when I was nearly in college.
The female bond was not something I was taught. My mother had her own experiences with women that were not favorable. And so I did not inherit it.
That changed when I moved to South Florida and found myself immersed in a community of Black women who were deeply loyal to each other. I attended a bachelorette party of twenty-three women — all Black, all in celebration — and I was altered by it. That experience quietly rerouted something in me. Now I have two daughters, and I will spend the rest of my life teaching them to be a woman’s woman. To hold other women gently. To listen well and observe better. To never judge, but to discern. Because a woman’s actions always tell the truth, whether she is whole or still healing.
And healing is what I have been doing with my own mother.
Having the uncomfortable conversations, getting curious about who she was at my age now, what shaped her, and what she was carrying.
Understanding her has given our relationship the grace it did not always have. And it has helped me release my expectations of my daughters — to let them become who God is intending them to be, not who my fear needs them to be.
These are not conclusions.
They are the middle of something. I am in the thick of motherhood, the thick of professional identity, the thick of being the wife my husband deserves. I am not on the other side of any of it. But I am in it with my eyes open. And for now, that is enough.
Much Joy,
AA
A balcony person building a health legacy
