All the Ways a Woman Becomes a Mother

Every Mother’s Day, instead of feeling celebratory and blessed, I often feel something quieter. A kind of sorrow. A tenderness. A deep compassion for women and the complicated terrain of motherhood.

Motherhood was complicated for me long before I ever held a child in my arms.

It began with longing.

With infertility. With years of trying to understand what was wrong with my body, as though womanhood itself had become a puzzle I was failing to solve. That kind of longing is brutal. It rearranges you. I remember feeling wounded by the sight of pregnant women and babies. Irrationally offended by their existence. I thought they were conspiring to humiliate me. Or worse, avoiding me because they could see the failure stamped across my forehead.

There were months of hope... the trembling anticipation of double lines that became single lines. The grief of miscarriages. Plural.

There is a particular loneliness to miscarriage because the grief often has nowhere to go. It is grief without photographs. Grief without arranged meals. Grief without language. Half the time, you cannot even explain what hurts.

There were babies we never met.

And some we met, only to return to Heaven too soon.

There is also another kind of motherhood story people do not speak about enough... the motherhood of yearning. Wanting to be a mother when there is no husband yet. Wanting marriage. Wanting hope. Wanting to meet someone kind and emotionally whole in a world that increasingly feels allergic to tenderness and commitment.

My heart aches for women still walking that road.

And then, even after the baby comes, there is another unfolding entirely.

The exhaustion.

The loss of self.

The strange irony of finally receiving everything you prayed for, only to discover that what you want most is sleep. Deep, uninterrupted sleep.

Then comes the fear. The constant calculation. Trying to keep these tiny humans alive and emotionally intact in a dangerous world. Which school? Which values? Which version of yourself will shape them?

Your choices are no longer just your own.

Travelling for work is no longer simply travelling for work. It becomes a painful weighing of provision versus presence. Ambition versus guilt. Calling versus closeness.

You sit in school parking lots beside other mothers and quietly question every life choice you have ever made.

Motherhood changed how I see women.

Completely.

It made me softer. Less judgmental. More aware that every woman is carrying a story in her body. Some stories are visible. Some are buried deep beneath competence and makeup and carefully curated Instagram captions.

And I think motherhood is bigger than children.

To me, the capacity to mother already lives in many women long before a child arrives. Motherhood journeys are not only about having children. They are about the heart. About longing. About nurturing. About loss. About hope. About becoming.

This Mother’s Day, I want every woman to know that she is seen.

Seen by God. Held by God.

The God who Scripture describes not only as Father, but with the tenderness of a nursing mother... the God who feeds us, comforts us, carries us close. (“Can a mother forget the baby at her breast...?” in Book of Isaiah has always undone me.)

And when I post photos celebrating my mother, or other mothers, it is not performative sentimentality. It is my way of saying: I see you too.

The woman you were.

The woman you are.

The woman you are still becoming.

Past, present, future.

This is why Brave Work exists.

Because I believe there is a gentler way to carry the cross of motherhood. A truer way. A still way.

A way where women do not disappear inside performance and exhaustion, but learn to return to themselves and to God at the same time.

A way where healing is not hustle.

A way where formation matters more than performance.

A way where women can finally show up before God as their real selves... not only as mothers, wives, helpers, or achievers, but as beloved daughters.