Motherhood is complex. In a sense it is art as it encompasses a collage of emotions from the birth of our children to the release of their childhood as they venture into the unknown. Each emotion represents a different color.

For me motherhood is loving people so much you can feel your heart being pulled between Joy and an ache of intense fracturing from the evolution of becoming.

It’s watching my teenager sigh while eyes roll and remembering the years they once reached for my hand like I hung the moon.

Motherhood is hearing, “I’m hungry,” and somehow I translate it into, “You are failing,” even while groceries wait in pickup lines and love waits in every room in my home.

The colors of motherhood can be found in the homemade bracelets. Cold coffee twice reheated. Tight budgets. Tender hearts and minds asking questions with answers only time will tell. Silent fears that bring streams of tears.

Motherhood has unearthed generations of questions inside this body of mine. Each one carried by a weight in the waiting.

Am I enough? Am I too much? Will my children remember the ways I loved them and will they have space for grace because of the moments I was tired?

Maybe I am still wounded, not by motherhood itself, but how old unworthiness puts on these clothes and looks at the mom in the mirror while whispering lies through these ordinary moments.

Because worthy mothers still cry in parking lots. Worthy mothers still feel behind. Worthy mothers still carry guilt for things that were never meant to portray cruelty, only humanity.

I can’t help but think, maybe healing is learning that my worth was never measured by stocked pantries, perfect moods, or whether a teenager smiled that day.

Maybe my worth is measured in smaller holier things like being found in the daughter who learned tenderness by watching me embrace the many emotions life brings. In my husband trying to remind our girls to love me well. In the fact that despite everything I survived, we survived.

I look around today and I see my house and I get to call it a home. Even if it isn’t always the brightest or the warmest colors it still contains authenticity and grace.

I think it really matters. I spent so much of my life wondering if I was worth staying for. Now as I look around. I have gratitude because we built a place we call home from a canvas that was once blank. My heart is full because I see our amazing daughters who call me mom or bro, and it’s the most beautiful mosaic of scattered pieces becoming colorful art.

❤️-Steph