A Birthday Reflection on Motherhood, Purpose, and Finding Myself:
This year challenged who I thought I was.
It’s strange to write that because the year didn’t start that way. At the beginning of the year, I felt like I was on top of the world. Or, at the very least, like I finally had a pretty good handle on my little corner of it.
I’ve spent much of this season finding purpose in motherhood, learning to recognize growth in unexpected places, and questioning what it really means to build a meaningful life.
I felt confident in my community. I felt confident in my friendships. I felt more settled in the relationships around me and more certain about the businesses and creative work I wanted to continue building for my family.
After years of trying to find our footing here, I thought maybe I was finally starting to understand what our life was supposed to look like.
And then, somewhere in the middle, I lost my confidence.
Summer came, and it felt like several things I had been standing on shifted at once.
Relationships changed. Some friendships disappointed me. Family relationships became painful. Spaces where I once felt connected no longer felt quite like home. Motherhood started to feel heavier. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I became pregnant again.
A blessing. A deeply wanted blessing.
And also, if we’re being real, a first trimester that absolutely wore me out.
I stopped writing as much.
I stopped feeling as productive.
I had less energy to pour into the things I had been so excited about building.
And for a while, I think I confused my lack of capacity with a lack of progress.
I looked at everything that wasn’t happening and started questioning everything that was.
Was I actually building community here?
Were these relationships as real as I thought they were?
Was I still building something meaningful professionally?
Was this blog actually growing?
Was I losing pieces of myself in motherhood?
Was this still the right place for us?
Was I doing any of this right?
For a good portion of the summer, I was sad.
Not poetic, reflective, someday-this-will-make-a-great-blog-post sad.
Just sad.
And maybe that’s part of why I couldn’t write about it while I was living through it. I didn’t have a lesson yet. I didn’t have a beautiful bow to tie around the season. I was tired, pregnant, emotional, disappointed, and trying to understand why things that had felt so solid suddenly didn’t.
Finding My Way in Exile
When we first moved to Arizona, I remember hearing a guest pastor at our church preach about exile.
I don’t remember every detail of the sermon anymore, but I remember the feeling it left with me. Sometimes you can find yourself planted somewhere that feels foreign. Somewhere that doesn’t quite feel like home. And you still have to figure out how to live there.
That message stayed with me because, at the time, Arizona felt a little like that.
I assumed the story would be simple.
We would struggle. We would build. Eventually, we would find our people, find our rhythm, and find our way.
And for a while, I thought we had.
Maybe that’s why this year hurt as much as it did.
It is one thing to feel lost.
It is another thing to believe you have finally found your way and then feel lost again.
But I’m starting to wonder whether I misunderstood the lesson.
Maybe finding your way isn’t something you do once.
Maybe there are seasons when you feel deeply rooted and seasons when the ground shifts underneath you. Maybe there are relationships that are meant to become pillars and others that are meant to teach you something before changing shape. Maybe belonging isn’t a destination you arrive at and permanently claim.
Maybe life asks us to keep finding our way.
Finding Purpose in Motherhood: The Life I Didn’t Know I Was Dreaming Of
I’ve also been thinking a lot about what it means to live a life of purpose, especially when that life doesn’t look anything like the one you originally imagined.
Before becoming a mother, I had a pretty clear picture of who I thought I would be.
I loved my career. I loved working. I loved the feeling of being good at something, of contributing, of having professional ambitions and a path forward.
I imagined myself becoming a successful working mom, balancing a career I loved with a family I was equally proud to raise.
But life had other plans.
I’ve written before about letting go of the mom I thought I’d be, and I think this year has challenged me to go even deeper into what that actually means.
Being laid off was confusing. It disrupted more than my employment. It disrupted an identity I had spent years building.
And somewhere along the way, I found myself becoming a stay-at-home mom.
Not because it had always been the dream. Not because I suddenly stopped caring about my career or my ambitions. But because life opened a door I hadn’t necessarily planned to walk through.
And recently, while talking to my husband, I realized something that surprised even me.
In so many ways, I’m already living a version of my dream life.
Not the version I originally pictured.
Not the version that necessarily looks impressive on paper.
But a version that has given me something I didn’t know how much I needed: the opportunity to discover who I am outside of what I do.
I’ve been thinking about how much confidence we borrow from our accomplishments.
From our job titles. Our employers. Our degrees. Our productivity. The things we can point to when someone asks us what we do with our lives.
And how uncomfortable it can feel when those things are no longer the easiest way to explain ourselves.
There’s something incredibly humbling about being able to say, “I’m a stay-at-home mom,” and allowing that sentence to stand on its own.
I’ve shared before how complicated learning to define myself beyond my job title has been. But lately, I’ve been realizing that I don’t need to explain everything I used to be to validate who I am now.
No immediate explanation of what I used to do.
No quick mention of the businesses I’m building.
No need to prove that I’m still intelligent, capable, ambitious, or interesting.
Just me.
A woman who is raising her children and building a home and a life with her husband.
And who is still all of those other things, too.
Finding purpose in motherhood has challenged me to develop a different kind of confidence. One that isn’t entirely dependent on what I’m accomplishing or how other people perceive my life.
Because my value didn’t disappear when my career changed.
My intelligence didn’t disappear when I stopped working full time.
My ambition didn’t disappear when motherhood became the center of my days.
And my purpose certainly didn’t disappear because I couldn’t neatly package it into a professional title.
If anything, I’ve had to learn how to recognize it in places I might have overlooked before.
In the home we’re building. In the relationships I’m nurturing. In the time I get to spend raising my son. In the creative ideas that are still waiting for me when I have the capacity to return to them.
And now, in the anticipation of welcoming another child into our family.
I still have dreams for my career, my writing, our businesses, and the impact I hope to make in my community.
Those dreams haven’t gone away.
But I’m beginning to understand that I don’t have to postpone feeling fulfilled until every one of them comes to fruition.
I can be proud of the life I’m living while still working toward the life I’m imagining.
I’ve had to give myself permission to want more without treating the life I already have as something incomplete.
I can be grateful for this season without needing it to be my final destination.
And maybe, just maybe, part of the growth has been learning that I don’t have to become someone more accomplished to feel worthy of the life I already have.
Ordinary People
Sometime during the last few weeks, I was driving alone and John Legend’s Ordinary People came on.
I was already emotional that day, and something about hearing that song in that moment cracked something open in me.
We’re ordinary people.
We have feelings. We get things wrong. We disappoint each other. We misunderstand each other. We change. We don’t always know which direction we’re going.
Sometimes we have to slow down.
And I think that is what this season has been trying to teach me.
To stop beating myself up.
And, honestly, to stop beating everyone else up in my head, too.
Not every disappointment needs a villain.
Not every relationship that changes means the relationship was meaningless.
Not every season of uncertainty means I made the wrong decisions.
Not every period of low productivity means I’ve stopped building.
And not every season that looks different from the one I imagined means I’ve wandered away from my purpose.
Sometimes life is just…life.
Complicated. Tender. Disappointing. Beautiful. Exhausting. Ordinary.
And we are ordinary people trying to make sense of it while we’re still living it.
The Garden Is Still Growing
My birthday season gave me something I desperately needed.
Perspective.
Not because everything suddenly became perfect. It didn’t.
There are still relationships I am grieving. There are family dynamics that still hurt. There are communities I am stepping away from. There are things about this season of motherhood that I am still learning how to carry.
But when I stopped staring at everything I thought I had lost, I finally noticed what was still growing.
My friendships are becoming clearer.
Maybe I don’t have the perfectly packaged “girl gang” I once imagined community was supposed to look like. But I am learning who is there. I am learning which women will sit with me, pray with me, laugh with me, check on me, and share ordinary life with me.
And that counts.
Some of the family relationships I hoped would be part of our village here have waned, and that hurts. But somehow, we have continued growing a village anyway.
Doors have closed in communities where I once expected to remain, while completely different doors have quietly started cracking open.
My husband is growing.
Our marriage is growing.
The dreams we have for our family and our businesses haven’t disappeared simply because I haven’t had the capacity to work on all of them right now.
This blog is still here.
Slowly growing.
And most literally of all, my family is growing.
There is an entire little person growing inside of me while I’ve been walking around worried that I haven’t been producing enough.
The irony is not lost on me.
Everything is growing.
Just not always at the pace, in the direction, or in the form I expected.
And maybe that’s the beautiful paradox of this season.
It’s hard as hell.
There is so much about motherhood, friendship, family, ambition, community, and becoming that I still don’t understand. I have plenty of time left to get things wrong. Plenty of seasons left to question myself. Plenty of moments when I’m sure I’ll wonder whether anything I’m doing is working.
So maybe the question for this next year of my life isn’t, How do I finally get everything right?
Maybe it’s:
How do I learn to accept the ebbs and flows not as evidence of failure, but as part of the growth in the garden?
Gardens don’t bloom constantly.
There are seasons of abundance and seasons when everything seems quiet. There is pruning. There are things that don’t survive. There are things you planted intentionally and things that seemingly appear from nowhere.
Sometimes you’re staring so intently at the empty patch where something used to grow that you miss the tiny green thing pushing through the soil beside it.
I think that’s where I have been.
Looking at the empty patches.
My birthday reminded me to look again.
Not everything has been lost.
There is still friendship here.
There is still community here.
There is still purpose here.
There is still creativity here.
There is still love here.
There is still a family dreaming and building a life together here.
And there is still me.
Maybe a little softer. A little less certain. A little more willing to let life unfold without demanding that I understand every piece of it immediately.
I haven’t completely found my way.
Maybe that’s okay.
I’m learning to take life a little slower. To give myself grace for being human and extend some of that grace to the ordinary people around me, too.
I’m learning that being uncertain doesn’t mean I’m lost.
And I’m learning that a difficult growing season doesn’t mean the garden is dead.
Sometimes you just have to look a little closer.
It’s still growing.
And so am I.
If this resonated with you, I’d love for you to share it with another mom who might need to read it today. And if you want to keep exploring what intentional motherhood looks like in real life, come find me on Pinterest where I share more of this journey.
