Part 2 - A Nest in Pieces

dancemf247
Jul 31, 2025
3 min read

First, thank you for all your feedback after my email last week. Graduation week was full of joy and sadness, madness and mayhem.

But am I glad its over?

So many people commented on my words and message; how they felt the same, how it will be an incredible time for me, how they also felt that way when their youngest graduated HS.

Thank you for acknowledging me and my feelings.

I have given so very much time and consideration as to why I feel so broken up, in pieces, over what is genuinely a GOOD THING.

I have two driven and inspired sons (thats my #1, Lowin, at about 10 months in the picture) who are both attending university with a clear path and enthusiasm.

Maxime, my step daughter, has already graduated college and seems happy and in love these days.

They all have big hearts, big hugs, and I know that I am deeply loved by them.

I couldn't ask for more.

So why the sad face mom???

The InHara System

After a lot of soul searching and personal reflection, what I have come to is this...

I am certain, a few days to a few weeks after Lowin was born in 2003, I came alive, became a whole person, and felt a purpose for the first time.

I was so in love. I had tapped into the nectar at the center of the universe and it was my son and I was his mom. Mic drop.

Prior to motherhood, I lost my self, ran from myself, questioned myself, hated myself, ignored myself, harmed myself and then, without any idea I was so lost, I found myself in the reflection in Lowin's eyes during the months after he was born.

I had never once felt so much joy or love. I am not sure I had ever honestly felt either until he was born.

And then it happened again. Elijah's birth was the hardest birth I ever witnessed, professionally or otherwise (remember I was/am a doula and have attended nearly a hundred births). But through it, I found grace. That was a word unbeknownst to me prior to that next year.

Alive - in love - grace

Today, there are only a few things I could confidently say about myself and without question.

Relating to this message, I can confidently say, I was and have been a very good mother.

I have worked at it. I have asked for help. I have deliberately broken generations of ineffective violent punishments with mindfulness and with the intention that fear would never be a part of my parenting strategy. I have held and listened, celebrated and cried, worried and raged,

I have mothered.

Holistic Health Care

There has been nothing more worthwhile than raising these boys, and Maxime before she left for college, which framed me into the person I am now.

I am thankful for them. Not because of anything they have individually done, but for simply being. They are what brought life into my living and purpose into my human-being.

So maybe I am afraid I will become a box of puzzle pieces; having known what the finished image looked like once but again is 1,000 little parts.

Some of you are telling me, yes! thats right. I will be a new image 'with' my children instead of 'of my children'.

I wonder, can I experience the fullness that motherhood has brought me in whatever image the new puzzle shapes up into?

I don't know.

Right now, I am just in pieces.