Why "Mothering Depth"

Postpartum, writing as survival, and naming this space

These days, writing is my life raft.

Writing has always been a shelter for me, but in the year and a half since my daughter was born, it has become as indispensable as minerals.

After a difficult birth, writing was the bassinet I climbed into when my body was aching and my newborn was screaming and I only had fifteen minutes to scratch down my anguish, my fear, my joy.

Writing was the bath I slipped into after long hours of bouncing on the exercise ball— the only way to calm the colic.

It was the hearth I returned to, night after night, to find my way back to my own thoughts.

It was the place where I could stare into the flames and make sense of the shapeshifting of my life.

Writing was where I processed the enormity of my entire world changing. Where I continued to encounter myself— even when I had no idea who I was.

Many days it wasn’t much. A few lines dashed sideways on a page. A poem written on the phone while she slept in my arms. A dream remembered from days ago, the details faded like the face of an ancient statue left lying in the sea.

But it was enough, always enough, to keep the thing I most needed alive.

When I realized I wanted to start this Substack, to share the writing that has been keeping me alive, to talk about motherhood and everything that goes along with it, I knew I wanted to find a name that matched the essence of what motherhood feels like to me.

I would say I thought about it for a long time— but that would be a lie.

I don’t really have long stretches of time to think anymore. Most mothers don’t.

I knew I didn’t have length or width—but I had depth.

So I thought about it, deeply, in the fifteen minutes while she nursed. I thought about it, intently, when I drove to the grocery store. I thought about it, with the entirety of my being, for the five minutes while I showered.

I’ve always loved the word “mother” as a verb. A boulder mothers new stones. An ocean mothers waves. A tree mothers shade.

To “mother” means “to bring to life.”

And so I asked myself—what is the journey of motherhood mothering within me?

There are so many ways to answer this question, as motherhood seems to amplify every aspect of being alive.

Some days being a mother gives birth to patience within me, sometimes frustration.

Sometimes clarity, sometimes confusion.

Sometimes ecstasy, sometimes depression.

I think that’s part of why motherhood feels so beautifully, radically, fascinatingly complex to write about. It’s everything. The entire spectrum of existence. Unbelievably miraculous and unbelievably mundane. Unbelievable, and yet entirely commonplace.

So what, at the end of the day, can we say motherhood actually gives birth to within us?

For me, there was only one word that could hold it all—depth.

Depths contain everything.

The thing that’s hidden, the thing we seek.

All that is unknowable. Meaning, weight, release.

Depths bring us deeper into an experience.

They don’t promise grand realizations or easy completion. But what they do offer, they offer without reservation— profound levels of awareness, new experiences of aliveness, deeper realms of understanding.

Depths ask us to sink into life. To surrender to the knowledge that being alive is an ongoing unfoldment.

Because depths, like the levels of our own awareness, are not finite.

There are always, always more.

And so the name for this space was born—Mothering Depth.

Because this is the truth of motherhood, the only one I can really write to with certainty…

The experience of becoming a mother will mother depth within you.

Depths you didn’t know were possible, depths you were afraid of before, depths that seem to break open the fabric of your reality—showing you a world far beneath the surface, one you could not have imagined before.

Like the deep sea, motherhood is an experience, an ecology, a climate unto itself. One you can’t really understand, not fully, unless you’ve been there with all its remoteness, its bizarreness, its blazing, life-altering beauty.

And more than this, motherhood doesn’t just give birth to new depths in your life…

It shows us, reminds us, that depth itself is a kind of mother.

That the deep places within us, even the ones we never wanted to visit, are the same spaces where new life is born.

The depths will transform you. It will reshape you. It will give birth to a new era of your life… if you let it.

And so the name of this space, the invitation of this place, is to go to those depths together.

To let the depths mother us.

To allow new depths to be created in our lives through the honesty, the enormity, the profundity of motherhood.

To descend, together, beneath the surface and greet what waits beneath the leagues.

Welcome. Blessings. Let’s join hands—and go deep, together.

(Photo by Eliza Bell Photography)