Among many ambitions and goals for my life, from the first moments I can remember, I identified with—and desired to be—a mother. This nurturing force inside of me showed up early: in my fondness for animals and dolls, and in the way I moved toward people, wanting them to feel seen and cared for. Mothering felt less like something I wanted to become, and more like something I already was. In 2016, that knowing took form with the birth of my son. Motherhood cracked me open in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. It brought a kind of wholeness I had long sensed but never fully touched.

And then, not long after, came loss I hadn’t prepared for—loss that unsettled not just my life, but my sense of myself within it. The identity I held so closely began to feel less certain, more fragile than I expected. I found myself moving toward the grief, wanting to meet it honestly, to make sense of it—but instead circling the same questions, the same longings for what I thought should have been. I was less in the experience itself, and more in what it meant. What it said about my life. About me.

For a long time, I stayed there—trying to reconcile the gap between what I had imagined and what was actually unfolding.

What shifted wasn’t immediate, and it wasn’t clean. It came through resistance, through returning again and again to something I couldn’t yet fully name. But slowly, there was a loosening. Not of the grief, but of the story wrapped around it. A sense that beneath everything that hadn’t gone as planned, there was still something intact.

That something became a kind of anchor. Not a resolution, not an answer—but a quieter, steadier knowing. One that allowed me to hold grief in one hand, without losing access to something else in the other: a sense of aliveness, of direction, of being rooted in myself in a way I hadn’t been before.

My life does not look the way I once imagined it would. And yet, there is a depth of connection—to myself, to others, to something larger—that feels more real than anything I had been reaching for.

Motherwild was born out of this space. Not as a solution, but as a continuation. A reflection of what it means to return to yourself, again and again. To loosen the grip of the stories that define you, and come back to what remains when they fall away. For me, this is where something truer begins—not in the absence of grief or uncertainty, but in the willingness to stay connected to yourself within it.