Write Like a Mother
Motherhood, Becoming, and the Creative Life
I’ve missed you all! Apologies for the quiet summer — I took a much-needed pause while juggling a few big life, work, and book projects, including an exciting writing workshop happening this Thursday.
But I’m so happy re-launch our Sunday writing circle. ✍🏾✨
Every Sunday from 3:00–4:30 PM ET, we’ll carve out dedicated time to write together! Whether you’re working on a book, an essay, a poem, or simply trying to get back into the habit of writing, come as you are! I can’t wait to get messy on the page with you all again. 💛
Register here: Sundays in August 📅 Virtual
August 2
August 9
August 16
August 23
August 30
If you’re looking for a chance to write before the sprint begins, I’d also love to see you at my workshop this Thursday. I can’t wait to write with you again. 💛
Motherhood, Becoming, and the Creative Life
The workshop I’m teaching on Thursday is being hosted by Scribente Maternum (an awesome community of writers who identify as mothers!) I’m excited share my writung experience with the participants! Because motherhood totally transformed my creative journey.
In the fall of 2021, the life I had carefully constructed online began to fracture. My son had just turned one, and I was moving through my days with the eerie sensation that I was both visible and disappearing at the same time. But listen, from the outside, everything gleamed. I had written an award-winning anthology. I had received literary awards and online accolades. I had built a loving community of readers who trusted me with their tenderness. If you held your phone and scrolled through my life, it appeared perfectly curated. But privately, that wasn’t my reality! I was unraveling. That year I had given birth, postpartum depression was settling in, and I was in a relationship that felt loveless. I would rock my son to sleep at night and wonder how I had managed to get so much right in public and so much wrong in private. How had I built something admired by thousands and misread something so intimate and personal? There is a unique loneliness in being praised while you’re breaking and feeling disconnected. What in hell was I doing? There are not enough “likes” in the world to push that feeling down. In that hard season, I had to really practice self-love and patience. Without question, motherhood sharpened this lesson.
My son’s needs were immediate and nonnegotiable. He did not care that I was questioning my relationship or my sense of self. He needed comfort and steadiness 24/7. Becoming his mother required a daily surrender that felt at once sacred and destabilizing. Truthfully, I could not control his moods or mine. Nothing - I mean, NOTHING seemed in my control, especially the pace at which my life was shifting beneath me.
Around that time, I returned to a quote from Alice Walker that would not leave me: “Keep in mind always the present you are constructing. It should be the future you want.”
The sentence felt less like an indictment. If the present I was constructing felt anxious and misaligned, what future was I building with it? And what was my responsibility, as both mother and writer, in shaping it?
Walker has said that the role of the artist is to make us pay attention - to help us see what we have been taught not to notice. I began to suspect that I had not been paying attention to my own life. Over the years, I had been moving quickly, building outward, expanding my online platform, but avoiding the quieter interior reckoning that asked: Is this loving? Is this sustainable?
Writing my memoir gave me permission to tell my story - then having my son made me realize that what I desired was not more visibility. I longed for stillness; a much quiet inner life that did not depend on applause. I need to grow like a flower. I imagined myself as an orchid, not because orchids are delicate, but because they require particular conditions to thrive. I began asking what conditions my own life required — and what I would have to dismantle to create them. So, the end of my relationship came abruptly but with certainty. I longer felt felt safe with him. My creative reinvention was a much longer process. I had to learn how to become someone new while still being someone’s mother.
“There was something so valuable about what happened when one became a mother.
The person that was in me that I liked best was the one my children seemed to want.”
Toni Morrison
Maya Angelou once compared creativity to electricity - mysterious, powerful, and morally neutral. You can use it to light a cathedral or an operating room. You can even use it to harm. The point is not to master its mystery but to harness it. The more you use it, the more it expands. I realized that even as I grew into motherhood — and discovered a new creative light — I could still access that underlying current. I could still tap into the creative force that sustains me and carries me beyond self-doubt. My incredible son is now 6. I have a beautiful life and stronger understanding of my creative calling. I can’t wait to see what the future holds. Xoxo.
~ Glory
“Motherhood is one of the most challenging and creative jobs anyone can do.”
Naomi Wolf
