Not everyone wants to be a mom.

But what if you want nothing more than to be a mom one day, yet you’re scared to death that you won’t know how?

What if you’re afraid that you’re not meant to be a mom, or you once were, but life circumstances depleted & deleted your nurturing capabilities?

There’s no test to know whether or not you’re able to love a child.

When you don’t know how to love yourself, you doubt how you’ll be able to love another innocent person enough.

If you can’t seem to find that compassionate loving part that your own self is in need of, how will you be able to hold someone else in your arms and comfort them?

How will you look into their eyes and say “you are perfect, you are amazing, you are beautiful” if you can’t say it to yourself.

This is what I thought for years.

I would think to myself “I wasn’t mothered the way I should have been, my formative years were full of dysfunction & pain. I won’t be able to parent.”

Over time I did “the work.”

I worked on me. As I worked on the story I held onto so tightly, I began to release it....little by little, like leaves falling from a tree. One leaf of pain and attachment dropping off of my limbs at a time.

As each leaf fell, there was room for new growth. That growth meant accepting and forgiving the life behind me, meeting myself where I currently was, and being compassionate and patient with where I wanted to go. As I began to turn within myself, rather than to external sources for my answers, my growth was nurtured.

As my new branches filled out and blossomed, my capacity to be loving and nurturing to myself emerged from deep within.

The more compassionate, self-accepting, and loving of myself I became, the more capacity I had to be loving towards others. It had always been there, but I had to love myself first, and stop putting myself last.

Every Mother’s Day I pause and reflect on what I had once feared most and the reality of what is.

Love