I just closed a year-long mentorship circle with extraordinary women. My whole heart is so filled and in awe from walking with women weaving careers, partnerships, and small children into a life they love. All through sleepless nights, devastating reorgs at work, contemplating moves across the country in pursuit of the life they're consciously building. And doing all while building self-awareness, reclaiming their feminine wisdom, tending to their regulation, attuning to their cycle and somatic wisdom, and breaking so many cycles. It's all so tender, raw, messy, and breathtaking.
And what emerged over the year?
Honestly, Is how much “suffering” in motherhood is bound up in the stories we carry. The internal narratives keeping us from taking the nap, enjoying the rest, asking for help, setting the boundary, canceling an obligation. All the ways we resist doing whatever helps us from moving in alignment with our natural design.
It seems clear that for most women the “key to enjoying motherhood” often lies in remapping our own stories.
And how important it is to take the time to do the work, to get to know yourself, and weave a life, career, and motherhood that moves in alignment with your unique design.
Because raising wholeness in our kids starts with us modeling it.
So I’m sharing some of my top reframes here in this article.
Would love to hear from you in the comments:
What this touched in you? What this inspired in you? What I missed? This article was hard to write, because this is just the tip of the iceberg. There was so much wisdom shared and so much conditioning that needs to be remapped. Sharing the most potent aspects we worked on together.
What is your biggest take away?
Filling our cups isn’t self-care. It’s essential and foundational. Our power, regulation, resilience, patience, and grace all live in our nourishment. Yet learning to tend to our feminine bodies is an art that’s been lost for generations of women.
This wisdom was always meant to be learned in maidenhood. And between conditioning, culture, and careers, we’ve been severed from understanding our own biology—our cycles, our hormones, our nervous systems, our need for safety.
Real regulation doesn’t come from another wellness trend or morning routine. It comes from intimate attunement to your body’s actual needs. I write about women’s regulation in more detail here. Getting enough protein so your adrenals can function. Tracking where you are in your cycle before diagnosing yourself with anxiety or doing deep shadow work.
We don’t know what we need until we check in. And most women have been running on empty for so long, they’ve forgotten what “regulated” even feels like.
These micro-moments of attunement ARE the work. Not preparation for it. The actual practice of returning home to yourself, again and again, throughout your day. This is how you reclaim the lost art of tending to your feminine system.
The Reframe: Attuning to your body's needs in luteal phase is elite care. Getting your protein minimum daily is elite care. Tracking where you are in your cycle before diving into shadow work is elite care. Your feminine wisdom is sophisticated biological intelligence. When you honor it instead of override it, you don't just survive motherhood. You model wholeness for your children.
There’s so much shame around “regulation.” It’s another area we project perfectionism onto, especially in motherhood. I have so many moms who feel like shit when they’re tapped out and completely dissociated. Like this is failure.
Here’s one of the bigger reframes I want to offer: Dissociation is not failure.
Every mom has moments where they’re overwhelmed, overstimulated, and without more support, there’s no escape other than to leave our body.
Dissociation isn’t dysfunction. It’s your body asking you to come home. To notice when it’s too much. Your nervous system is protecting you from overwhelm it can’t process. It’s creating distance so you can recalibrate and come back when you’re more resourced. It’s a time when we often need co-regulation and support.
The nuanced lens: If you’re into Human Design, your open centers are where you absorb everyone else’s stuff. If you feel everyone else’s emotions, you have open energy centers designed to feel and reflect the world. “You literally absorb your whole family’s everything,” I told one mother.
The Reframe: Just noticing when you’re dissociating is the medicine. Take a pause, check in with a friend, partner, or just yourself. See what the missing need is and how you can take aligned action to get it.
Your nervous system regulation and your family’s regulation is the foundation everything else is built on.
When you’re dysregulated, everything suffers. Your patience thins. Your boundaries blur. Your capacity tanks. You snap at your kids, resent your partner, and shame yourself for not holding it together better.
For our children, chronic dysregulation impacts brain development. Your ability to co-regulate is everything.
Yet we constantly override this. We over-schedule because we want our children to have access to opportunities. We say yes to staying up late to finish the movie. Yes to the grandparents’ dinner even though it means skipping nap time. We say yes to things that come at a cost to our own or our children’s regulation.
The goal isn’t perfection. It’s attunement. What am I available for? Do I have the capacity to recover if I say yes to something I know is dysregulating?
This means sometimes the answer is canceling the playdate because everyone’s overstimulated. Saying no to the birthday party because your nervous system can’t handle it. Choosing rest over the “shoulds.”
This is where our stories about what we “should” do win over the wellbeing of our families.
The Reframe: Prioritizing your nervous system and your family’s nervous system isn’t indulgent. It’s the most sacred move you can make.
Resentment shows exactly where we’ve crossed our own boundaries. Not by others. By us.
We often mistake resentment as anger with others for “failing” us. Not seeing our distress, not helping—can’t they see how much I’m struggling?
The real question is: where are you not seeing yourself? Where did you ignore your own needs? Where did you silence your voice? What boundary did you need to make?
Every flash reveals where you’ve abandoned yourself to maintain “harmony.” So many daughters are celebrated for “being good,” contorting who they are to be liked, suppressing their needs to avoid rocking the boat.
This shows up in our adult life as lack of boundaries, then sitting in resentment because we’ve dissociated from the part of us that’s angry for not speaking up and still terrified of speaking up.
The Reframe: The work isn’t changing others or expecting them to read our minds. The reframe here is to just notice. When resentment arises, ask yourself: where did I say yes when I meant no?
9 out of 10 times, the challenges with your kids aren’t reflecting your failures—they’re illuminating exactly where your parents didn’t know what to do either.
This is inherited nervous system templating, generational trauma, ancestral wounds. The outbursts often feel so big because they’re not just your emotions.
That’s why you freeze when your kid melts down. Why you rage when they won’t listen. We often resort to our default parenting aka the nervous system templating we absorbed from our childhood. You literally don’t know what to do because no one modeled it for you.
The answer isn’t in another parenting book. It’s in asking your inner child: “What did I need here?”
When you make space to reparent your inner child in that moment, you’re healing the lineage and creating the playbook to support your kids. This is the radical power of conscious motherhood. You break the cycle by tending to yourself first.
The Reframe: Your struggles with your kids aren’t something to be ashamed of. They’re precise invitations showing you where your own inner child is still waiting to be held. Reparent yourself, and you reparent the entire line.
It’s part of being human to get triggered. There’s no amount of self-regulation, self-care, or inner work that will exempt you from this part of our humanness. We all carry generational trauma. Not one person is trauma-free, not you, not your kids.
A lot of mothers think we’re going to reach a destination where we don’t get triggered. Even my shadow work teacher, who’s been doing this work for decades, still gets had by her own shadows. The key is learning to work with them.
We confuse good parenting with perfect parenting. Our role is to model our humanness, the failures, the mistakes, the repairs after we lose our shit. Every trigger, every meltdown is data about your conditioning, not evidence of failure.
My daughter and I have a saying: when we spill the milk, we just pick it up. When we notice our humanness showing, we tend to it with gentleness.
The Reframe: A “good” parent isn’t regulated all the time. Being a work in progress, repairing when we cross the line, working on our self-awareness—this is being a great parent. Your children need to see you feel your feelings fully, then pull yourself back together. This is how they learn wholeness.
Consistency in motherhood just looks different. As a single mom, I've had to release timelines that don't fit my reality. Things 'pop up,” my kid is sick, programs get canceled, she doesn't nap. I know people who don’t have kids just “don’t get it.” It’s something I learned to sit with the tension, to hold both the uncomfortableness of other expectations and the yearning to feel understood and seen for prioritizing my family’s wellbeing and regulation.
And when it comes to “consistency” it just looks different. It’s not weekly, monthly or even annually. This is just not the season for it. This is the season of riding the waves.
Consistency in motherhood is coming back to things when you have spaciousness. And that might be a month, a season, or even years later. Check out my podcast rhythm if you need proof.
I just keep coming back to my passions, my craft, when I can. I’m not here to force it. When I do force it, it usually comes out sideways with frustration, lack of patience, angry directed at my kid (more practicing the repair I mentioned in reframe above).
I find I have so much more aliveness, desire, energy to create when I’m not wasting energy shaming myself over things I can’t control. And I have so much more creative life force when I drop what I need to so I can be present with my kid. Seems counterintuitive, and it’s just been my way.
Our children need to see us honor our rhythms, not perform reliability we don’t have. Not push through and live in constant burnout.
The Reframe: Consistency isn’t about showing up the same way every day. It’s about returning to what matters when you have the capacity, and tracking your capacity. Your kids are learning that creativity and passion are worth waiting for, that rest is sacred, and that forcing things creates more problems than it solves.
One of the biggest myths of motherhood is about endless giving.
Motherhood is actually your season to receive.
And yes so many of us have shadow around martyrdom. Invitation to just notice if you’re thinking about asking for help with a transactional mindset. So many women don’t reach out for help because they’re afraid they can’t return the favor. Stop tracking who you “owe.” Just receive.
If it was your daughter struggling, what would you tell her? As one mothers from my circle shared: “Receiving without giving back isn’t selfish. It’s showing my daughter she’s worthy of support without earning it.”
This is biologically informed, especially during postpartum. Women don’t get their periods back for the first 6 months. Our bleed is the one time during our cycle where our womb is closed and not ready to receive. Of course we don’t get our cycle back till later—we’re meant to just receive.
The Reframe: Your capacity to receive teaches your children their own worthiness. When you accept help without guilt, you’re modeling that love isn’t earned through performance. You’re showing them what it looks like to be held by community, to trust that support exists without strings attached.
There are honestly so many more reframes to be made. We have long out grown the outdated views and perspectives of parenting and motherhood. It’s time to rebrand.
And revolution doesn’t mean perfection. It means consciousness.
It’s easy to get lost in motherhood. In all the conditioning, old patterns, and ways of unconsciously living. And it’s also natural. You’re human, doing one of the most challenging things humans do.
I want to invite you to step into (or deepen into) becoming a conscious creator of your motherhood journey. You weave your story, your legacy, through both the beautiful moments and the messy ones. In 10, 20 years, what do you want to look back on?
It’s about not having it all figured out, or doing it all right - just getting to know yourself, and creating a motherhood journey that fits your unique mother essence.
Every woman who rewrites motherhood, paves the path for other women, paves the path for our daughters to live with more joy and wholeness.
Sending love,
Jenn
I’m here to support women breaking cycles and bringing intention, consciousness to their role as mother, as woman, and modeling wholeness for our littles. Wholeness that includes the struggles alongside the beauty.
If you’re looking for more ways to deepen your own journey of remapping motherhood, I’ll be hosting Seasonal Motherhood & Wholeness Circles.
Winter Circle starts February 13th: Boundaries Rooted in Wholeness
Where we will collectively compost our stories around boundaries and support each other to reorient to boundaries that are rooted in wholeness and attunement to our capacity.
Together we’ll practice remapping how to say no without collapse, to hold your yes, and notice resentment and how to take responsibility for our own resentment. To let others have their feelings while you tend to yours. This is the foundation everything else is built on.
WINTER: Boundaries Rooted in Wholeness
Calls are Fridays @ 1PM ET
(5) 90 min circles over 6 Weeks
February 13, 20, March 6, 13, 20
Explore full details here or reach out with questions. Happy to navigate the fit together.
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