Shedding Skins + Mothering the Mother : Our Second Matrescence

On creativity, loss and coming home to ourselves.

Hello everyone.

For those of you who are new - My name is Stacey. I’m a Mama to two, a regenerative farmer, writer and painter. I’m the owner of two businesses; a brick-and-mortar shop and Slow Folk - a community for heart-centred entrepreneurs and rebellious creatives, thirsty for a slower life in a world obsessed with speed.

Here on Substack I write about the place where radical slow living, motherhood, creativity and entrepreneurship collide. So glad to have you.

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My youngest child turns 10 in a few short weeks. It feels . . . like turning a corner, like opening a door. My eldest is 12 now and I’ve felt over the last couple of years a shifting. An opening. A moving towards.

In those early days of motherhood the boundaries between ourselves and our children dissolve. Our edges blur; we are sea and shore.

We lose ourselves in the rhythm of sleepless nights, nourishing our babes, attuning our whole being to their frequency, our bodies an antenna dedicated to their channel - lightning or breath.

This season of matrescence is beautiful and difficult and all-encompassing.

It is also one we talk a lot about, as we should.

What is talked about less, what is secreted away, often wrapped in the darkness and self-doubt and shame, is the truth that for many of us, this season of new motherhood is also one of grief.

Some of us may have the capacity to ask more beautiful questions of our lives and selfhood as mothers; how to integrate who were were before motherhood with who we have become.

But others of us surface the waters of our matrescence strangers to ourselves. The women we were fall away like a papery skin, abandoned to the breeze.

As I emerged from the dark waters of a difficult birth, shrouded in shame and disappointment and the fog of undiagnosed postpartum depression, the thought of resurrecting my creative self felt painfully impossible.

I felt fear about this. Grief. Rage.

I couldn’t have conversations with myself about making time for writing or painting or simply feeding my spirit with the things that used to bring me joy.

My physical body was broken; raw and unrecognizable. My spirit felt the same.

So I grieved these women. Mourned them for dead.

Eventually, with help, I emerged from the postpartum but the darkness of my matrescence always cast a shadow.

Like so many other women I secretly, shamefully, carried a truth deep in my belly that I dared not speak aloud; I didn’t feel whole. This wasn’t enough.

There were days that I found myself asking -

Is this what I am FOR? This endless parade of laundry and dishes?

Is this why I am here, in this body, miraculously alive in this moment - just to scrub this small square of linoleum - over and over and over again?

And although what I felt was true in the moment . . . it also wasn’t the whole story. I wish I had known.

If I knew, I could have leaned into that season of mothering, surrendered to it and lived it more deeply, because I wouldn’t have been so afraid. I could have dove in, instead of treading water.

Here's the truth of it:

Those parts of you? The women you have set down or set aside or let fall away like a shed skin? The parts of yourself you mourned and grieved?

They were with you all along.

The moment I went looking for her - that feisty, curious, creative part of myself, the one who chose art school over law school, who played guitar and painted and went to gigs in tiny bars on Wednesday nights, who gave the middle finger to the misogynistic pricks at university and went ahead and made feminist work despite them . . .

The very moment she felt a whisper from me, she came back. Slowly, tentatively at first, then all at once.

She didn’t die. I hadn’t lost her. She was with me all along.

And so, since I turned 40, I have quietly, gently, intentionally been coming home to myself.

No longer in survival mode, I am beginning to ask myself -

What do I need to thrive? What fills me up? What makes me feel whole?

And then I have simply gone out into the world and done it.

I did it without fanfare or overthinking or asking anyone else for permission. I gave myself permission to try and to fail. To change my mind. To try something and discard it if it didn’t feel true.

After an impossibly long hiatus, I picked up my paint brushes again.

Instead of the large, sweeping paintings of my early work, I gave myself permission to start small. I began with just colour theory exercises, reacquainting myself with my tools and the medium I love.

Eventually I settled on making tiny oil paintings - just 4 inches square on rag paper. The size and scale freed me from the stress and guilt of larger projects, and they fit seamlessly into my life as a mother.

I never have half-finished paintings guilting me from the easel anymore and that makes me indescribably happy.

One of my teeny-tiny paintings. 4” x 4”, oil on rag paper.

I was also mindful about surfacing the joy inherent in each part of the process - right down to making a ritual of a trip to the art supply store. I booked lots of time, dressed in a way that called forth my creative self, brought a cappuccino and simply savoured being in the space, surrounded by other creatives and so much inspiration.

Just touching the pots of printing ink transported me back to my print studio 20 years before. To the luxurious intensity of focus, the community, the work itself.

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Then, at 40, I started piano lessons for the very first time.

I was just sitting in the car for 30 minutes, anyway, while my daughter took hers. I offer these opportunities to my kids - value them, encourage them. Why shouldn’t I do the same for myself? If my daughter told me she’d always wanted to learn to do something - I’d tell her to go for it.

So that’s what I did.

I didn’t do it because doing something I love would make me a better wife or mother or reduce my stress or cure burnout or any of the rest. It was absolutely, deliciously selfish in the best way possible. I even refused to participate in the traditional recitals, because as a musician (and a grown-ass woman) I already knew that performing wasn’t what lit me up.

I wanted to play strictly for an audience of one - me.

This was about claiming my joy and reclaiming my creative self. Nothing more, nothing less. No second-guessing and no apologies.

In the process I’ve discovered that reawakening our creative selves after losing touch with her during motherhood is a gentle, rebellious act of mothering ourselves.

And this, I think, is our second matrescence.

We have become mothers, we have weathered the storm, the rough and the smooth, the unspeakable joy.

Now, as our children make arcs away from us, further and further, ever wider, a space quietly manifests near our heart. An openness beneath our ribcage where breath might return. Where we might gently cultivate a sense of expansiveness to welcome home our multitudes.

( And let’s not forget - drink our whole damn coffee while it’s still hot. )

We talk a lot about those early days of finding our feet as our identity shifts into motherhood, but there is a space after that, one that bears closer investigation. An age where as women, we often become invisible to society at large even as we internally come into our own with newfound confidence and clarity.

It's a transition we need to talk more about, because it can be just as disorienting and empowering as the transition to motherhood itself.

This shift, this coming home to oneself anew after a season of deep, intentional mothering has been so empowering.

I wish I knew it was on the horizon when I was a younger mum. Knowing it was there, off in the distance, would have afforded me a sense of courage to deepen into the experience of those - at times disorienting - early days of motherhood. 

And so, I offer this knowing to you, a branch across the waters of motherhood.

If you feel less-than whole, if you feel that your self, especially your creative self, has been consumed by laundry and dishes and the wiping of little bums . . . you’re not alone.

There is nothing wrong with you. You are not broken.

Mothering is worthy, worthwhile, purposeful work. Mothering can be a creative act in and of itself. It can also devour you whole.

Both can be true.

These difficult days, these sleepless nights, the cracked and bleeding nipples, the colic, the feeling like you will never, ever get to drink an entire cup of coffee while it’s still hot or finish a thought without interruption . . . They don’t last forever.

Neither do the days of lying on our backs in the cool grass watching clouds and counting swallows. Of tiny fingers and faces stained purple with wild blackberries and heavy, sweaty little heads asleep on our shoulder.

One day, you’ll suddenly realize your hips and back don’t ache anymore; your children no longer need to be held. You will crave that pain in a way that makes your heart heavy, and you’ll find yourself unconsciously doing ‘the Mama sway’ in the grocery line with empty arms, as someone else’s baby cries.

Savour it. All of it is good. Even the tough stuff. Even the moments that break you open.

You WILL come out the other side.

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There may always be laundry and dishes, but I promise you - that is not all that you are for.

You are a lighthouse on the rocks. A safe harbour they will continue to return to again and again.

In time, you will also learn that you can be that for yourself.

Our mothers got us this far - it is our sacred duty to take it from here. To enter our midlife with all the lessons and wisdom we’ve gleaned from our first matrescence and to turn that wisdom, care, attentiveness and love inward.

To know that even when it didn’t feel like it, even when the crushing drudgery and cold coffee and never-ending pile of laundry felt like it might suffocate us, that our creative selves had gone, never to return . . . even in our mothering we were creative all along.

Your life is already artful, waiting, just waiting for you to make it art. - Toni Morrison

So now, as I creep up on 42 trips around the sun and my children tower over me, I’m turning my attention to mothering myself.

To nurturing the creative part of myself, shaking out the cobwebs, stretching limbs tight and stiff with stillness.

Like blood returning to a sleeping leg, the process is sometimes uncomfortable. The pins and needles of the the rushing return of my creative self simply needs to be sat with, massaged, patiently waited on. It is not nice, but it is necessary and it will pass.

I keep going through the inevitable challenges by remembering that mothering myself, reclaiming my creativity, showing up in my own life - as myself, for myself - is a gentle act of rebellion.

It is a refusal to play small. To be unafraid to rock the boat. To stop putting the mere comfort of others before my wholeness as a human being.

To do this brave work, to allow others to bear witness to our effort, simply by being - we give other women permission to do the same. To be alive to the alchemy of a woman coming home to herself, transmuting external expectations into something of her own making, is powerful beyond measure.

It is also an act of carving a new path for our daughters, so that they, too, might know themselves.

Not as a label or a title or a one-dimensional paper doll.

As deliciously imperfect, internally contradictory, inherently creative and most importantly whole human beings.

Reclaiming our creativity will help ensure our daughters grow up in a world surrounded by women who have the audacity to claim their own joy.

Women who refuse to go gentle into that good night of midlife, silent and invisible to the world around them. Who take up space and who share what’s on their hearts, without permission or apology.

This is the work we are called to do in our second matrescence.

It is sacred work. Worthy work. Joyful work. It is rooted in radical self-compassion, curiosity and love.

There is no right or wrong way to mother ourselves, just as there’s no right or wrong way to become a mother.

This simple truth is - your heart already knows the way.

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Stacey Langford is a writer, renegade farmer and slow business mentor living and working in Canada’s Fraser Valley. In 2010 Stacey ditched her cubicle in the city to turn her attention homeward, farm and help others craft a simple life, from scratch.

Are you ready to build a life - and a living - you actually love?

I help rebellious solopreneurs and creatives build businesses rooted in Slow Values. If you’re ready to step into your own Slow Life and finally claim your calling, let’s chat!