The grief of crossing into a new season before your heart has caught up. The grief of realising that while your children are becoming someone new, you are becoming someone new too.
I remember slow mornings and nowhere to be. One child, then two. Playgrounds becoming our second home. The thickness of winter sometimes matched the sharpness of the season we were living through, and still, we would find ourselves outside – faces turned toward sunlight, children laughing as though joy itself had followed us there.
It was a challenging season in so many ways, and yet when I look back, I feel tenderness for that version of life. Before school bells and lunchboxes and after-school logistics. Before calendars slowly filled around us. When, for a brief moment in time, the only place to be was exactly where we already were.
I miss that version of them.
But if I am honest, I miss that version of me too.
The mother who lived inside slower rhythms. The woman shaped by a particular season of closeness, exhaustion, tenderness and becoming.
And still, I love this version too.
Lately, I have begun to wonder whether part of motherhood is constantly trying to catch up. To the child standing in front of you, who somehow feels both entirely familiar and completely new. To the version of yourself required to meet them there.
Because just when you begin to understand one season – what they need, who you are inside it, how the rhythm works – the doorway moves again.
Your child arrives as someone slightly new.
You do too.
And there is often no ceremony for the mother learning how to meet both of you there. Only the slow work of adjusting. Of catching your breath from who they were while learning the contours of who they are becoming.
I think this is where so much of the ache lives. Not in wanting to go backwards. Not even in wishing things would stay the same, but in loving someone enough to feel the tenderness of their changing while you are still changing too.
Maybe this is one of motherhood’s hidden truths:
We are not failing when we feel unexpectedly emotional, untethered, or behind. We are often just standing inside a doorway that has already moved, learning how to belong to the room we have only just entered.
And perhaps the tenderness comes from this – learning that it is possible to miss what was, love what is, and slowly grow into what comes next.
These reflections sit at the heart of the work I explore through the Peaceful Mama Project, where I support mothers navigating the inner seasons of modern motherhood through thoughtful tools and gentle guidance.
Camilla van Rosendal is a writer, mother and founder of the Peaceful Mama Project based on the Sunshine Coast. Her work explores motherhood, identity and the quiet thresholds women move through across seasons of life. She is the author of Scatter to Bloom: Conversations with My Intuition.
