Nobody really warned me that one day the life I worked so hard to build might fit everyone in my family… except me.
Maybe that's because I expected this part of motherhood to arrive more neatly. I thought there would be the years of raising children, followed eventually by the years of letting them go. One season would end and another would begin.
Instead, I'm somehow doing both at the same time.
Two of my children are adults, building lives that are increasingly their own. Two are still young enough that I am very much in the daily work of raising them. One of my younger children can go days without needing anything from me. Another can yell “Mom!” from the other side of the house to ask a question that absolutely could have waited until we were standing in the same room.
Motherhood for me these days is learning to give one child advice only when it is wanted while reminding another, for the third time, to brush his teeth. I didn't expect to be letting go and holding on at exactly the same time.
For most of my older children's lives, my job was to step in. Protect them. Teach them. Correct them. Help them make decisions and, when possible, catch things before they became disasters. Then somehow the job changes. I had to learn when not to step in.
I watched them make decisions I might make differently. I had to learn to wait for them to ask for advice instead of immediately offering it. Sometimes loving an adult child means standing close enough that they know you are there while resisting every instinct to grab the steering wheel.
I am still learning that one.
At the same time, I am raising younger children who still need quite a bit of steering. One child may need me to listen without fixing anything while the other actually needs me to fix something. One needs independence; another needs boundaries. Somehow I am supposed to know which version of Mom I am supposed to be at any given moment.
For 19 years, I homeschooled my children. Motherhood didn't just influence my life; it shaped the rhythm of almost every day. There were lessons to teach, meals to make, places to be and approximately 4,000 questions to answer before lunch. My days were full, sometimes too full, and I loved that life.
That's important for me to say because conversations about women rediscovering themselves after years of motherhood sometimes make it sound as though we have to resent the life we had in order to want something different now. I don't. I don't look back on those years and think I lost them. I don't feel like motherhood stole some better version of me. I chose that life, and I loved that life.
But somewhere along the way, I became so accustomed to asking what everyone else needed that I stopped asking myself a much simpler question: What do I enjoy?
That's surprisingly difficult to answer when you haven't asked yourself in a long time.
When my younger children transitioned into public school, there was suddenly space in my days that had not existed before. Not unlimited space—let's not get carried away. There were still children at home, schedules, meals, laundry and all the ordinary things that do not magically disappear because the school bus starts coming in the morning.
But there was breathing room.
The barn was already there, woven into our family's story. Long before it hosted a wedding or an overnight guest, it was simply part of our lives. Horses were something we shared. We played polocrosse together, spent countless hours at the barn, and traveled around the country with horses in tow. There were practices and competitions, long drives pulling a trailer, dirty boots, tack everywhere and all the work that comes with building family life around horses.
We invested in the barn and made it beautiful, but not because we had some grand plan to turn it into a business. We did it for ourselves. It was ours, and it held a lot of our family's life inside it.
Then our family began to change, as families do. Children grew older. Two became adults and left home. Interests and schedules changed, and the way our family used the barn changed with them. But the barn was still there—still beautiful, still full of memories, still very much part of us.
Every time I walked through it, I had this feeling that something so beautiful should be shared.
So I started sharing it.
First came overnight guests and people traveling with their horses. Then someone asked about a party. Someone else asked about an event. Eventually there were weddings.
Apparently my response to not knowing how to do something is, “Sure, I think we can do that.”
Then I hang up and figure out how to do it.
I learned to host guests, plan events, coordinate weddings, design parties and create experiences. Sometimes I learned something because I was curious. Other times I learned it because I'd already told someone I could do it and there was really no turning back.
And I started surprising myself.
The barn was still part of our family's story, but it was becoming a personal space for me in a way it hadn't been before. I wasn't leaving our old life behind. I was taking something I already loved and discovering what else it could become.
It took me a while to realize I was doing the same thing with myself.
I hear women my age talk about “reinventing” themselves, but that word has never felt quite right to me. I don't want to reinvent myself. I like the woman who got me here.
She's raised four children. She's homeschooled for nearly two decades. She's made mistakes, changed her mind, worried about things that never happened and figured out an awful lot as she went.
I don't want to discard her and become somebody new. I just want to see what else she can do.
I didn't lose myself in motherhood. There were simply parts of myself I didn't have much occasion to use. I hadn't stopped being creative; I was creative in different ways. I hadn't stopped being ambitious; my ambitions were focused on raising people. I hadn't stopped being willing to take risks. The risks simply looked different when four other human beings were depending on me.
Now some of those parts of me have room to stretch again.
Maybe having children at such different stages of life has made that clearer. My older children are becoming adults while my younger children are still becoming themselves, and somewhere in the middle of all that becoming, so am I.
Watching children grow up teaches you something you can't fully understand when they're little: they were always supposed to become people separate from you.
Maybe I was supposed to keep becoming a person separate from them, too.
That doesn't diminish motherhood. My children don't have to remain dependent on me for my life to have purpose, and I don't have to stop growing so they can feel secure in the mother they've always known.
Both things can happen at once.
That's essentially where I am now. I'm giving independence and still setting bedtimes. I'm watching adults make their own choices while reminding younger children to brush their teeth. I'm learning when to offer advice and when to keep my mouth shut—which may prove to be the harder skill.
I'm still Mom. Very much Mom. I just have a little more room to be other things, too.
For a while, I thought I needed to figure out who I was after motherhood. Now I don't think there really is an after. Motherhood changes shape. Children need us differently, and we learn to love them differently.
Perhaps the same is true of us.
The life we've built doesn't have to be discarded simply because we're changing inside it. We don't have to become entirely different women. Sometimes we just need enough room to get curious about ourselves again—to try something we might not be good at, take a risk, become a beginner and see what happens.
I'm still raising children, and I'm learning how to release them. Somewhere in the middle, I suppose I'm still raising myself a little bit, too.
I don't know exactly what comes next.
I'm beginning to like that I don't know.
For Asher and Libby, whom I’m learning to let go, and Denver Grace and Sumter, whom I still get to hold a little closer. You four have been the greatest part of who I’ve been—and I love that you’re still part of who I’m becoming.