There's a version of transformation that gets all the airtime.
It's the silent retreat. The solo pilgrimage. The sabbatical. The radical departure — leave the job, leave the marriage, leave the country, find yourself on a mountaintop with nothing but a journal and the sound of your own breathing. It's beautiful. It's real. And for most mothers, it's fiction.
Not because we don't deserve it. Because the eggs still need scrambling at 7am and someone has to find the other shoe.
Most transformation literature assumes you can clear the deck. Step away. Create conditions. Hold space for your own unraveling with the kind of reverence it deserves — silence, solitude, uninterrupted time.
And then there's the version no one writes books about: the one where your identity is dissolving and you still have to pack a lunch. Where grief is sitting on your chest and a small voice is asking for more milk. Where the deepest spiritual reckoning of your life is happening in parallel with laundry, bedtime negotiations, and trying to remember if you defrosted the chicken.
This is not a lesser form of transformation. This is the advanced course.
A contraction doesn't wait until you're comfortable. A wave of grief doesn't check your calendar. The moment your old life cracks open — the diagnosis, the betrayal, the sudden knowing that you can't keep living this way — that moment doesn't care that you have school pickup in forty minutes.
And yet. The women I know who have moved through the most profound thresholds of their lives did it with a child on their hip. Did it while chopping onions. Did it between 9pm and midnight after the house went quiet, with just enough energy left to feel what they'd been holding all day.
They didn't have retreat centers. They had kitchen counters. They didn't have spiritual teachers. They had their own bodies, still showing up, still feeding people, still somehow holding everything while simultaneously coming undone.
That's not a limitation. That's the practice.
They told you about the sleeplessness. They told you about the body changes. Maybe they even told you about the identity shift — that you'd become someone new.
What they didn't tell you is that becoming someone new doesn't mean the old you gets a graceful send-off. It means she dissolves — sometimes violently, sometimes slowly, sometimes in the middle of a Tuesday — and the new version has to emerge while the old one is still being needed by everyone around her.
Did you know it would take everything? Not just your time and your body and your sleep, but your self — the one you spent decades building, the one you thought was permanent?
Did you know you'd have to rebuild from the inside out, in stolen moments, with no manual and no one watching?
Did you know the rebuilding would be the most sacred work of your life and that almost no one would see it happening?
Here's what I've learned, living it:
The most powerful threshold work doesn't require a cleared schedule. It requires a nervous system that can hold complexity — the sacred and the mundane, the breaking and the building, the grief and the grocery list — without collapsing into one or the other.
It requires an internal architecture sturdy enough to let you fall apart in layers rather than all at once. So the part of you that's dying can die, and the part of you that's making dinner can keep making dinner, and neither one is pretending the other doesn't exist.
It requires trusting that transformation doesn't need to be witnessed by anyone but you to be real. That the 2am reckoning on the living room floor counts just as much as the mountaintop revelation. That the integration happening while you stir the soup is as legitimate as the integration happening in ceremony.
Maybe more. Because you can't bypass anything when there's no escape hatch. There's no silent retreat to run to when the silence lives in the three minutes between dropping her off and pulling back into the driveway. You have to metabolize it all in real time, in small doses, in the cracks between being needed.
And you do. You have been. Even when you didn't call it that.
They don't come to me because their lives are falling apart. They come because their lives are falling apart and they still have to function — and they need someone who understands that those two things happening simultaneously isn't a problem to solve. It's the territory.
They don't need someone to tell them to slow down. They need someone who knows that sometimes the most embodied thing you can do is move faster — make the decision, leave the conversation, plant the seed, start the business — because your body already knows and your mind is just catching up.
They don't need more information. They need an embodied orientation. A way to be in the experience without being consumed by it. A felt sense that the ground is still under them even when the ground is shifting.
Not because I studied how to give them that. Because I live it. Every day. Still making dinner. Still showing up. Still somehow moving forward even when forward doesn't have a shape yet.
If something moved while you were reading — there's more where this came from.