I have been navigating the tension between control and surrender since I became a mom. I hope that my honesty, vulnerability, and growing clarity provide something to you as you navigate transitions in your own life.
Real transformation happens not when we “get it right,” but when we stop resisting what is. Life doesn’t follow our plans, and trying to hold on too tightly—especially to identity, routines, or ideals—only creates more struggle.
What I have learned, however, is that:
-
Transitions are powerful teachers.
-
Parenthood reshapes identity in ways no one prepares you for.
-
Surrendering to the moment, even when it’s chaotic or seemingly unfair, is where real strength and creativity emerge.
-
Presence is more powerful than perfection.
I don’t attempt to preach; I’m inviting you into my lived experience.
This is what happened. It broke me open. And I’m learning to meet it all with presence and grace, even when it’s messy.
It’s not about being a perfect mother or a perfect creator. It’s about living fully in the reality I’m in and letting that shape my next becoming.
Transitions…
You gotta love transitions… or they will really take you out of your natural flow every single time.
Loving transitions really means loving what is. There are things that are the way they are, and any energy spent fighting that is energy you steal from what you can create. You can’t fight what is and create at the same time. It’s almost as if life—our energy, mode of operating—can handle only one way of acting. If you lock into the forward-acting/creating, that’s what you will have. If you are locked in a fight, you are stuck or going backwards.
The Idea of Motherhood vs. the Reality
Becoming a mom is one of those life transitions that seemed easy when I was on the outside looking in. There was a very clear expectation of what I thought it would be, and the reality didn’t match it. At all.
When I was pregnant with my first child, I thought I’d feel good. There were many things to love about it: I got pregnant literally right after deciding that I wanted to. I was able to stay fit, which mattered to me in my early 30s so much. But morning sickness made me not enjoy my days, so most of the time I felt sorry for myself. At the time, I was trying to hide it behind closed doors because I did enjoy the public admiration. For some reason, marriage, pregnancies, birth of the child are one of those things people pay attention to and acknowledge. I liked that.
Nothing Went According to Plan
Nothing, however, went my way. I went into labor early, so even my baby shower was ultimately canceled because I already had a baby and no energy to entertain. Despite trying everything to do things naturally, including bothering at least 30 of my friends who had babies about their birth story, I had a c-section. When I woke up after the surgery and my husband showed me a blue paper with our son’s footprints titled “It’s a boy,” I motioned with my hand for him to move that out of the way and screamed that I was in severe pain. I realized, only later, that this was normal.
When you go under general anesthesia and have a c-section, they don’t give you any pain medication until you are fully awake. Much to my initial fear about c-sections, this is a major abdominal surgery. Mine actually went well—in terms of, there were no complications, I got closed up and stitched back pretty well—but I will forever have a scar and a little cushy thing above it. I don’t think about it anymore, but at the time, I didn’t like it… though, to this day, it amazes me that this cut is only a few inches and that it doesn’t really show when I am in a bathing suit, for example. It’s a horizontal, not vertical, line that some women proudly wear as a sign of their creating life. I somehow felt cheated of the good creating experience. I just felt like somehow I was doomed to have the most beautiful act of birth be somehow complicated for me.
The Weight of the Early Days
Caring for a newborn took everything. I cannot even tell you how often I had to Google something, how many appointments I went to in order to make sure all was well. Jason and I were diligent about writing things down—how many times our baby pooped, the color of it. We had a very specific nighttime routine… so I never really understood why then our firstborn wouldn’t sleep through the night. I did everything right… or so I thought.
It is mind-boggling to think about this more than a decade later and wonder why, on a large scale, I couldn’t just give myself some time to recover and take care of my baby. I was working full-time, often holding my son in my arms with earbuds in my ears. I breastfed him for more than a year, and most of that time on an every 3-hour interval, so I was desperate for sleep, for rest, and for some time alone.
Losing Control, Losing Myself
There is one person who got so annoyed that I had no power to cut off breastfeeding at night. Even though she was also a new mom at the time, I think she grew frustrated with me saying I wanted the result of my son sleeping through the night but ended up giving in time and time again. At that time, however, I welcomed people just showing their inability to accept me as I was—not as I used to be just months before this new world of motherhood. Before this transition, I was someone who said X and did X and nothing could get in the way. The demands of motherhood, and parenting without a large community, truly humbled me.
That said, I wasn’t just breaking my word to myself continually. Eventually, I made a trip to stop breastfeeding so that at the very least I didn’t have to watch my toddler beg me for breast milk. Those of you who gave birth and who did breastfeed can probably understand that when a child cries, your breast produces milk whether you give it to your child or not…
Saying Yes to a Second Child
I remember that time with fondness because I was present for most of it, but I also remember it as a difficult time in my life. Simply put, I could not practice the control I was able to practice before it.
And then, we made a conscious decision to have another child. Deep inside, this was an intuitive decision to not be over-focused on our firstborn. I felt that we would all benefit from bringing to our family another member. And that’s when my second son was born. The pregnancy was not easier—I was better.
NICU, Mama Gena, and Reclaiming My Body
I had my second son even earlier than the first one, so he ended up in NICU for 2 weeks. Surely, this felt like I failed birth, though this time I birthed my child pain-free (used the epidural in time) and awake.
What was majorly different the second time around was that I was now living back in New York rather than just temporarily staying at my mom’s place until we found home (we spent the first 1.5 years of raising our firstborn in Florida, which is a story for another day). Besides being in New York, I was taking a class at Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts, so I was actively learning how to appreciate my body and being a woman.
A Birth Experience I Owned
I never hated that I was a woman, like I know some people do. In fact, I felt at home in my female body and I loved it, secretly. However, I wanted to control my body, so when I couldn’t lose weight, I’d starve it or exercise it to exhaustion. I hated my big breasts that grew three times their normal size in pregnancy, but I remember Mama Gena nipping that in the bud in her Mastery course. And the more time I spent surrounded by women from all walks of life and of all different shapes and sizes, the more I loved my own shape and my own size.
So giving birth the second time was nearly orgasmic. I was so in touch with my body and able to advocate for it, which is why I insisted the doctors listen to me and trust me that I wanted natural birth and not another c-section. With my second son being born early and then spending 2 weeks in NICU, I was able to go home and recover from birth at my own pace while he was in the best care of the NICU nurses.
Help, Guilt, and the Gifts of Community
Of course, while this was practical, it came with a lot of feelings of guilt. I still remember calls with my mom asking me: “Oh, so you’re not going to go to the hospital again today?” and then making a remark: “Then I will go,” not realizing that she just made me feel like she was better than me. Nevertheless, I was okay with people being better, doing more, and helping me out because at this point I had a toddler at home—happy, beautiful, full-of-life toddler—and this beautiful, easy-going baby who learned the proper bedtime routine from the nurses who’ve obviously done it for the longest time.
The Early Years Took a Village (Sort Of)
This is how motherhood started for me. Early years for both of my kids took a lot of physical energy, we lacked sleep, but people were helpful, understanding. While we didn’t have a “village” to help us raise these kids, we got so many things from so many people. My husband’s family from Portugal came to visit with a suitcase full of stuff for kids. Jason’s stepmother sent a box of things a couple of times a year. My mom was helping both take care of them and buy them the most essential things. It’s humbling to say this now, but all those acts of kindness and all the contributions really helped us.
Taking care of kids is expensive, and I believe it’s almost like an industry on its own because many businesses prey on your guilt, and so you would think you need so much to raise your kids—when in fact, what they need is so basic and so little. What they need the most is your presence, and that we cannot do when we demand of ourselves to give them a perfect childhood.
The Moment Everything Changed
Something changed, however, when 2.5 years ago now, our older son had a concussion at school. He was pushed by another kid and his head hit a metal bench. I was so scared. He was okay at that moment, but less than a month later, a chair in his violin class fell on his head in the exact same spot. Shortly after, he nearly fainted, which caused us to take this injury very seriously.
What Followed Was a New Kind of Parenting
Raising boys means, often, that they fall and hit themselves a lot. It takes a whole new level of being able to navigate your internal fears and emotions. As a person with a controlling ego, tough exterior, but determined to get ahead, I was getting exhausted in my attempt to take care of my son, prevent another injury, and get the school to understand that this kind of lack of attention and care cannot be happening.
The whole year after was filled with doctor appointments, dealing with teachers who didn’t believe my child was feeling nauseated or had headaches (fast forward, he has headaches to this day—he’s just gotten used to them), and we slowly lost our allies at school, felt like withdrawing, having him more at home, taking him to many checkups, losing days of work, hoping our second child was not neglected while we dealt with this very serious injury that changed his life (and our lives) as we knew them.
Doubt, Then Clarity
I admit, even I thought my child was manipulating us to get out of school early, to come home, etc. But now, nearly 3 years later, I see that he was telling the truth. It was very clearly a neglect at the school to have ignored these injuries (nurses dismissed him), and later his pain (teachers were just convinced he was lying), and also kids who began to bully and make fun of the student who used to be the smartest kid in class.
Letting Go of the Clock and the Script
We had to keep our son at home until the paraprofessional was in place to help him reintegrate back into the classroom—as he would both get intense headaches or feel faintish—and we had to make sure he didn’t fall again and injure his head again. We could no longer own our time the same way. Unpredictable was the name of the game. What our son needed, however inconvenient, had to be provided—and, as parents, we surely resisted at first.
A Different Way to Parent
It is our instinct, I think, to not want to be controlled by something outside of us… to parent with the conviction that I am the adult, you, as a child, have to listen to me.
This way of parenting, however, I feel is very much the way we experienced it and were parented—not how we get to parent in this day and age.
Kids are born smarter, different, closer to their spirit. There isn’t anything that a child cannot do nowadays with access to the internet and their sponge-like mind that learns and adapts way faster than the older brain.
Yes… they aren’t mature enough to make responsible decisions, but the land of what is possible? They can see further—if we let them.
Letting My Life Be a Life with Children at the Center
For a while, I resisted letting my kids dominate my life. I felt entitled to focus back on my work after years of being pregnant, giving birth, recovering from it, breastfeeding them both, changing so many diapers, staying up at night to make sure they were well. Now that they were school-age, I felt entitled to have more time to myself.
But the more I tried to take, the more I would create tension and conflict—and the more time that would take from what I wanted for myself…
Peace with the Life I Created
After many attempts to have it my way, I made a conscious decision to accept that this is a time of transition. That my children, until they are old enough to go to college (or maybe just a tad earlier), are in my care and have to be my priority. In some ways, I felt I was fragmented inside… parts of me that want to perform, create art, sing, teach, coach other people, and love and be loved, were competing with the parent who needed to not just be there to support their children’s growth but who needed to be flexible for how that would look and what that would take…
I stopped resisting this transition. I acknowledged this was it—the life I created. Forcing different circumstances won’t make any difference. Being at peace with them will eventually allow the grip of control to loosen, which I know will impact all the other parts of what I want to do and practice in life…
And Still, I Create
And while mothering, I still get to perform, sing, write, make art, teach.
Not 24/7—but enough to feel connected and alive.
