Create the community you crave

The story behind The Mother Writer class

Jun 18, 2025

After I gave birth, I felt profoundly changed. My son had entered this world through the portal of my body, and with this entrance came another person new to me: myself as mother. At its most basic, birth is universal: we are all born. I have met hundreds, maybe thousands of mothers over the course of my life, and yet, I felt as though I had entered a new realm that no one had ever before experienced. A realm that was somehow both alien and ancient. I felt more myself than ever before. I felt lost. I felt strong. I felt bewildered. I felt, I felt, I felt. I had never felt so much in my life, and I struggled to put words to an experience that felt as much bodily as it did emotionally, as much awe-filled as it did quotidian.

In the weeks and months after birth, I found myself searching for connection. I posted pictures and thoughts and poems on Instagram, sent flurries of DMs to friends, and enrolled my son and I in a baby music class. People asked me all the time if I was in a new moms group, or if I had brought my son to early childhood education classes yet. But I didn’t know how to express that the thought of these spaces made me seize up. So much of the rhetoric I had seen about motherhood on social media immediately made me feel shame, or insecurity, or brought my hackles up. So many of these moms seemed to know exactly who they were and exactly how to raise their babies, and they had beautiful eyelashes they trained on their smart phone cameras while they explained who they were and how they raised their babies.

Every person’s birth experience brings with it its own complications and layers. The birth I shared with my son was beautiful, because it brought me him, but it was also a doozy. In short: Baby’s heart was decelerating, his hands were up by his head, he couldn’t find his way through the birth canal, a vacuum-assist, four chances to push before he’d be shoved back inside me and I’d be wheeled to the ER, a deep deep breath and a sound I’d never made before, a third-degree tear that left me bed-ridden and bleeding for weeks, unable to walk more than a single city block for months, and high-point pelvic floor dysfunction that I am still working through over two-and-a-half years later.

Almost every mother I know has experienced loneliness and isolation. (There are many reasons for this, the biggest I can see being the complete lack of institutional support for mothers and children in the United States.) Looking back now, I can see that the consistent, continued pain and loss of control I felt because of my third-degree tear compounded my feelings of isolation and shame. I also didn’t know then that my brain was going through seismic, irreversible changes throughout pregnancy, birth, and the months after. That there were biological reasons for the profound shifts in perspectives and priorities. Not to mention that it was easy for me to brush away any of my own needs and feelings in service of nurturing my little one.

I recently read a book called Matrescence by Lucy Jones. This book has had a profound impact on my life and has given me so much of the language that I’ve been searching for since giving birth. In it, Jones writes that after giving birth, women’s bodies do not return to a “normal” state hormone and other-wise until four years postpartum. When I read this, I felt so seen. I felt relief. So I wasn’t supposed to be “back to normal” by now. Thank god!!

In all honesty, I finally started feeling like I was coming up from the postpartum fog at about the two year mark. My baby needed me (a little!) less, I was starting to find more time to fill my cup with some passions that preceded birth and others that were new and exciting to me. I could think clearly enough to plan ahead and dream a bit more concretely about what I wanted in my life. And one thing I kept circling back to again and again was that I wanted a community of mothers around me.

But I didn’t want to talk about sleep cycles or sleep training or, honestly, sleep at all. I didn’t want to hear phrases like “baby-led weaning” or “eat play sleep.” I didn’t want to feel the perceived threat of being judged and I didn’t want to enter into the comparison mode I’d been trained to jump into thanks to social media. No. I wanted to talk about creation with fellow creators––mothers.

I turned to the books that nourished me during my postpartum season. No, they weren’t Bringing Up Bebé or anything by Emily Oster (though I did read these while pregnant and found some things in them helpful!). They were called Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder and The Mother Artist by Catherine Ricketts. These books were about mothers who were reckoning with multiple modes of creation––their children and their art––and the frustrations that come with being a caregiver in a country that devalues women and mothers. These mothers knew that they were their most authentic selves when they allowed both their artist and their mother self to feed into each other in a powerful cycle. Their life was their art and vice versa. I wanted to Nightbitch my life and I wanted to do it with other mother artists at my side.

Share With Love From My Kitchen Table

The problem was that I didn’t know where to find these other women. When I looked for classes online, all of them seemed to be in other cities or on Zoom. I wanted to be in-person. I craved a circle of women sitting together, close enough to reach out and grab hands or pass along a poem or pencil. So I decided to make a space for us myself.

I’ve taught at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis for five years now, and I’m so lucky that when I floated the idea of The Mother Writer class (title inspired by Rickett’s The Mother Artist), the education director jumped on the idea and encouraged me to write a proposal. The first cohort wrapped up this past winter, and it was a profound experience for me. Because we had the language of writing and the space for artistic expression, we were able to discuss motherhood in ways that felt raw and powerful and completely true to each of our own unique experiences. Did sleep and feeding come up? Yes. But they were couched in discussions of poems, of dreams, of essays and stories. There wasn’t space for judgement or insecurity because we were wholly focused on helping each other achieve our goals of expression and creation. By viewing each other through the lens of artist, we could better understand the creative choices we had each made as mothers.

At the end of our six-weeks together, I, nervous like I was about to ask them all to prom, asked if anyone would want to exchange phone numbers and continue to meet to talk about mothering and creating. Five women said yes, and we’ve been meeting every month since, sometimes writing alongside each other in silence, sometimes discussing a book we picked out to read, sometimes just talking about whatever is going on in our lives. Every time I get a text from them (our group text is called “Nightbitches”) or hop in my car to meet them at the Loft, my heart gets a flutter. I have the community I craved and needed so much. And––I’m going to toot my own horn here––I’m really frickin’ proud I got up the gumption to design and propose this class, especially after feeling so lost and alone so often in early motherhood. I was afraid of rejection, but my desire for community outweighed that fear and now I am part of a community of mother writers just like I dreamed.

With Love From My Kitchen Table

Create the community you crave

The story behind The Mother Writer class

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