Motherhood as Mending
Mother’s Day always makes me pause.
Somewhere between the morning rush and the quieter moments when the children are busy with their own worlds. It’s a moment to look back at the small threads that stitched this life together.
When my first child was born, I began making clothes from what we already had: discarded shirts, worn jumpers, fabrics that carried our lives before children. I cut them up at the kitchen table and sewn them back together into tiny trousers. It was practical, yes but also a way of caring, and of wrapping my child in pieces of our story.
Those small experiments slowly grew into something larger.
What began as making clothes for my own baby became an upcycling business, and later workshops where others gathered around tables with their own worn fabrics. Together, we experienced that mending isn’t only about fixing something broken. It’s about attention, patience, and the quiet satisfaction of giving something a second life and ourselves some time.
Motherhood has a way of unravelling you.
In the early years especially, it’s easy to lose yourself in the noise and the tiredness and the endless caring. And yet, slowly, something else happens too. Beneath the chaos, you begin to find a truer version of yourself - softer perhaps, but also stronger.
Somewhere along the way, another path opened through my children.
Woodland paths, muddy boots, pockets filled with sticks and feathers. Through them, I found Forest School and a deeper relationship with being outdoors. Watching children in nature reminds me daily how simple things can be so joyful - the curiosity of turning over a log, the pride in lighting a fire, the calm that comes from sitting beneath trees.
Working with children outside feels like another kind of mending - facilitating a space to breathe and a space to grow.
Being a freelance mother is often a juggle. There is work squeezed in between school runs, muddy clothes - mine and theirs, half-finished cups of tea and ideas scribbled in notebooks. But it also brings a quiet freedom. The freedom to spend long afternoons outside and to sync my work closer to the rhythm of our family life.
Mothering is not something we do alone.
We are held by others, and we hold others in return. Friends, family, community - all hands that support us when we’re stretched thin and voices that remind us we’re not the only ones figuring it out as we go.
In many ways, being a mother feels like being a mender.
Stitching things back together. Holding space for growth. Trusting that with care and time, both children and we ourselves will find our way.