Becoming Wider: On Motherhood and the Woman Who Never Disappeared

This painting was created for someone who wanted a gift for her friend's journey of expansion. When she first reached out to commission it, she told me she wanted it to represent a woman coming back to herself.

As we talked, we realized those weren't quite the words for it.

The story wasn't about finding the woman again.

She had never disappeared.

She had spent years pouring herself into motherhood — the beautiful, exhausting, sacred work of growing and caring for another life. Like so many women, she wondered where all that love had left her.

Nature offered a different perspective.

A river doesn't stop being a river because it nourishes the forest. It doesn't lose itself because it gives life. It simply becomes wider.

That became the heart of this piece.

The deep blues and greens hold the seasons that rooted her. The warm golds and corals are the parts of her beginning to bloom again — not as the woman she was before, but as someone expanded by everything she has lived.

To me, this painting isn't about choosing between being a mother and being a woman. It isn't about returning to an earlier version of yourself.

It's about trusting that love, when it is lived fully, doesn't make us smaller.

It makes us capable of holding more.

Maybe that's what becoming is.

Not leaving pieces of ourselves behind, but growing large enough to carry them all.

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This piece became "Embodied" — now available as a museum-quality giclée art print: Embodied — Colorful Feminine Fine Art Print.