Decades of training, now put to real use in motherhood.

The training that helped me heal myself

My own Maiden story is a formative part of my new Motherhood story, and it is what lets me, as a mother of one-year-olds, write about motherhood from a place of real experience.

The first person I had to learn to mother was myself.

At seventeen, I became very unwell. The precise illness and its multifactorial nature are chronicled elsewhere, but the upshot was an early immersion in the world of the healing arts. First, Human Design and Gene Keys: I was one of the earliest students of both of these modern renderings of the archetypal wisdom held in the Ancient Chinese I Ching, which I also studied. Validation led to deep understanding, but no miracle cure.

From there, my education moved into nutrition, then medicine and naturopathy, functional biochemistry, and neuroscience. My illness was so "of the body" that I felt certain becoming expert in these disciplines would be my solution. Once again, I was wrong.

It was only when I stepped back, and began to understand the body and the human being as a vehicle of becoming, one that interfaces its designs (physical and archetypal) with its undeniable attachment upbringing, its early-life formations, and its ongoing adult experience, that I started to understand myself more profoundly. This took me into the study of somatics: formation, gesture, organization, and trauma, through Somatic Experiencing™. Not the insta-digestible practices, but the neurological and bio-physiological science behind the feedback mechanisms that lay down our most fundamental relationships to life.

As I studied each art, I would start by jettisoning the ones before it, rejecting them as failed attempts at wisdom. It took me many years to realize that the wisdom was in the synthesis of everything I had studied. My career in Functional Medicine began to integrate coaching, Somatic Experiencing, and archetypal wisdom. This rarefied understanding of the "total human" became the bedrock of a sophisticated, adult-focused practice.

It was also the true mothering of myself that I needed: deep awareness, the stability of safety, and not just tools but a complete sense of myself. This wasn't a mothering my own mother knew how to give me, and so it was something I had to learn to give to myself. Then I could give it to others. And I thought that was it.

Then I met my husband.

Our beginning was rocky, our early marriage has been tough, and our family and all its surrounding infrastructure is, frankly, chaos. But isn't everyone's?

Believing we were infertile, I fell pregnant after six weeks of dating. We had already realized we were each other's person, so this wasn't worrisome from a commitment perspective, only a logistical one. Then we discovered it was twins.

At that point I hadn't even been able to meet my stepchildren yet, and on the timeline we were first given, I wouldn't have met them until two months after my twins were born.

And so it was that within three months I became a stepmother and a mother to twins. My stepkids were with us the week my twins were born, and spent the second month of their lives with us. Yes, really. Any multiples mom reading this knows exactly how ridiculous that is.

Within that reality, something became clearer with every week and month of mothering twins and welcoming stepchildren in and out of our home. Nothing tests your capacity like this kind of family life. Nothing examines your nervous system's resilience like this kind of initiation. The shift in your identity, the makeup of your family, your relationship, and every facet of your reality, alongside the legal and co-parenting pressures any blended family can carry, is a real test.

It is one we have met, as a family, with my tools.

I would not be as okay as I am without my learning, my wisdom, my familiarity with my own nervous system, and my hard-won awareness. My stepchildren would make far less sense to me without what I know about attachment science, trauma, and parenting dynamics. The most frightening stretch of those early years would have sunk us without my depth of practice in self-steadying and in letting everything be what it is.

This is more than "regulation." It comes from a depth of archetypal wisdom, modern medicine, and all the attachment and motor-development mechanics in between. My babies make sense to me. My responses make sense to me. My stepkids make sense to me. And when it's hard, which it is, these are my supports: my remembered, hard-won wisdoms.

These are the tools, tips, tricks, and testaments I want to share with you, with the mothers here. None of this is easy, but we are so ill-equipped to meet the world when no one has told us some of these things. Mothercraft exists to support the most important ship in the fleet: you, the mother. Not because you can do it all, but because you shouldn't have to.

Welcome to our flotilla. We're honored to be part of your village.

An unusual intersection

Very few people work across all of this at once — and fewer still do it from the floor of family life.

✎ Add your actual certifications, years of practice, teachers/lineages, and any credentials you want named here.

Signature, Sensation, Bond

Every reading moves through the same three lenses — the design, the body, and the relationship between you.

A few things I hold to

• ✓The only nervous system you can truly steer is your own.
• ✓A child's behaviour is information, not a verdict.
• ✓Understanding the whole family is gentler than fixing one person.
• ✓Depth and warmth are not opposites.

✎ Swap for the principles in your own words — this is the heart of the trust page.

Start where it feels right.

A mini reading for your child, the dyad, your own becoming, or the whole family. Begin small or go deep.