The Kind of Mother I Choose to Be
Not the one I was modeled. Not the one culture rewards. The one who refuses to pass on what I came here to end.
Motherhood changed me in ways I didn’t ever expect.
I knew when I became a mother that my life wasn’t just mine – it was now shared with a being who depended on me fully and wholeheartedly for his lifelong well-being.
For his well-being, I have restructured my life in ways I wouldn’t have known prior to his arrival on this planet. I am crystal clear on what matters in the process of mothering and what is cultural, historical and familiar fluff (distractions from what matters).
The cultural lie
The cult-ure has a lot to say about how we should mother. The most dangerous (and annoying) bit of that is not that someone tells you how to parent at a grocery store, but instead the things you’ve internalized as real and continue to replicate out of your awareness.
The knowing
I don’t have to tell you what those are, because you already know…
You may not want to give it voice, but you know … you know what feels ‘right’ and what doesn’t.
When it doesn’t feel ‘right’, you may deny, defend, dismiss—but in the depths of your being, you know.
The question becomes: How do you choose to engage that deep inner knowing (that won’t leave you alone)?
The template vs. truth
The template our mothers modeled to us is just that – a template. Although an invasive and pervasive one, it is just a template.
Who you choose to become is entirely your creation.
Yes, you will likely feel guilty going against the grain of the intergenerational, historical and familiar. Choosing to differentiate and individuate is no easy feat. Yet it is imperative in our evolution. And that of our children.
From where I stand, a calm, congruent, Present mother is the single greatest gift I could give to my son.
Who he is becoming is modeled after his father. But the template for his partner? That comes from me.
(Yes, despite the political climate of identity confusion my son is definitely and definitively a heterosexual male, let’s move on…)
The stakes
Parenting for potential is one of the hardest things I’ve chosen to do (right up there with shifting identities to connect with my emerging authentic Self).
It is a path that is not well walked, and it is also generally not well supported.
I have to find alternatives to the path that’s laid out to effortlessly walk – and often I have to create the path I want to walk.
A path no one has walked before is much harder to trailblaze through – and it is worth it.
What’s the alternative?
Repeat the status quo story and die a slow death while modeling to my son that adulthood looks like sacrifice, pain, numbing, pushing through, dissociating, distracting, fighting, disease, and eventually … simply giving up.
A body riddled with shame, rage, outrage, loneliness, despair, isolation, confusion, avoidance, pain.
A mind looping the same old thoughts, 65000 times a day.
A spirit broken, chained to cultural conditioning with no reward at the end of the tunnel.
Or maybe that is the reward – discovered only in the very last breath.
The legacy
That was my path, and it is categorically not my path.
By choice. With intention. Because I deeply fucking care.
And I refuse to let the illusion take over my body and mind, no matter how pervasive everywhere.
No matter the external pressure to comply.
No matter the challenges I need to overcome to create the life I want for myself along with the life I want for my son.
I want him to know that despite the challenges coming up (because our children will face a world dripping in control-over), he is resourceful and resilient when he knows himself.
When he knows how to listen to the cues of his body.
When he is profoundly and unshakably connected to his inner cues to guide him – because they can never guide him astray.
How do I know that? Because it’s how I choose to live.
The awe
In truth, I trust that my son will be just fine.
The world will change and it will have unfathomable challenges (we’re already seeing the beginning of it with AI blending reality with fiction).
However, as long as he stays connected to his Signal from Self, he will know exactly how to navigate the reality – actually, he’ll know he creates it with his choices.
All in all, as I watch my five year old son be his silly Self, I am filled with awe for who he has now become.
He’s free. He’s alive. He’s vibrant.
He’s inquisitive. He’s hilarious. He’s generous.
He’s kind. He’s playful. He’s imaginative.
He’s responsive.
He’s himSelf, and that’s all he ever needs to be…
…and I’m the kind of mother who will never ask him to be anything else.
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“There is no process without the body. Thought is not enough.”
— Louise LeBrun
A Motherhood Manifesto
For the mothers who refuse to disappear under the weight of the conventional narrative of who they were told they should be.
I. Refusal
I refuse to mother from martyrdom or from illusion.
I will not give up myself in the name of “love”.
I will not confuse love with self-sacrifice.
I refuse to give up my children to be devoured by the ideology of pretend.
I will not model depletion and call it devotion.
I will not carry the weight of the women who came before me.
I refuse to carry their silence.
II. Reclamation
The motherline lives in my bones,
but it ends with me where it no longer serves.
I choose presence over performance.
Truth over tradition.
Wholeness over holding it all together.
My children don’t need a perfect mother – they need a real one.
A woman who breathes.
When I evolve, they evolve too.
Because I become the power of permission
for them to be the wholeness of who they are.
Unapologetically.
I refuse to sacrifice myself at the altar of their societally proclaimed needs.
I am here to show them what it looks like to become.
Real. Embodied. Truth.
III. Creation
I choose.
To create.
To trust the intelligence of the body.
To break the intergenerational cycles of violence—
not through blame, but through embodiment.
Through listening.
Through living.
Through letting go of who I was told to be – who I thought I should be.
None of it was real, anyway.
Reality is a holographic projection of my mind – what do I choose to see?!
IV. Becoming
I am not here to repeat the past.
I am here to become the future.
I AM the perpetual now, manifesting a meaningful life.
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Are you ready to break free from your habituated patterns and discover how to align with your truth?
Here are two free email courses for you to dive into:
👉The Boundaries Bootcamp: Building a Stronger Self
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I’m Stela Murrizi, and I work with women who feel too much, think too deeply, and carry a silent ache that something’s missing. Here, we don’t shy away from that ache—we turn toward it. Through the body-led, science-backed process taught by the WEL-Systems Institute that’s been evolving for over 30 years, we explore the places culture taught you to avoid—so you can remember who you are and reclaim how you live.
