A Woman Walks Through the Valley of Death...
Through the Gift, Joy, Blessing and Privilege of Creation
May 30, 2025
In the quiet, hidden corners of the world, a caterpillar weaves itself into stillness. It wraps its soft body in silk and shadow, surrendering to transformation. This moment—the becoming of a chrysalis—is not loud or dramatic. It is humble, almost invisible. But inside, everything is changing. Cells dissolve. Old shapes are lost. It is a kind of dying. A kind of trust. The caterpillar must believe, without evidence, that on the other side of this undoing, something beautiful awaits.
Motherhood is its own chrysalis.
The woman who once stood whole must surrender to the slow undoing of self. Her identity stretches, blurs. Her body becomes both shelter and forge. Like the caterpillar, she begins to dissolve—ambitions paused, freedom curtailed, her very sense of time and space given over to something utterly dependent and unknowable. There is no manual for this kind of surrender. No map. Only instinct, and love.
There is grief in this becoming. A private, aching grief that no one warns you about. The grief of vanishing—of watching your name, your silence, your sleep, your solitude, drift from your grasp like threads in water. And yet, from that dissolution, something new begins to stir.
Catharsis arrives in unexpected moments: a baby's hand curling around a finger, a quiet breath against her collarbone in the deep of night, the way laughter returns like a bird to a long-abandoned branch. These moments do not erase the pain or the loss—but they illuminate it. They make it holy.
And then, one day, she watches the child take their first step away. Their small back turns, arms outstretched to a world larger than either of them. And she realizes the wings were never just the child’s—they were hers, too. She was not only the cocoon, but the sky.
The metamorphosis was always mutual.
She did not lose herself in becoming a mother—she shed what was no longer needed. And what emerged, trembling but radiant, was something stronger. Not less. Not broken. But changed. Wings patterned with sacrifice and starlight.
In the hush after flight, she stands alone in the golden light, not empty, but full—of stories, of scars, of soft and terrible grace. The cocoon is behind her. The sky is ahead.
