How Motherhood Transformed My Songs to Joy

Photo by Yan Krukau

“What about your music?” someone close to me once asked when I said that I wanted to be a mother, as if the choice before me was either to have children or continue to write music. I can remember saying something about finding a way to do both, and about being willing to compromise on things like not joining a world tour in the next few years (no one was inviting me to do so, by the way, so that wasn’t that big of a compromise).

If I knew then what I know now, I would answer from an entirely different perspective — I would say that it could really only be through becoming a mother that my music would truly blossom, that it would find the same transformation that I myself unknowingly craved in the blessings and trials of motherhood. 

I’ve been a singer/songwriter for as long as I can remember. Even before I could play guitar, I would write my lyrics in my diary and sing them secretly to myself in my childhood room. Like many young artists, my songs held my deeper and often darker emotions, giving them a place to reside so I could process them and hopefully move forward from them.

My early adulthood was marked by the most challenging and painful years of my life and my songs certainly didn’t get any lighter. Right as I needed guidance the most, living states away from home for college in New York City, my closest friends and family members seemed to fade into their own separate lives, with some experiencing unexpected and severe mental health crises that kept them internally occupied and less able to be present in my life. As my roots seemed to erode beneath me, I clung to the wrong people and ideas for support. 

Now a competent guitarist, I found the most complex and moving harmonies I could to match the complex emotions that were eating me alive. Not only did I generally write sad songs, I preferred to listen to them as well. If an artist wasn’t willing to explore heartbreak or tragedy, I wasn’t too interested in hearing their music.

After years of an unhealthy relationship and disintegrating sense of self, by the grace of God, I started to take in new ideas and see myself in a different light. I began to have a vision of what life could be like if I embraced my feminine urge to make a profound self-sacrifice in a healthy, rather than dysfunctional and self-destructive way. That’s when I recognized that I had a deep longing to become a mother. 

It would still be a few years before I could realize this dream. I met my husband in 2019 and everything began to change. The songs I wrote about falling in love with him surprised me because they were so much calmer, so much more grounded, so much more sweet and settled than what I had been writing for the past several years. There was a growing simplicity to the form and chords that I chose because my soul was finding out that love in its most profound and true form should be sweet and simple, too.

We got married in 2020 and we had our son in 2022. Without a doubt, I had found my reason for proper self-sacrifice. Our sweet boy was colicky, wouldn’t take a bottle, hated car rides and baths, and would hardly ever sleep alone. The first song I wrote after he was born was about falling asleep next to him, giving him both my rest and my warmth, and the little things about him that made my heart so incredibly full — his smile, his long limbs, his laugh. As what’s known as a “high needs baby,” or an “orchid,” he certainly did know how to ask for plenty, and it was plenty that I gave him. 

I wrote most of the lyrics to that song on my phone, lying awake in bed with him finally asleep next to me, rather than my usual alone with my guitar and seemingly endless time in front of me. When I do squeeze in moments to write these days, I have to be quicker with my decisions and often simpler with my guitar playing because I don’t have hours a day anymore to keep up my “chops.” For now this suits me fine because it’s matching the sweet and simple love I’ve found and that I want to celebrate and share with others through my songs. 

When I listen to music now, I’ve noticed that what I want to hear has also changed. I no longer seek sad songs to fill my ears and days, which means I’ve been listening less to artists who don’t seem to have moved on from the sad sound they had when I was younger. What I crave to hear instead is transformation, to hear all of life’s story rather than what should just be a phase. And sometimes I just want to hear peaceful or fun music that gets me and my toddler smiling, singing, and moving.

Now our second son simultaneously kicks and punches from inside my womb — we are eagerly expecting his arrival this August. From his already apparent spunk, we’re sure he’s going to offer us just as much of an opportunity for growth when he joins our family as his older brother did.

I’ll have even less time to play guitar, less time to write, and I’ll be taking another (and probably longer) hiatus from performing. None of that matters much to me, though, because when I listen back to my music I realize how my darkness has been slowly but surely transformed by this sweet and sacrificial love into true joy.