What I'd tell you.

A love letter to my younger self.

Feb 20, 2025

I began blogging in 2006.

You can read one of my very first posts here. (I’ll try not to cringe while you do.) I had just finished my bachelors in English and History, and I had three very young children. (I finished up my senior year nursing my first daughter through classes so she would sleep.)

When I picked the name of the blog, I chose Memoria Arts- “memoria” being the latin verb “to remember” and “arts” because I had become so drawn to light and influence of art and beauty during my undergrad years. I wanted to explore that intersection more: what we are called to remember as a culture and a people and the many influences of beauty, art, and truth.

However.

I was deep in the throes of young motherhood- I would go on to have six children under six in the next few years. While other mother writers and artists have gloriously managed to continue their crafts in the margin of very young motherhood, I could not. Those early years were deeply intense, and a school and a sanctification all their own.

I look back on my young mom self of twenty years ago (my eldest is now 22) and I just want to hold her. That mom needed so much mothering of her own. I can still keenly feel the pressure I felt then to “be a good mother”, but at the time, I had no idea what that even looked like. (Full disclosure: I’m still not quite sure what that looks like, but more on that later.)

So many writers both on Substack and elsewhere have done such excellent work about the pressures of culture on motherhood. Specifically, how do you mother in a culture that is so atomized and lacking cohesion, even within communities of faith? Reading these articles over the last few years, thanks in no small part to the lovely

Haley Baumeister

, has helped me to realize and recognize how heavy a burden had been placed on me back then sometimes entirely without my recognition and yet at my own hand.

If I could go back and meet my young mama self,

I’d gently lift off of her so many things that were not hers to carry. Even now, as I see the mothers of young children around me, I just want to reach out to them, right there in the street or after Liturgy or at the grocery store and just give them a big squeeze. (I do when they let me.) I tell them how Beloved they are. How Beloved their children are, and how I pray for them. That is absolutely okay, even necessary, to take a big deep breath, lean into peace and prayerfulness and just be with their family and tune the rest of the world out.

I think the intensity of the cultural pressure has only turned UP in the last two decades. Even though all of my children are now teenagers and adults, I still feel that weight and I can’t imagine quite how I’d feel if they were young again. It was hard then. It’s even harder now.

Turns out, I’ve realized somewhat of an answer to the question I posed to myself back then.

Mothers are so uniquely placed at the intersection of “remembering” in a culture and where that culture meets in its art and work. I don’t think that quite clicked to me back then, and yet, I clearly had glimmers and threads of the answer forming throughout those years. My social media handle has long been art of the everyday because it just encapsulated my thought- how something so quotidian as a dusty shaft of sunlight through a glass knob can suddenly illuminate beauty in a way that makes your heart ache for Home and heaven. I kept collection those pieces and threads all throughout the years over on Instagram.

Eventually as all of my children entered the late elementary years I was drawn to making art of my own like a dying woman searching for water. A vast chunk of who I am the had long been suppressed and dormant burst to life. Creating always brings me peace. I started painting first in acrylics, but rapidly switched to watercolor- and in recent years- I’ve given myself over to exploring children’s illustration to my heart’s content.

Now I find the threads joining, and want to return to writing in a deeper way. I hope you’ll join me. I’m excited to see where this journey takes me next.