Welcome, I’m so glad you’re here.
This space is your cozy corner for honest talk about motherhood, mental health, and true, healing self-care. A place where the messy and the magical can sit side by side. Where you don’t have to have it all together to be worthy of rest, joy, or connection.
Come as you are—tired, tender, curious, hopeful, at whit’s end—and let’s begin together to tease out the beauty, to seek out the joy, to hold tenderly the hurting parts of ourselves. I see you, mama. I’m right there with you.
“What if joy is a form of resistance?”
— Toi Derricotte
All The Mama Therapy
Hi, I'm Colleen —Therapist-mama doing her best to find joy sprinkled in the midst of the chaos of early motherhood.
I’m a fellow-struggler and joy-seeker.
You’re not alone, mama, and I’m so glad you’re here.
I would love to hear your story and send some whimsy your way!
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This season is not meant to be journeyed alone— we all need each other.
A question I’ve been mulling over lately:
What if that part of me that I’ve overlooked,
called “silly” or non-essential
was actually the part of me the world needs most?
That I need most?
That my family needs most?
This feels too good to be true.
Could it be that the writing, whimsical, fairy-loving, joy-seeking part of me is not indulgent—but necessary?
Seriously subversive?
A quiet rebellion against the polished, professional, capitalist version of who I’ve been taught to be?
Don’t get me wrong—my serious therapist brain has value.
It knows how to sit with grief, hold pain, witness trauma.
We need that. I need that.
But what if it’s not the only thing we need?
What if it’s not even the most necessary thing right now?
What if?
What if you carry something the world is starving for, too?
What if the parts you’ve discarded—the ones you’ve called extra, childish, frivolous—are the parts we’re all aching for?
What if your love of drawing, or dancing, or poetry, or baking, or baseball, or magic—is not silly, but sacred?
What if the world needed less performance, less knowing-it-all, less hustle?
What if it needed your joy?
Your softness.
Your wonder.
What if the world needed your
joy?
Needed you to live into it fully and extravagantly
and offer it to others too?
What if—especially in this season of fear, division, and disconnection—what we really need
is to meet each other in the playful places,
the childlike places,
the curious, messy, joy-lit places…
not just the heavy ones?
What if pausing and chasing joy were actually
essential, not just extra?
What if?
I’m going to experiment with that here.
I hope you’ll come along.
Before kids, I underestimated the power of sleep. I knew I had a hard time when tired, but I never knew this kind of desperate tired. The only-thing-I-can-think about tired. Anxiety inducing, what-will-this-night-hold kind of tired.