CHAPTER 18: THE BEAUTIFUL IN-BETWEEN

Congratulations. You’ve entered the part of life no one posts about, the beautiful in-between. This too is art.

You’ll know you’ve arrived when your coffee is cold, your hair has achieved its own ecosystem, and your child calls you “Mom” thirty-seven times before 8 a.m. You used to be an artist, remember? Now you’re an unpaid short-order cook with a minor in emotional regulation and a PhD in guilt. This was my survival manual for the years that felt like a blur of Cheerios, tantrums, and dreams deferred. Nobody tells you how loud silence can feel when your creative life stalls, when the artist in you is still breathing, but barely, somewhere under a pile of unfolded laundry. I wasn’t just tired; I was vanishing. I had become a background extra in my own movie “Exhausted unknown Woman Folding Towels, Take 37.” And that realization hurts.

Step One: Drink the coffee anyway.
Hot, cold, reheated, forgotten, it doesn’t matter. Coffee is not a beverage here; it’s a belief system. It says, You can do this, even if you don’t want to.

Step Two: Lower your expectations.
Of everything, the laundry, your writing, your partner, yourself. There will be days when brushing your teeth feels like an Olympic event. You’ll spend entire afternoons thinking about a nap but never taking one. And somehow, the world will not end.

Step Three: Hide in the bathroom.
It’s not glamorous, but it’s holy. Five minutes of peace with the door locked can reset your nervous system better than any meditation app. You’ll scroll, cry, or stare at the ceiling and remember, Oh right. I’m still in here.

There was a stretch of years when I felt invisible. My camera collected dust. My ideas stayed trapped inside the notes app on my phone. My kids were small and loud and wonderful and exhausting, and I loved them so much it hurt, but I also mourned the version of me who used to have space to hear her own thoughts. And yet, somewhere inside that blur, something profound was happening. The artist wasn’t gone; she was just marinating. Like a photograph soaking in developer, she was forming quietly, molecule by molecule, in the dark.

Motherhood doesn’t just rearrange your schedule; it rearranges your sense of self. It humbled me, stretched me, and quite frankly, wrecked me in all the right ways. It taught me to create in fragments, to see beauty in the unfinished. I learned to make things in between naps, to write in the notes app while someone was crying in the other room, to photograph moments that weren’t perfect but were true. I learned that love, real, inconvenient, soul-rattling love, is its own art form.

It’s not that I didn’t love being a mother. It’s that I didn’t know how to be both, the artist and the caretaker. Society gives you gold stars for sacrifice, not for selfhood. You’re praised for being everything to everyone, and punished, quietly, subtly, when you try to be something for yourself. But there was something else too. Somewhere between the endless school drop-offs and the cold coffee mornings, life kept whispering: there’s more. You need something that pushes you, that stretches your heart wider, that shows you love in a way you’ve never seen before. The kind of love that doesn’t just romance you, it rewires you. This is motherhood. Every conversation, heartbreak, revelation, every late-night laugh and sacred yes gets stored in some secret drawer. And then one day, when you finally have time again, time to make, to dream, to build, it all comes pouring out.

In those years, I learned the language of small joys: the way the light hit my daughter’s curls in the morning, how she giggled at my terrible accents, the weight of her hand when she fell asleep on my chest. Those moments didn’t fill galleries, but they filled my soul. All those years you thought were wasted? They were compost. Fertile ground. You were collecting manuscripts of ideas and dictionaries of new meanings about art and life without even realizing it. You were living the work that would someday pour out of you.

It becomes making things in stolen moments,

between homework and dinner, when the house finally exhaled. I shot photos with toys scattered around my feet, wrote ideas on grocery receipts, and used motherhood itself as a mirror. The mess became the material. The chaos became the muse.

There’s a strange alchemy in losing yourself. It’s awful and clarifying all at once. When the noise quiets, after bedtime, after the breakdown, you hear something honest whispering underneath: You’re still here. You’re still you. You’ve just changed shape.

So no, the messy middle wasn’t glamorous. It was survival art. It was loving and losing myself in equal measure. It was learning that invisibility doesn’t mean erasure, sometimes it’s incubation.

Looking back, I don’t wish those years away. They made me softer, slower, more deliberate. They taught me how to make something sacred out of ordinary moments. They gave me empathy, humor, patience (well, kind of), and an entirely new definition of success.

And when it does, your seeing changes. The world feels more textured, your perspective stretches wide. You no longer chase meaning, you recognize it. You have become a bigger piece of your own life puzzle, and the art that flows from you now carries the fingerprints of everything you’ve lived through: the broken plates, the sleepless nights, the tiny miracles that no one applauded but you survived anyway.

So if you ever find yourself in-between, too tired to dream, too busy to breathe, here’s my advice: Drink the coffee. Lower your expectations. Hide in the bathroom. And remember: this isn’t the end. It’s the middle. The beautiful, messy, necessary middle.

Because somewhere, deep under the dishes and the deadlines, your voice is still there, waiting for you to pick it back up.