The Words I Couldn't Receive

Gentleness when your entire life has changed

Hello! Change abounds these days, and I have faced (yet again) some changes during this calendar year that have required a shift of cadence and focus, especially in my writing life. But no season invites us into the ongoing work of navigating life’s changes like the month of May, a season ripe with transitional moments—markers of passing time, endings leading to new beginnings, and a turn toward summer rhythms.

Today, I am here to share an essay recently featured in the Coffee + Crumbs Spring Collection. This story is told in the context of motherhood and expat life, but I hope that, no matter your own situation or season, you will find resonance with its broader theme: gentleness with ourselves in the midst of change.

Thank you for being here.

Springtime in Germany

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The Words I Couldn’t Receive

an excerpt from Coffee + Crumbs

Only weeks before my oldest son was born, we moved into a new home. Desperate for affordable furniture to fill up the space, I visited a local thrift store and antique market. While carefully squeezing my belly through the store filled with knick-knacks and repurposed furniture, I fell in love with a small, vintage Ethan Allen rocker.

I’ll give it to you for $50, the seller said, which was a significant investment for me at the time. But the living room was still half-empty and the baby would be arriving soon, and I needed some places to rock him. I paid cash and placed the golden rocker in front of the fireplace on old wooden floors.

Weeks later, I sat in that chair with a newborn pressed against my chest, rocking, rocking, rocking, while the child in my arms kept his eyes open to the world around him. As it turns out, the rocker quietly creaked with each movement back and forth. Summer light fell across the hardwoods while I stayed inside, dutifully following the rhythm of sleeping, feeding, and waking I had been told by the internet was my ticket to new-mom success.

But in those early days, nothing seemed to be working. Only weeks before, I had stepped away from a job at a university where I had some sense of competence about my daily efforts. Now, alone all day with an infant, recovering from a hard delivery, I questioned my abilities:

Why wasn’t he sleeping?

Why did I feel so flustered?

How many hours was I going to have to sit alone in this house, stuck in this creaky rocker?

The sleeplessness, long days, isolation, body changes, even later-diagnosed postpartum anxiety—those were real challenges. But there was an even heavier burden inside my mind and heart, an unwanted, creaking subtext to my early mothering days: the feeling that I shouldn’t be struggling, at all. The sense that I should be doing much better than I was.

A neighbor down the street—a mom several years ahead of me—witnessed me flailing during that season. One afternoon, while we sat in her living room with my baby playing on a blanket, she affirmed how much transition I was experiencing:

“Your entire life just changed,” she gently told me.

Read the rest at Coffee + Crumbs.