My Delirium

Why Motherhood Feels Like a Bad Acid Trip (And Why That’s a Good Thing)

Sacrifice isn’t whispered in reverence anymore, it’s muttered through gritted teeth at mum groups, a quiet competition of who’s lost the most and smiled through it. A little martyr badge. “I gave up my career for my kids.” “I lost my body, my sleep, my time.” And I know that tone intimately, because I’ve said those things. That woman, seething in the kitchen while her husband’s life barely skipped a beat, just got a new title of ‘Papa’ while mine cracked open along with my nipples and swallowed me whole.

That was me. Smiling through clenched teeth while he got to keep his name, his rhythm, his fucking sleep. Meanwhile, I was being remade in the dark.

But that’s the part I couldn’t see at the time.

Because sacrifice, in the old, mythic sense, wasn’t some quiet resignation, it was sacred. It was blood on the altar, fire in the belly, bones rearranged by purpose. It meant you didn’t just lose something, you offered it.

You walked into the underworld, laid your offering self down at the mouth of the labyrinth to be made in blood and knowing, and let her dissolve into the red-threaded corridors of becoming, so something holy could rise in her place. That’s not subtraction. That’s metamorphosis.

It’s like the myth of Persephone - depending on which version you’ve read and how you choose to interpret it. There’s the one where she’s kidnapped, dragged screaming into the underworld by Hades, her mother ripping the earth apart in grief until they strike a deal: six months above, six months below. That one teaches you to fear the dark. To see descent as a punishment. To cling to the light like your life depends on it.

In Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés gives us the deeper cut. Persephone is taken, yes, but the descent is essential. It’s how a girl becomes a woman. It’s not victimhood, it’s transformation. You go down to meet your instincts, your bones, your shadow self. You don’t come back the same, and you’re not supposed to. The descent is the price of knowing. You sacrifice the light so you can see in the dark.

And then Carolyn Elliott kicks the door open with Existential Kink and says maybe Persephone wanted it. Maybe she was bored of the daisy chains and the endless spring. Maybe part of her liked the pull of the underworld. Maybe the part we call chaos is the part she craved. The descent wasn’t just necessary, it was delicious. She gave herself to the dark like an offering. Not because she was broken, but because she was ready.

And here’s what ties it all together. Whether you’re dragged or you jump, it’s still a sacrifice. Not in the modern sense. Not that watered-down martyrdom.
I’m talking old world sacrifice. Holy. Voluntary. A surrender made in blood and truth and soul.

Motherhood is that. Matrescence is that.
Not a loss. Not a punishment. A sacred choice to become someone real. Because what could be more holy than laying your old self down—not because you had to, but because something inside you knew it was time?

That’s not failure. That’s initiation.
That’s the sacrifice women were always meant to make.

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In my last post, I wrote about how postpartum anxiety, depression, and rage aren't just mental health conditions to be medicated into silence. They're symptoms. Alarms. Signals that you're dragging your maiden behind you like a corpse instead of burying her like you were meant to.

Because when you don’t lay her down, when you keep gripping the curated identity, the filtered self, the free-spirited girlboss version of you that belonged to another lifetime, she starts to rot. And you start to unravel.

And then I read Motherhood by Jungian psychoanalyst Lisa Marchiano. And there it was. The exact thing I’d been circling around, just sharper. More precise. It hit like a clean scalpel. Lisa says:

“At some point we will be asked to sacrifice unlimited potential for a lived reality. Becoming a mother is often the point that many of us face this sacrifice. If we make the sacrifice we become changed, we grow in ways that may be surprising even to ourselves. If we cannot make the required sacrifice, however, we may continue to be the eternal girl, refusing to give up youthful things despite the outward appearance of adulthood.

In the psyche, when we cannot let something die, the result is that we cannot fully live. In order to become firmly planted in your unique life, you must sacrifice the unlimited potential for the manifested reality of ordinary fate.. This is a sacrifice that must be made to embrace maturity.”

Motherhood is the ultimate sacrifice. But we have to remember that real sacrifice isn’t transactional, it’s transformational. It’s not just about what you gave up, it’s about what you’ve stepped into. And if we keep talking about motherhood like it’s some shitty trade deal, measured in milestones and paycheques missed, then you’re destined for disaster.

Because the “unlimited potential” we mourn—it’s not some noble, raw talent the world never got to see. It’s the maiden. The persona. The curated fantasy self. The one who still had time, who still got to play in possibility, who hadn’t been pinned down by reality. She was everything in potentia and nothing in form. And you can’t become someone real while clinging to someone imaginary.

Lisa continues to reference a quote from Marie-Louise von Franz lodged itself in me like glass:

“There is a terrific fear of being pinned down, of entering space and time completely, and of being the one human being that one is.”

And hell, did I feel that. Not just as a mother, but as a woman raised on the lie that freedom lives in endless options. That the moment you choose one path, all the others die and somehow that means you've failed. We were raised to believe we could be anything, but we weren’t aware of what it would cost to actually become something. We were taught to pivot, to optimize, to curate ourselves like a brand with a nervous system.

But what von Franz is saying, and what motherhood makes violently clear, is that at some point you have to stop shape-shifting. You have to land. Let the other selves die so the real one can finally take up space.

Edward Edinger hit it even harder. Said ‘you have to give up being everything in potentia if you want to be anything in reality.’ Meaning you have to stop floating in your own fantasy and pick a shape. Form. Jam on your shirt. Hair in a bun. Crumbs in your bed. A life that’s not made for display, but for living.

When von Franz talked about entering space and time completely, that’s what made me start thinking about Watts and Tolle’s perspectives on mindfulness and ‘the now’. Because what is space and time if not the present? What is the fear of being pinned down if not being dragged into the now after a lifetime of dissociating into the past and fantasising the next thing and the next version of yourself that you swear is the one that will finally feel right?

Their premise on suffering is the same; that our suffering comes from our refusal to be where we are. That we’re always trying to become instead of just being. That we live our lives in a desperate forward lean, reaching for futures that don’t exist, dragging behind us the weight of past selves like ghosts that never got a proper burial.

While listening to one of Alan Watts’ talks on Buddhism, he says what we call suffering is really just clinging, and in Buddhist terms, that’s dukkha, the first of the Four Noble Truths, a kind of ancient blueprint for how to stop suffering over who we no longer are by finally letting go of who we used to be. (*cough*themaiden*cough*)

The First Noble Truth: dukkha—there is suffering.
Not just in the obvious ways. Not just from sleep deprivation or cracked nips or the thousand tiny indignities of motherhood. It’s deeper. It’s the ache that comes from trying to hold on to a version of yourself that doesn’t fit anymore. The suffering is real, but it’s not random. It’s the symptom of clinging.

The Second Noble Truth: suffering comes from attachment.
From the refusal to release the maiden. From dragging her ghost behind you like a weighted cloak. From scrolling through old photos and trying to reincarnate the version of you who had time, who had silence, who had her body to herself. You keep trying to bring her with you. But she was never meant to survive this.

The Third Noble Truth: there is a way out.
The suffering stops when the clinging stops. When you stop trying to straddle two worlds—maiden and mother—and finally choose to be where you are. Not who you were. Not who you thought you’d be. Just here. In this body. In this moment. In this mess.

The Fourth Noble Truth: there is a path.
And it’s not glamorous. It’s not a five-step checklist or a perfect morning routine. It’s presence. It’s surrender. It’s letting go of the girl who could handle it all and grieving her properly, so the woman you are now has room to breathe. It’s the daily practice of choosing not to resurrect the maiden every time your ego gets itchy.

That’s precisely what these jungian psychoanalysts are also saying. That we’re always running, always somewhere else. Then motherhood comes along and hits like a brick to the ego and suddenly you're being trained, against your will, in the ancient art of being present. These kids, these messy little monks, don’t give a shit about your five-year plan. They want you now. Fully. Tying a knot in a piece of string or looking at a worm like it holds the secrets of the universe.

Because here’s the part I wrote about in The Kill (Bury Me) and I’ll keep writing it until it sticks. If you don’t bury her, she’ll turn your motherhood into a haunting. She won’t whisper. She’ll weigh you down. She’ll hang off your back like a corpse in a ball gown, draining every ounce of energy you need to care for this new life, this new body, this new family. The weight of her will leech your joy, your patience, your presence—until all you’re doing is surviving her. Because you can’t carry both. One of you has to go.

That’s the trick. The ache isn’t proof you’re lost. It’s proof you’re clinging. And clinging always hurts. That’s Buddhism. That’s matrescence. That’s the whole damn path. And the sooner you stop trying, the sooner you get free.

Eckhart Tolle, said it too. “Wherever you are, be there totally.” But how do you do that when your mind has been trained like a dog to chase everything but the moment? We were programmed to perform it. Because we’ve been trained since our childhoods if not earlier, to live out of sync with time.

We were rewarded for planning, praised for ambition, punished for stillness.
We became experts at being ‘anywhere-but-here’. School taught us to chase gold stars. Capitalism taught us to climb ladders. Even our healing became a hustle.

So when we’re finally pulled into the now, it doesn’t feel like peace. It feels like walking into a rave you didn’t buy tickets for. It’s like it’s 10:30AM on day two of a camping festival, still coming down from heavy doses of LSD. The sun’s too bright, the bass is too loud, your skin’s too raw, your thoughts dissolve mid-sentence. Your nervous system is fried, and all you want is a dark corner and a fucking moment of silence. But instead, you're handed a baby and told this is the rest of your life.

And then, somehow, right there on the floor in the middle of it, covered in someone else’s snot and your own unmet expectations, it happens. You drop in. And ‘the now’ lets you in. And I tell you, presence doesn’t feel peaceful at first. It feels raw. Like your skin's been peeled off and suddenly you're fully here, hearing every sound, smelling every smell, feeling everything that you tried to outrun.

It’s overstimulation on a soul level. Your body is there, but your nervous system is trying to climb out of every orifice of your body. Someone’s pulling your shirt. and everyone keeps touching you, asking you questions you don’t have answers to. Someone else is crying because their banana snapped in half. There’s a sock full of slime in the fridge. There’s Lego heads frozen in the all the ice cube trays. The toddler rubbing something into the rug. You can’t remember if you drank your coffee or just thought really hard about drinking it.

But if you stay there, if you don’t flinch, if you let yourself get pinned and breathe anyway, something clicks.

Because this is the portal. This chaos is the doorway. And the longer you resist it, the more it drags you by the hair until you finally give in and say fine, I’m here.

Tolle says:

“The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it. In other words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more you suffer. Or you may put it like this: the more you are able to honour and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain, of suffering - and free of the egoic mind. Why does the mind habitually deny or resist the Now? Because it cannot function and remain in control without time, which is past and future, so it perceives the timeless Now as threatening. Time and mind are in fact inseparable.”

That’s the whole of it. That ache in your chest while your child asks for the tenth snack. That crawling sense of urgency when all you want to do is finish a thought without someone needing to poop or scream or ask you to fix something stupid and small that still somehow feels like the most important thing in the universe to them. That heat rising behind your eyes when the day has been nothing but interruptions and you start to forget who you were before it started. That’s not failure. That’s the residue of a mind trained to escape.

Tolle calls it resistance. Mental, emotional, spiritual. Judgment disguised as planning. Negativity disguised as needing space. He says the pain comes from how hard we cling to the belief that this moment shouldn't be happening. That it’s in the way. That it’s not enough.

But the more you fight the now, the louder it screams.
And what is matrescence if not the slow death of your ability to escape time and space?

This is what Marie-Louise von Franz meant when she said we’re terrified of being pinned down. Because to be pinned is to be present.
And the present is threatening to the mind because the mind only survives by dragging us through the past or flinging us into the future. It cannot live in the Now.

So motherhood drags you into it. Not gently. Not sweetly. It drags you in with tantrums and toast crumbs and the third request to cut the crusts off again. It drags you into the Now until the only thing left to do is surrender because there is no later. There is only this. This body. This floor. This knot in this string. This is it.

And the sooner you stop clinging of the fight and let yourself land,
the sooner you realize this isn’t the death of you, it’s the beginning.

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You see it now, right? How it’s all just clinging. And how every path; Buddhism, Tolle, Watts, matrescence, myth - is pointing to the same damn place. The suffering isn’t random. It’s the ache of refusing to let her go. The maiden. It’s the clinging. The curated version of you who still had time, who still had silence, who didn’t flinch every time someone said “Mum.”

And once you finally make the sacrifice, once you bury her properly, not with resentment but with reverence, something starts to shift. The suffering eases. Not because life gets easier, but because you’re no longer being torn in half by who you were and who you are.

And that’s when the real work begins. Because now the shadow steps forward—not as a monster, but as the cold twitch in your jaw while you stare at your husband snoring on the couch at 2pm on a Saturday, eyes glassy with that same Jack Torrance death-glare from the Overlook Hotel, wondering how the fuck you became the maid, the mother, the meal planner, the house manager, budget analyst, clothes buyer, emotional triage nurse, on-call therapist, part-time hostage negotiator, grocery logistics manager, full-time meal planner, chef, sous-chef, cleaner, dry cleaner, seamstress, arts-and-crafts engineer, immune system researcher, playtime improviser, bedtime negotiator and doing it all with no training. No feminine example. No lineage of maternal wisdom to lean on. Just pure instinct and blind effort. Untrained in nurturing, unskilled in softness, never taught how to care without resentment. Just a woman trying to cook meals she was never shown how to make, fold clothes no one ever taught her to care about, and mother in ways she never received, while simultaneously digging through her own childhood wreckage, trying to heal wounds in real time so she doesn’t bleed all over her kids or drag them through the same hell she crawled out of. Trying to break the cycle without breaking the whole damn family all while he dozes undisturbed in the wreckage of your shared life.

She’s the voice that rises when you feel unseen, unheard, unheld. The voice that won’t shut up. The one that replays every argument like it’s prepping for a courtroom drama, complete with PowerPoint slides and a closing statement that’d win an Emmy.

That’s her. That’s the shadow. Not some monster under the bed—no, she is the bed. And she’s not here to ruin you. She’s here to be integrated. But you can’t access her when you’re still busy playing dress-up in a costume that no longer fits. You’ve got to strip it all off. Get raw. Get honest. And start meeting yourself in the dark.

To be the specific human being that one is, pinned in space and time, not as punishment but as arrival. And if that’s not enlightenment, I promise you, its a start.

If you feel like you’re drowning, you’re not; you’ve just stopped floating.
Welcome to the ground. Welcome to the now. Welcome home.

Words best paired with My Delirium by Ladyhawke