The Forgotten Sea

Why Surrendering to Motherhood Might Be the Most Powerful Thing a Woman Can Do

“Joy is the serious business of heaven.”
—C.S. Lewis

Like any good evangelical kid, I was bottle-fed the C.S. Lewis canon. Narnia, of course. Then the brawnier stuff: Mere Christianity, Abolition of Man, The Great Divorce. Books that made you feel smart just for underlining them. But it was Lewis's sermon-turned-essay The Weight of Glory that never left me alone.

The central argument is: you were made for more. All our hungers for beauty, belonging, and significance are not mistakes. They’re clues pointing us toward what we're really after: eternal joy. But we aim too low, get dazzled by things that sparkle and die, and settle for cheap knockoffs. As he puts it: “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us—like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.”

I used to think I got what he meant. Thought I was chasing the real stuff. I’d been raised to want big things: education, freedom, influence. And I was doing it: the résumé, the polished calendar, the success that photographs well. I was fluent in modern womanhood and all its hustle. I looked like someone who had built a life.

Then I got pregnant at 35. My husband and I were thrilled, of course. But looking back, it felt like just another grown-up milestone. I thought I was entering a new phase. I didn’t realize I was leaving the old world behind.

When my first child arrived, it felt as though gravity had changed direction. One minute I had an inbox under control and a decent haircut. The next, I was stripped raw and holding a tiny boy whose need didn’t blink, didn’t sleep, didn’t stop.

I wasn’t just overwhelmed; I was overtaken. Gripped by the ancient, primal task of keeping him alive. I fed him from my own body. I held him through nights that bled into morning. My brain frayed. My body broke. But somewhere in the repetition of giving when I had nothing left, something wild and unshakable began to take root.

It wasn’t empowerment the way we’d been sold it: filtered, glossy, strategic. It was older than that. Elemental. Motherhood wasn't refining me ; it was undoing me. It felt like dying because in many ways, it was. And in that undoing, I met a self I didn’t know was waiting.

This, I think, is what is meant by a rite of passage: not a title you earn, but a self you survive to become. A descent into ancient depths. The making of a mother.

But here’s the trouble: the loudest voices in our culture don’t tell the truth about this. They frame motherhood as noble, sure, but mostly drudgery. Sacrifice without transformation. Obligation without awe. So instead of being woven into the blueprint of early adulthood, motherhood gets pushed out, deferred indefinitely, treated like a disruption to be managed later, if at all. The driving fear is we’re losing ourselves when the truth is we’re being remade. We don’t recognize it for what it is: the first crack of becoming someone new.

We were raised to do high-status things: earn degrees, start companies, climb ladders. And those are good things. But somewhere along the way, we receive the message that motherhood is the opposite, that it is lesser, that it shrinks us.

That isn’t just a lie; it’s theft.

The deeper into motherhood I go, the more I see what we’ve lost. Fertility is plummeting in the West, and we’re told it’s progress. But what if it’s not just freedom we’ve found, but also disconnection? What if we’ve cut ourselves off from the deep, electric power of creating and sustaining life? Feminism gave us rights, thank God. But it didn’t give us reverence. It taught us to fight for autonomy, but not to stand in awe of the body that swells, bleeds, stretches, feeds. It didn’t know what to do with babies. With birth. With the birth of a mother.

And in doing so, we robbed ourselves.

Please don’t read this as a political argument (though I know that’s nearly impossible). Set down the slogans. Forget the talking points. Let’s just name something staggering: women can grow life. Birth it. Feed it. Raise it. That’s not a side plot. That’s the main event.

For decades, the architects of the modern woman have told us that motherhood is small, like it’s a backup plan for those who couldn’t make it elsewhere. But I’ve never felt more vast than the moment I roared my children into the world. We’re told motherhood ties you down and puts your life on pause. But really, it gives you something to stand on. Grounds you in something deeper than status or speed. It breaks you open and fills you with something more transcendent than ambition. A power that breathes life into new, growing humans. A power that can build nations from a nursery. A power that endures.

Just because our society treats motherhood like a consolation prize doesn’t mean it isn’t the crown. We’ve been trained to see it as life’s understudy, waiting offstage in case your big break doesn’t come. But what if it’s the thing that teaches us how to love, how to endure, how to live for more than just ourselves? What if it’s the fire that remakes you?

Lewis said we’re like children making mud pies in a slum because we can’t imagine the offer of a holiday at the sea. That’s what we’ve done to motherhood. We scrubbed it of glory, called it regressive, and dressed up the slum like it was a penthouse.

The truth is motherhood is love that costs something and gives infinitely more back. It gives us the sea: the arresting joy that waits on the other side of surrender. Wild, sacred, uncontainable.

Thank you to Julianne for this incredible piece.

Julianne is a Cleveland-based tech executive with four kids, one of whom is a newborn. She hasn’t sat down since 2021.