A Full Circle Moment: How My Work as a Therapist Led Me to Motherhood

written by: Kristine Page LCPC, LPC, PMH-C

When I first decided I wanted to become a therapist, I knew exactly who I wanted to help: kids.

I wanted to help children who were hurting. Children who had experienced things they never should have had to experience. Children who were carrying stories that felt too big for their little bodies.

My hope was simple: if I could help them work through what they were experiencing while they were young, maybe it wouldn't have to follow them for the rest of their lives.

I wanted their childhood to be part of their story, not the thing that defined their story.

That belief has stayed with me throughout my career, but what has changed is my understanding of how we actually help children.

Because somewhere along the way, I realized something incredibly important:

If I want to help children, I also have to help their parents.

Children don't exist in isolation. They exist within families, relationships, communities, and systems. And as I began working more closely with parents, I started seeing something over and over again.

So many of the adults sitting across from me were carrying their own unresolved experiences.

Their own childhoods.

Their own trauma.

Their own losses.

Their own stories.

Sometimes they were struggling to respond to their children not because they didn't love them or weren't trying hard enough, but because their child's experience was touching a place inside of them that hadn't yet been healed.

And so my work began to shift.

I started to understand that helping a child sometimes meant helping the parent understand themselves.

And then, my own life changed.

And then I became a mom.

My son was born prematurely, and our family spent five weeks in the NICU.

I experienced birth trauma. I experienced postpartum depression. I experienced a version of motherhood that I don't think I could have fully understood until I lived it myself.

And suddenly, I was no longer only sitting across from parents as a therapist.

I was a parent.

I understood in a different way what it meant to enter motherhood carrying expectations, hopes, fears, grief, love, exhaustion, and an entirely new identity all at once.

And once again, my thinking changed.

I found myself asking:

What if we didn't wait until parents were struggling to support them?

What if we got to parents before their children were born?

What if we prepared parents not only for labor and delivery, but for the enormous psychological, relational, emotional, and identity transition that comes with becoming a parent?

What if we talked about birth trauma before it happened?

What if we normalized the possibility of postpartum mental health struggles?

What if we gave parents language for what they were experiencing instead of waiting for them to reach a crisis point?

And so my work moved again.

From children.

To parents.

To perinatal mental health.

To supporting families during one of the most significant transitions of their lives.

And here I am now, years later, realizing that this has been quite the full-circle journey.

But I'm also realizing that the circle isn't actually finished.

Because the more I learn, the more I realize how much there is that we don't talk about.

I often meet moms and parents when they are already pregnant or postpartum and already struggling with the immense changes that are happening.

They're overwhelmed.

They're questioning themselves.

They're grieving parts of who they used to be.

They're trying to figure out who they are now.

They're trying to navigate changes in their relationships, their bodies, their careers, their friendships, their expectations, their identities—and somehow we're often telling them that this is all just supposed to be "natural."

But becoming a mother is not simply something that happens when a baby is born.

It is a profound transformation of a person.

And that realization has led me to where I am now.

Going deeper into matrescence

I am currently deepening my education around matrescence through The Matrescentic Way.

And honestly, it feels like another piece of the puzzle falling into place.

I'm learning more about the culture of motherhood.

I'm learning about the history of motherhood and the expectations that have been placed on mothers across generations.

I'm thinking about the messages mothers receive about what they should be.

I'm questioning the ways our systems support—or fail to support—mothers.

I'm exploring what we have normalized that perhaps shouldn't be normalized.

And I'm asking a question that feels incredibly important:

Where are we missing the mark?

Because if we can better understand what mothers are experiencing, perhaps we can better support them.

And when we support mothers, we support families.

When we support families, we support children.

And when we support children, we are shaping the future.

That brings me right back to where I started.

I entered this profession because I wanted to help children have healthier lives and to know that the difficult things they experienced didn't have to define them.

I just didn't realize then that the path to helping children would lead me through parents, trauma, birth, motherhood, identity, culture, and ultimately matrescence.

What I thought was a straight line has actually been a series of chapters.

Each chapter has taught me something the previous one couldn't.

And each time I think I've figured out where this work is taking me, I find another question.

Another population to understand.

Another layer to uncover.

Another place where we can do better.

Maybe that's what I love most about being a therapist.

There is always more to learn.

And perhaps the goal isn't to ever reach the end of the learning.

Perhaps it's to stay curious enough to keep asking better questions.

Because I still want to help children.

I just understand now that sometimes the best way to do that is to help the people raising them.

And sometimes, the best way to help those parents is to meet them before they ever become parents and help them understand that becoming a mother or father is not simply the addition of a baby.

It is the beginning of a new chapter in their own story, too.

And that is the work I find myself incredibly grateful to be doing.