How parenting has helped me reclaim me!
Hi, I'm Mae — at least that's the name I’m writing under as I begin this next chapter. I’m a forty-something, undiagnosed neurodivergent, queer solo parent of three (also undiagnosed ND) kids.
I’m an ex-evangelical, a recovering emotional eater trying to write instead of snack, and a Manifesting Generator who's technically unemployed but spiritually self-employed — once I find my missing mojo that is! As the old saying goes: “Jack of all trades, master of none — though oftentimes better than a master of one.”
Honestly, that forgotten ending feels like the perfect unofficial motto for a Man Gen.
I don’t smoke, drink, or take any kind of drugs. Actually, food has long been my “drug” of choice — a common reality for many Christians. I used to drink, though; my body started rejecting alcohol around the time I had my firstborn. Make of that what you will, or not. Come to think of it, I don’t do much of anything that might be associated with experiencing pleasure — the kinds of pleasures our culture trains us to chase: cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, food, sex. Something I’m slowly learning to unpick and work on in my own way.
I conceived my first child on my honeymoon 15 years ago — my initiation into mothering, the start of my unlearning journey. Back then, I was a 30-something “virgin,” stuck in a heteronormative script where sex meant nothing but penile penetration and purity rings: all rules, zero curiosity, and absolutely no permission to imagine what I might actually want. Heck, I didn’t even realise that what others suggested didn’t have to be what I wanted!
Looking back now, it’s wild to see that I was queer the whole time, albeit this part of me is still very new — so new that after my first heartbreak this past summer, I tucked it away for “later,” even though I know that’s just an old pattern trying to keep me safe. It’s absurd, familiar, and something else I’m unlearning one layer at a time. Purity culture had taught me desire was dangerous, and queer women barely existed in my faith community. Same-sex attraction? Unthinkable — second only to using God’s name in vain! Back then, I didn’t even know I could imagine being anything other than straight, let alone explore who I actually was. Truthfully? I didn’t know who I was. I still didn’t really know — and that’s a reality that has only hit me full force this year!
In December 2018, exactly one week after turning 41, I finally walked away from organised religion. It wasn’t a sudden decision — more like the final step in a slow unraveling that had begun before I graduated Bible College in 2009. I’d learned enough by then to see the gaping holes in the Christianity I’d been raised in, but it had been my entire world. I knew I didn’t want my children growing up with the same narrative, but I also knew walking away would be one of the hardest things I’d ever do. Looking back now, I can see how my unconscious Sagittarius energy played into it all — the push–pull between freedom and belonging, truth and loyalty. My sun, moon, rising, and Venus placements are all in Sagittarius (I sometimes joke that I’m as Sag as Sagittarius itself), which means I’m wired for expansion, questioning, and the kind of truth-telling that often blows up the life you were taught to protect.
Since walking away from God and Jesus in 2018, I’ve come full circle in my own way — though I struggle to label it. I do believe in a higher power, and for now, I call it Divine Source Energy. The key difference (and the Bible itself hints at this) is that we are that energy — it is us, flowing through us, not something distant or separate. And, regardless of your views on an historical Jesus, I think we can all agree he was not a white European — his more culturally accurate name is Yeshua. He was a person of colour, and he was not, and never was, the “one and only Son of the One True God.” If (and that would be a BIG IF) he held to any world religion, it most likely would have been Judiasm rather than Christianity. If you’re curious, check out The Freedom Transmissions channeled by Carissa Schumacher and hear for yourself what Source Energy might be.
But enough about queerness and spirituality for a moment — back to motherhood. Fast forward three and a half years after my honeymoon, and with three kids under three I felt like I was drowning. How could the life I’d longed for since childhood feel like a nightmare instead of the dream I’d been promised? It took me a while to understand what was happening. Motherhood didn’t diagnose me — but it did hold up a mirror I finally felt brave enough to look into. Through that mirror, the nagging suspicion I’d carried for years about autism suddenly made sense. And as I learned more about my eldest child, I began recognising the ADHD woven through my own profile too.
And the truth is, all of this — the queerness, the spirituality, the neurodivergence, the slow unwinding of who I was told to be — circles back to motherhood. Not the glossy, sacrificial, “good Christian woman” version I was conditioned to perform, but the real, raw, unravelled experience of raising three neurodivergent kids who basically hold up mirrors for a living. Parenting didn’t just make me a mother; it made me confront myself. It stripped away every illusion about who I thought I should be and forced me back into who I actually am. That’s what this first post is really about: how parenting has helped me reclaim me.
I’ve intentionally named this blog The Unlearning Mother because, for me, even the word “mother” sometimes feels off — it carries expectations I’ve spent years trying to loosen. Motherhood is a paradox: both the anchor that steadies me and the tide that pulls me under. I love it and resent it; it uplifts me and exhausts me.
But more than anything, becoming a parent cracked open a truth no one ever told me: so much of “parenting” is actually reparenting ourselves. Adult-me learning to show up for inner-child-me in all the ways she needed but never received — especially with an emotionally unavailable mum and a dad who was mostly away working. It’s the process of giving myself the safety, compassion, presence, and permission I never had growing up.
It turns out children really are our greatest teachers. They invite us into the present moment and into the work of unlearning the old patterns we inherited — healing the parts of ourselves that were never held. But we have to be tuned in enough to notice that invitation, and brave enough to accept it.
My experience has taught me that when I stop trying to shape my children into who I think they should be and instead make room for who they already are, something shifts — in them, and in me. I begin to meet the parts of myself I’d misplaced. It’s not a grand revelation, just a gradual remembering of something quietly true inside me.
That tension — guidance without control, love without losing self, learning without certainty — is the space I write from.
Thank You for being here – for witnessing a small part of my remembering.
