Start Here: MotherLore

A living archive of motherhood, myth, and healing plants

Motherhood changed the architecture of my life in ways I didn’t expect.

It cracked me open and rearranged me, sharpening some parts while softening others. It asked more of me than I thought I had, and then it asked again. Somehow, I always found more to give. But somewhere inside the breaking and remaking of who I was, I found myself disillusioned by the lack of people speaking honestly about the deeper truths of matrescence, of becoming a mother.

I’m not referring to the exhaustion, the sleep loss, or the endless piles of laundry. I wanted to talk about what lives beneath all that. The way motherhood bends identity. The way longing and devotion coexist in a single breath. The way fierce love can terrify you with its brightness. The way grief and joy are entangled. The way I was no longer moving through the world as one, but as two — as though my heart started beating somewhere outside my body. The way rage can rise, and moments later, the beauty of the moment pierces your hard exterior exactly where you feel most fragile.

I learned that motherhood isn’t conquered. It’s yielded to. That we must soften, in order to meet the world as it is, so that we can move forward. Over time, I came to understand that motherhood is not either/or. It is always both/and. Both rupture and sweetness. Both breaking and blooming. Both the desire for solitude and the ache for closeness. The beauty does not erase the difficulty, and the difficulty does not diminish the beauty. They shape one another — like tide and undertow.

These were the truths living in my chest, that we seem to lack the language for. I discovered that we now have a word to describe the profound transformation of a woman in motherhood - matrescence. But even with a name, so much of it remains hard to speak. We have language for the logistics of motherhood, but very little for its interior weather — for the grief braided into love, for the inability to recognize ourselves, for the sense that one of our hearts now beats somewhere outside our body.

When these truths go unnamed, many mothers believe they are alone.

MotherLore exists to challenge that.

I found myself aching for stories that could hold the intensity of becoming a mother without flinching away from contradiction or ambivalence. Stories that could hold both shadow and bloom. So I turned to folklore and myth — the stories that have always held human complexity without needing to resolve it.

In the old stories, I began to recognize mothers who mirrored parts of me I didn’t yet know how to express. The Selkie Bride, caught between sea and shore, maiden and motherhood. Demeter, whose grief reshaped the world. Frigg, whose fierce love and fear drove her to try to outwit loss itself.

These stories are not parenting how-tos.
They are mirrors.

Even when the struggles and blessings of motherhood were not spoken plainly, they have always been visible in our old stories. They show us that what we are living now is not new — and that we were never meant to carry it alone.

This is how myth becomes medicine: not by telling us how to be mothers, but by showing us that mothers have always been complicated — and still worthy of love.

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About Ayla

I’m Ayla De Grandpré — a Canadian writer, researcher, and mother.

I locate myself as a settler of European descent, working primarily with the mythic traditions of my own Celtic and Norse lineages. My relationship to myth is ancestral rather than academic alone: a way of listening for what was lived by women whose interior lives were rarely recorded, but never absent. To me, myth is the shorthand of the soul. It is a language spacious enough to hold the tectonic shifts of a woman’s life without breaking.

Before becoming a mother, I taught yoga, helping women soften their nervous systems and reconnect with their breath and bodies. I spent time in Tuscany teaching university students about slow food and rural ways of living, learning how land and seasonality shape us when we’re willing to listen.

I am also a CGS-D Doctoral Fellow and PhD candidate specializing in sustainability and resilience. My research examines how systems respond to disturbances, loss of control, and constraints, and how they reorganize afterward. It focuses on adaptation, more-than-human relationships, and the conditions that allow life to continue after rupture.

Motherhood became the most personal version of my research.

I once feared motherhood would make me feel smaller. Instead, it has made almost everything else in my life feel too small for me. I feel profoundly expansive in this season.

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What Lives Here

MotherLore is a book in progress — a year-long journey through maternal myths, retold for our time. Each chapter, or month, will contain a myth, paired with research on maternal psychology and resilience, a plant, and a small, grounded ritual. This Substack is where the work takes shape in real time.

Here, myth sits beside lived field notes. Research and ecology breathe alongside grief, bliss, devotion, rage, and loss. I gather unspeakable truths of motherhood — ambivalence, depletion, devotion, the quiet grief of losing your old self — alongside rituals and herbal practices that tether us back to the body when motherhood scatters us to the edges.

What you can expect:

Alongside the long-form chapters, this space holds the fragments and field notes that arise along the way.

• Myth Retellings: original retellings of maternal figures from Celtic, Norse, and related European traditions, written to surface the emotional truths buried in the old stories and to re-center the mother’s perspective.

• Essays & Research Notes: reflective essays that weave lived experience with maternal psychology, ecology, and resilience research, translating theory into language that can be felt.

• Short Notes & Poems: brief, image-led pieces shared in between longer posts. These are often written in the cracks: during naps, early mornings, or late evenings, and speak directly to the interior moments of motherhood.

• Plant Companions, Recipes & Simple Rituals: gentle, seasonal practices offered as ways to metabolize what the writing stirs.

• Field Notes from Writing the Book: glimpses into the questions, tensions, and discoveries emerging as MotherLore is being written..

This is a place where the deeper realities of motherhood can be spoken and held without judgment, a place to remember that mothers are not only caregivers.

We are creators.
Destroyers.
Returners.
Boundary-setters.
Storytellers.
Keepers of old wisdom.

If you are here, I imagine you’ve felt it too, that quiet ache for meaning, for myth, for language that honours your experience rather than shrinking it. You have felt the rupture. The life that no longer fits. The love that remade you without asking permission.

Subscribe to enter the record of maternal interior life — to give language to what has lived in your body without words, and to refuse its erasure.

Welcome to MotherLore.

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