I grew up motherless.
My mother didn’t die — she left.
She had two other daughters she stayed with, but my brother and I were left behind.

That kind of pain doesn’t just appear; it’s inherited.
I come from a long line of women — four generations — who carried the same wound.
Women who were motherless not by death, but by abandonment, by silence, by the ache that comes when love breaks under the weight of its own pain.

Each generation passed it on — not because they wanted to, but because they didn’t know how to stop it.
The curse wasn’t a spell; it was the absence of healing.
And I was born into that absence — a lineage of lost daughters, each searching for a mother who could not stay.

It was hard knowing my mother was out there, and even harder not to know why she chose to leave.
Knowing is painful.
Not knowing is haunting.
Every day was a reminder that mothers are meant to love their babies and stay.
And I was always the strange one — the girl without a mother.

But even then — even in the pain — God never stopped speaking to me.
When my body moved, when I pushed myself past exhaustion, when my heart was on fire and my lungs were burning — that’s when I could hear Him most clearly.
In the rhythm of my breath, in the pounding of my feet, in the silence between waves — He was there.

He kept whispering, “You are the one. You are the strongest one. You will end this.”

And I believed Him — even when I didn’t understand what He meant.
Looking back, I see it now.
He was preparing me for a spiritual war — not one fought in the world, but in the soul of my own family line.
He was raising me to break what had been unbroken for centuries — the chain that kept mothers and daughters apart.

When I looked into the eyes of my children, I knew there was no way I would become part of the problem.
I would end it.
I would win this war.
I would set my children free.

I always knew I was different — but I thought it was in a bad way.
I thought it made me too sensitive, too intense, too much.
But then I became a mother — and I realized it wasn’t a curse.
It was the call.
It was the “Neo in The Matrix” kind of different — the kind that wakes you up and shows you that you were never meant to fit in.
You were meant to change everything.

I was pregnant with my first child in the middle of COVID.

Becoming a mother without ever having had one was frightening enough. Now there was a new fear:

Who would I become?

Would I lose surfing? Would I lose sport?
Would I lose my body, my freedom, my identity — the very things that had carried me through a lifetime of surviving without a mother?
And beneath all of it lived the question I was almost afraid to ask:
How do I become a mother when I never had one?

Then, almost overnight, the world changed.
Fear. Panic. Isolation. Plans disappeared, families were separated, doors closed.
Millions of people were searching for someone to tell them: You’re going to be okay. Here is what happens next.
There were no answers. You simply had to step into the unknown and trust that you would keep going.

And strangely — I felt almost normal.
Because I had been living that feeling my entire life.

There was no maternal safety net beneath me. No mother to call when I was frightened. No one to teach me the things a daughter learns simply by standing beside her mother.
And it wasn’t only the missing advice. It was the absence of that deeper thing a mother’s love gives a child — the feeling that somewhere in this enormous world, you are held.

I had learned to move through life without that map.
The world was meeting those feelings for the first time. I had been navigating them for most of my life.
And now, in the middle of it all, I was becoming the mother.

At the same time, the one woman I had known as a maternal presence — my grandmother on my father’s side — was slowly dying.
Because of the pandemic, I made one of the most painful decisions of my life: not to be beside her when she took her last breath. I had to protect the family growing around me, and the life growing inside me.

So there I was.
Becoming a mother.
Losing the woman who had shown me what having one might feel like.
And confronting, more deeply than ever, how much I had never been mothered myself.

Then there was surfing.
Sport was how I had learned to navigate being motherless. When life felt unstable, movement was there. When I couldn’t explain what I felt, sport gave it somewhere to go. And the ocean was where I felt held by something far larger than myself.
Losing that wasn’t a small fear. It terrified me.

So I went searching for the mothers in surfing who could show me the way.
How did you surf pregnant? When did you stop? What was safe? What happened to your body after birth? How did you breastfeed and surf? How did you return?
How did you become a mother without losing the surfer inside you?

Again and again, I found silence.
There were mothers in surfing. But where were their stories? Where was the lived record for the next woman coming behind them?

And somewhere in that silence, for the first time in my life, I heard God as clearly as if He were standing beside me:

If you cannot find it, create it.

So I began.
I asked questions. I listened. I documented. I learned from my body, from other mothers, and from the ocean.

I couldn’t go backward and give the little girl I had been a mother.
But I could move forward and become one.
I could become the safety I had searched for. I could give my children roots where I had known absence.
And I could build something in surfing so the next mother searching in the dark wouldn’t have to start with nothing.

That is where Imua Moms began. Not because I had all the answers — because I knew what it felt like to have none.

Maybe that is why the word Imua found me.
My story was never asking me to go backward and recover everything I had lost.
Motherhood wasn’t asking me to become the woman I was before. The ocean wasn’t asking me to become the surfer I had been.
God was calling me somewhere else.

Forward into motherhood.
Forward into surfing.
Forward into the woman I was becoming.

Forward into creating what had been missing all along.

Imua, my son

Imua is my son’s name.
His life is what inspired me to finally turn toward the most painful part of my own — so he could have the best mother I could become.
His life inspired me to change the world for the better.
Every step forward, it was always him I was moving closer to.

And, eventually, his amazing sister — Gaia.

Our little earth.

When I became a mother myself, everything shifted.

Birth cracked me open — not just physically, but spiritually.
It forced me to meet the parts of myself I had buried: fear, grief, rage, and longing.
In the delivery room, I met my shadow.

All the pain I had avoided came rushing back.
It was beautiful — and terrifying.
I felt every wound I had inherited, every echo of abandonment and silence from generations before me.

And then came postpartum — a storm I wasn’t ready for.
I thought I had healed. But motherhood showed me where the wounds still lived.
The joy was overwhelming, but so was the sorrow.
Even as I held my baby — the purest love I’d ever known — I felt my past staring back at me.

Sometimes, I wondered if my mother had felt this too.
Maybe she had suffered silently, trapped in her own unspoken pain.
She had no mother either. She was an orphan.
Maybe this was a chain — centuries long — that I was meant to break.

In the darkest moments, when I couldn’t find myself in the mirror, I turned back to the ocean.

The waves became my therapy, my temple, my mother.

Surfing reminded me who I was.
Each paddle out was a prayer.
Each wave — a baptism.
The sea didn’t judge my pain; it absorbed it.

And as my little family grew — my son, my partner, our life by the water — I began to heal.
Together, we found rhythm.
Together, we remembered love.

Through every tear, every sleepless night, every whisper of doubt — I heard God’s voice.
He said:

“You have to change the world for mothers. This is yours to carry. You will end this curse — for yourself, for your children, and for the world I created.”

I didn’t have a plan. I just had faith.
So I began — with one small step.
A space for mothers who needed support while still chasing their passions.

That space became Imua Moms.

Imua Moms began where my healing began — in sport.
Athletics had always been my sanctuary, my mother.
And the ocean — my constant teacher.

So I built this movement from that truth:

Mothers are not broken. They are becoming.

Imua Moms is more than a community. It’s a movement.
A reclamation of the sacred connection between motherhood, nature, and God.
A reminder that when a mother stays connected — to herself, her children, the Earth, and the divine — she becomes unstoppable.

Nothing is more powerful than a mother in alignment.

She carries the wisdom of creation, the rhythm of nature, and the strength to heal generations.

When we honor the mother — in ourselves, in our families, in the world — we end division.
Because motherhood transcends race, culture, status, and story.

The mother is the living reflection of God’s love.
She keeps her children close to faith, to the land, and to each other.

This began as a whisper from God, and today, it moves like a wave — unstoppable, alive, and divine.

For four generations, the women in my family carried the same wound — a lineage of motherless daughters, each bound by silence, fear, and pain too heavy to name.
But God never stopped speaking to me.
Even when I was lost in that pain, I could hear Him in motion — in the rhythm of sport, in the stillness between waves, in the fire that burned through my body when I refused to give up.

He kept saying, “You are the one. You are the strongest one. You will end this.”

And when I became a mother, I finally understood.
The battle wasn’t against the world — it was within the soul.
A spiritual war carried through generations, disguised as abandonment, shame, and disconnection.
But looking into the eyes of my children, I made a vow:

This war ends with me.

I don't have to hesitate wondering if I have the answers to healing my family, and helping others. I KNOW now I have, and always have had, the power to rewrite the code.

Through love, faith, and movement, I broke the pattern.
I chose connection over escape.
Presence over pain.
Faith over fear.

And from that choice — from that victory — Imua Moms was born.

It began with sport, because that’s where God spoke to me the loudest.
Through the ocean, I remembered who I was — and who all mothers are:
The living reflection of divine love.
The bridge between heaven and earth.
The heart that keeps humanity alive.

Now, this movement carries that message forward.
We are rewriting what it means to be a mother — in sport, in culture, and in spirit.
We are raising mothers who walk with courage, and children who will inherit a world that finally honors the mother in every sense of the word.

This is more than a movement.
It’s redemption.
It’s restoration.
It’s the return of the mother.