Welcome to Kerry Rocks’ Empowering Stories, where we share conversations with the powerful women who inspire us to live life on our own terms. They’re real, they’re raw, and they’re beautiful.
This Mother’s Day, we honour motherhood as a force that continually reshapes us.
Attune your heart as author, filmmaker and Radical Reframe founder, Vashti Whitfield, shares what it means to raise resilient children and hold space without control throughout every season.
MOTHER OF TRANSFORMATION:
Holding Life With Truth and Presence
Motherhood refines you. It shifts the ground beneath your feet. It alters the landscape within.
For Vashti Whitfield, motherhood has been an initiation into surrender.
A steady shedding of control. A return to presence and self.
In love, in grief, in becoming, she stands beside her children, holding space and allowing each season to shape their resilience as individuals and as a family.
Was there a moment you realised motherhood had fundamentally changed the way you move through the world?
18 May 2005. 8.05am AEST. The world shifted. Giving Birth. My first child arrived. My son, Jesse. My first cub, as I call them.
Motherhood reshapes our emotional terrain. How has yours shifted?
Motherhood doesn’t shift once. It keeps shifting. Just when you think you’ve found your footing, your children, your cubs, change the terrain entirely and off you go again, slightly disoriented, holding snacks and emotional responsibility.
In the beginning, my love came with a quiet contradiction. I was fiercely protective. Not just in the practical sense, but in a full-body, lioness-at-the-gate kind of way. I wanted their childhood to be free from chaos, from the slightly wild, unpredictable, dysfunctional edges I had known.
I had grown up around chaos. Sometimes brutal. Other times wildly adventurous, with deeply creative, brilliant parents who also carried a volatility that could shift the ground without warning. I had travelled through India, Afghanistan, Greece, Turkey, all around the world by the time I was seven. It gave me a lens on life that was expansive and alive, but also, at times, un-contained.
So I wanted something different for them. Smooth. Safe. Intact.
It felt the opposite of mine, responsible and self-aware. It felt like I was deeply dedicated to their safety and their needs.
What I didn’t realise was that in trying to remove all the chaos, I was also quietly removing some of the magic. The adventures that we need as adults to keep us whole. The stories you only get to tell because something didn’t go to plan. The kind of resilience that only comes from being in it, not being protected from it.
When you’ve grown up like that, there’s often a silent vow that forms somewhere along the way. Not them. Not my children. But protection, if you’re not paying attention, has a way of tightening into control. And control is rarely about them. It’s usually your own nervous system still trying to tidy up a past it didn’t quite get to finish with.
At the same time, I was very aware of the messaging I wanted to give them. Be creative. Be expansive. There is enough. You are enough. I would quietly tuck my own needs to the side so theirs could feel uninterrupted, unquestioned, safe.
And then life did what life does. It doesn’t consult your parenting philosophy.
Their world fractured.
I remember standing at the Sydney screening of Be Here Now when someone asked me what I had learned from losing my husband and raising my children through that. My answer arrived before I could edit it.
In trying to protect them from everything, I was also taking something vital, in their becoming, away from them.
That was the shift.
I began to see that holding space is far more powerful than holding control. Resilience doesn’t come from a life well-padded. It comes from contact. From navigating. From feeling something wobble and realising you’re still standing.
And if I’m honest, much of my instinct to protect wasn’t actually about them. It was my own wound, quietly asking for attention. Once I stopped trying to silence it through control, and allowed both of us a bit more room to be human, something softened.
They grew. And so did I.
Motherhood, in its truest form, first took me away from myself. And in leaning into every lesson it has offered, has slowly returned me to the parts of myself I had long abandoned, while continuing to humble me, stretch me, and occasionally unravel me.
Which, it turns out, is the role.
What has motherhood asked you to reframe?
We like to think our children learn from what we say and do. What I’ve come to see is they learn far more from how we are than what we say.
They pick up on everything. How we treat ourselves. The tone of our inner voice. The way we move through stress, hold ambition and make sense of our own worth. That becomes their reference point long before any advice lands.
It shows up in the smallest moments. The way one can so easily slip into the quiet martyr role, holding everything together, keeping everything flowing, and somehow disappearing slightly in the process. The way the day runs smoothly, everyone gets where they need to be, and yet you’ve quietly left yourself somewhere behind. They don’t hear the words as much as they feel the energy.
When their father died while they were still so young, everything heightened. I overcompensated. I filled gaps before they were even there. I softened things that felt too sharp. I carried the weight of being both anchor and horizon. Grief sat at the table with us, alongside purpose and fear.
I remember my son coming home from school after spending time with the counsellor. He said to me, “Mum, I realised I’m allowed to be happy too, not just sad like everyone else.”
Which, in the moment, if I’m being completely honest, felt like my heart had been ripped out. A mix of failure, hurt for my little boy, and this deep, quiet disappointment that I hadn’t thought to explain it to him. That thing we do, trying to foresee everything, to get ahead of it, to protect them, and still missing something so important.
And then something shifted.
It gave me what I now call a radical reframe- an entirely different perspective.
In that moment came the realisation that I wasn’t going to get this perfect. That there was no version of parenting my cubs through grief, or life, and still delivering a consistently “happy” childhood that I could engineer or control. The idea of getting it right quietly fell away.
And strangely, there was something freeing in that.
Because it also showed me that they didn’t need me to be everything. They needed space. Space to feel things in their own way. Space to speak to someone who wasn’t me. Space to make sense of their world without it being shaped entirely through my lens.
It asked something different of me.
To ask for help. To allow support in. To trust that I wasn’t the only place they could land.
And to understand that loving them well didn’t mean holding everything. Sometimes it meant stepping slightly to the side. There is only so much we can be. Only so much we can hold. And so much of what they learn comes from seeing us not carry everything, not try to be everything.
I’ve really had to reframe over-functioning. Because what it teaches isn’t always what we think. It can quietly show them that love looks like running yourself into the ground. That worth comes from sacrifice. That safety comes from holding everything tightly.
That’s not what I want them to learn.
So my parenting has become a moment-by-moment check-in.
Is this actually strengthening them or am I trying to protect them from something?
Am I here and present, or am I reacting from something I haven’t yet worked through?
Am I showing them what it looks like to be steady, or am I just bracing my way through?
I find myself pausing, again and again, coming back to who I say I want to be, and who I’m actually being in the moment.
How has your understanding of love expanded across different seasons of motherhood?
Love, in the early years, is primal.
You’re exhausted, stretched in ways you didn’t know were possible, and yet you just keep going. There’s an instinct that takes over. You don’t analyse it. You don’t workshop it. You just respond. Feed, hold, soothe, repeat.
Then it changes.
There was a season where love meant sitting beside my children, my cubs, in grief, without asking them to carry mine. Learning how to be honest about my sadness, and then putting it down enough so there was still space for them. Children can move through something and be laughing minutes later. It’s extraordinary. I had to learn not to pull them back into something they had already released.
And now, with teenagers, it’s something else again.
They’re in it. Big internal shifts. One minute open, the next pulled inward, processing in their own way. Their brains and bodies are doing a lot behind the scenes, and it can change in the space of a single conversation.
At the same time, I’m in my own version of that. Early fifties. Things shifting physically, hormonally, emotionally, identity-wise. There’s a clarity that’s coming through, and also moments where I find myself quietly wondering what on earth is happening now.
So we meet each other somewhere in the middle of all that. None of us fixed. All of us moving.
Because, truthfully, there’s something quite similar happening across all of us. Their systems are expanding and rewiring. Mine is recalibrating. A different kind of becoming, but a becoming nonetheless. A stripping back of what no longer fits.
Different stages. Same intensity.
And that creates a tension.
You’re holding them, while also having to hold yourself in a completely different way. Old patterns rise quickly in those moments. Old reactions sit right there, ready. Especially when everything feels heightened.
Love, now, looks a lot like catching that in real time.
Noticing the urge to step in, to correct, to smooth it out, to make it all okay. And pausing. Not perfectly. But more consciously than before.
A lot of it comes back to regulation. Feeling the surge, the frustration, the worry, and not immediately acting on it. Staying with it long enough so it doesn’t spill out onto them. So it doesn’t quietly become theirs to carry.
And also allowing myself the same grace I’m trying to give them.
Not expecting myself to have it all figured out. Not expecting a polished version of who I am at all times.
Somewhere along the way, love has shifted from control to connection.
Less about shaping them. More about staying close to who they are as they figure themselves out.
Holding my ground without tightening. Staying present without overstepping. Letting them feel me there, without needing to manage every moment.
Some days I do that well. Other days, not so much.
But even that has become part of it.
The repair. The coming back. The quiet acknowledgment of “that wasn’t it” and choosing again.
There’s something deeply humbling in loving this way.
It asks you to grow alongside them.
Kerry created a custom piece for you to symbolise the enduring connection between you and your husband. What did it mean to have that relationship witnessed and honoured in that way? And what other Kerry Rocks pieces do you reach for now?
It felt like a quiet declaration that death, symbolised in a delicate gold skull ring, can be as powerful a symbol of love as any.
I have two other Kerry Rocks rings that I love to wear in blue and black. Gigi Ring in Aquamarine and Black Onyx. People always stop and ask me about them.
If you could offer one radical reframe to mothers this Mother’s Day, what would you invite them to remember?
However hard it may feel, everything in life is happening FOR you.
Vashti’s & Indigo’s Personal Picks
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