Rowan Marlowe

She is the best parts of me.
And I hope and pray I show her that.

-Rowan

#rowanmarlowe #motherhood #gentleparenting #breakingcycles #writingthroughmemory

She is everything good.
Everything I once needed.
Everything I never knew I was allowed to be.

And she is me.
And she has me.

She doesn’t have to earn love through silence.
She isn’t me.

Because my love isn’t conditional.
Because it isn’t tied to her ability to contort herself into something smaller,
softer,
more palatable.

She is herself, unapologetically.
She does not need to be afraid.
She never has to wonder if she’s enough.

This child is loved.
This child is seen.
She is not stitched together with shame and silence.
She is vibrant and wild and gloriously messy—
all squealing laughter and sticky fingers from ripe fruit.

But now—
now I see my daughter,
and it’s like looking through a mirror that sees into another lifetime.
Except this time, the story is different.

There was nothing anyone could do.
Even if I wasn’t loved, I was alive.
And that was enough for them.

So instead of asking, she stayed quiet.
She disappeared into the cracks of systems meant to protect her—
but she was still fed,
still clothed,
still had a bed.

Looking Glass

Sometimes, my daughter is so much like me it feels like I’m staring into the past.
I see the version of myself who learned to destroy in order to self-soothe.
The child who wanted to be heard but didn’t yet have the words,
or the space,
or the safety to ask for more.

A fairytale in Tuscany. Fun fact: Taken with my smartphone

Because maybe it doesn’t matter how I love.
Maybe it’s enough that I do.

-Rowan

#slowmagic #loveinquietplaces #softobservations #rowanmarlowe #everydayintimacy #thingsiwontapologizefor #lovelikethis #domesticpoetry #tenderthoughts #thisisalsoaloveletter #inthewild

And maybe that’s what makes us all the same.
Maybe we all just want to be witnessed in our rawest form
—and still be chosen.

I like to believe love pours out through the cracks.
Through the mismatched, the well-worn, the softly imperfect.

I see it in the smudged fingertips of an artist.
In the ballerina who dances with her pain, not against it.
In the way someone keeps the same mug for years, chipped but beloved.

That’s love to me.
Not always grand but known:
intimate, lived-in, full of care.

There’s tenderness in that.
In the way she feeds people.
In the way she makes homes.
In the way she tends to scraped knees and quiet mornings.

Like how I’ve managed to fall a little in love with a baker I’ve never met. She doesn’t know me—and probably never will—but I know her in the way she moves through her life. Short, clean nails pressing dough. Copper pans with patina. Chipped mixing bowls. Jewelry that’s more memory than metal.

I’d like to think that I don’t see love the way everyone else does.

The swallows don’t know me.
But I know them.
And that’s enough, somehow.

-Rowan

#QuietTenderness #SoftPlaces #SeasonShifting #NestKeepers #SwallowSeason #GentleWriting

There’s an ache in my chest and I don’t have the words for it.
But I think it might be love.
Or longing.
Or both.

Maybe that’s what I’m feeling today.
The memory of something small and sacred.
Something that built itself, quietly—
and left just as quietly.

They held life once.
That feels important.
Even if I don’t fully understand why.

They’re so carefully made.
Each one shaped with intention—
stitched together with things the wind might have forgotten.

When the birds leave, I keep the nests.
I don’t know if that’s strange.
I just… can’t throw them away.

It’s held four nests since then.
Four small homes built from nothing.
Quiet. Careful.
Made of windfall and instinct.

The swallows will return soon.
They always do.
To the little birdhouse out front—
the one I bought years ago without thinking.

The air has changed—sharper, maybe. Cleaner.
A different kind of light slips through the windows now.
I think spring might be close.
I think that matters, though I’m not sure why.

I don’t know what’s sitting in my chest this morning.
Only that it’s soft. And heavy. And full.