Containers of Joy
on naming, carrying, and the things we bring with us
I made Motherhood Meals in 2022 — I needed a quick name, something catchy, and the word “motherhood” stuck out to me — duh. The word “motherhood” was more of a verb to me than a noun. Motherhood is something you do. Mother, or mommy, mom or mama were names and nouns. But motherhood was something you went through. My tagline for Motherhood Meals became postpartum is forever.
It’s been a little over 4 years since I started Motherhood Meals, and in the last year, through different clients and experiences, I started to feel like it needed to be more. There would be comments from men wondering if they could eat my food — sure you can eat it but please be aware you might grow boobs and start lactating — or my aging neighbor Barbara, who was dying of cancer and had little appetite but wanted something nourishing. Just like mothers’ bodies expand — their hearts, their brains — Motherhood Meals needed to EXPAND.
The focus would still be postpartum, but I wanted a doorway to allow others in too. Realizing you need to expand feels like the easy part — doing the work of expanding is the hard part.
Picking a new brand name felt like picking out your child’s name. Like most, I had a list of favorite names that had been collected over the years for my future children. For me though, the name has to come to you.
The name Daphne showed up at the Borghese in Rome, staring at Bernini’s statue of Apollo and Daphne — the one where Daphne is half human, half tree. Greek mythology was one of my favorite things to learn about, and as I was reading the plaque about the myth of Apollo and Daphne, I had forgotten she turns into a laurel tree.
The name Lauren, my name, means crowned with laurels. And it was there that it hit me — if I was to have a daughter, her name would be Daphne. I would be crowned with my child.
I am an avid reader, and I love to read. Reading allows me to experience life, and I am thankful to all the wonderful authors out there that make this possible. Near the end of 2023, I realized I had not picked up a book in a very long time — since becoming a mother, maybe I had read 3 fiction books. I read a handful of non-fiction, but to me those don’t count. It made me sad to think how I had misplaced this activity that brings me so much joy.
My mom passed me an airport book, as I like to call them — The Last Thing He Told Me. Clearly I was starving, and I devoured the book in 3 days. This genre is not my normal cup of tea, but it whet my palate. I told myself that I will make time for this. I will make time for reading. I will hold myself accountable and read at least one book a month. And guess what? I did it. To commemorate, I reviewed each book and I accomplished the same goal in 2025.
It was in 2025 that I picked up Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts — which, I realize in my book review above, I called The Wanderings…woops. I am a big Jhumpa fan. I read her book The Lowlands in 2013 and then saw her speak at the 2016 New Yorker Festival — she’s a literal babe and absolutely brilliant. Whereabouts is a novel that she wrote in Italian after having this innate desire to learn the language and then re-translated back into English — BY HER!
The character in Whereabouts, who goes unnamed, has you wandering next to her in her head, in her body. Maybe all this wandering and moving about with her is why I kept calling it The Wanderings.
Midway through the book, she mentions a jewelry box and the word portagioie, which she believes to be the most beautiful word in Italian. She and the book continue on, wandering. I earmarked this page.
At the end of the book, she has one page titled “Notes”, in which she breaks down this ONE word — portagioie.
Page 77: Portagioie, the Italian word for jewelry box, is a compound of two polyvalent words. Gioia (pl. gioie) means both “joy” and “jewel.” Porta, meanwhile, derives from the Latin verb portāre, and belongs to a constellation of words pertaining to acts of bearing, bringing, carrying, and transporting, which in turn give rise to terms for “door,” “gate,” and “port.” Portagioie, therefore, could also be interpreted, in Italian, not only as a box of jewels, but a container of joy, a doorway or gateway to joy, something that brings joy.
And just like that, the name found me — portāre
What felt so magical to me about the word portāre wasn’t that it was just one word — it was many. My brand could encompass all the words derived from it.
Many Latin-based languages have words with the prefix port — transport, portable, import, export, support — words we use all the time without really thinking about what they mean. We just know it’s about moving and carrying.
And then we have the ones where port is a little more hidden — comport: how you carry yourself; deport: to carry away; purport: to carry meaning; important: something that carries weight; opportune: carried toward the right moment.
Words carry so much meaning, and sometimes we forget how connected they are — to each other, and to us.
Now that we had the name picked out, I could move to bringing it to life. To help with this endeavor, I worked with Iona Vision, who helped a few people I know with their branding vision. Before deciding to work together, Tiffany and I would share these long voice notes back and forth — my ramblings, my vision, things that I was feeling, reading, noticing. As a side note, she would sign off her emails with “love,” and it was so touching.
I took it upon myself to take the visuals she gave me and build it out myself — I’m a bit of a weirdo in that I love both my right and left brain, but sometimes I don’t get to use my creative side as often as I’d like. Creating this site, and coming up with some of these ideas and placements, and those A-ha moments, all on my own, felt really meaningful — and seeing it all come together was fulfilling; kind of felt like growing a human a bit.
Back to Jhumpa — I became a little obsessed with her and started listening to some podcasts she was on, just in awe of how she moves about in the world with such grace and assurance, even though you can tell she’s still searching, still figuring it out.
In both of the podcasts that I listened to, she talks so much about what it means to be “native” and “foreign” and can you be both at the same time. It made me think about those early days of motherhood, where you at times feel completely and utterly disconnected from who you were. How your own body can feel foreign even though it’s native.
Identity is such a strong theme in her work. In the podcast with Sam, it is revealed that her mother passed away 3 weeks prior. You can hear that she’s wading through grief and loss. She grapples with identity — who is she without her mother, and who is her mother without a body? Before her mother passes, as she knows her time is coming to an end, she begins gifting some of her most precious items, kissing her favorite dresses and gifting them to a friend or family member. She was, in a way, asking her friends and family to carry them for her. The act of carrying things for other people — and how objects can carry a person inside them.
One of the many topics that arises in all of Jhumpa’s writing is the idea of home. What is a home? Just because there is a house, doesn’t mean it is a home. I know this well — before 19, I lived in 9 different houses. For me, I learned home is not a static location. It’s transient. It’s a feeling more than a place. My husband sees this differently, having lived in the same home from age 6–18. For him, that is his only home. He sometimes talks about our house that we currently live in Florida as not being his home, and kind of always longing for this “home”, similar to how Jhumpa’s parents felt about their houses in the US versus their home in Calcutta.
When I think about all of the recurring themes that Jhumpa brings up in her writing, and then finding this word portare, I can understand why she loves the word portagioie so much. It’s not a jewelry box — it’s a container, a vessel for joy. Aren’t we all just vessels of joy?
Our bodies were made to be portagioie — carrying joy from one place to another.