always belated Mother's Day
the proof is in the processing
So before this moment, I was unaware of how deep and broad is my circle of women friends who chose or were chosen to not bear a child.
I always carried the admiration (awe?) and respect for Julie*, who in high school announced she had no desire to be a mother. That was her choice, her way - my faintest earliest childhood memory was fixation on the day my life would become complete with a husband and children - a “family”.
My then best friend Amy, like bestie Melissa now, came to the place of feminine sanctity with less pre-planned choice, yet I have watched them live in their temples with spoken wisdom I’ll never have.
Before now my mind allowed me to frame their paths as mixed wistful loss and resignation - maybe life just had different wish-fulfillment systems and I was ?lucky to have my “dreams come true”?
End story - move on to make it to the car-rider pickup line on time…
Life has its own schedule though, and doesn’t seem to care about my chore list spreadsheets and white board schedules.
So over the years connections with a rainbow of feminine archetypes has filled my world with a spectrum of stories - themes of autonomous choice, ambivalent acceptance, and longing for physical nurturing from one’s own womb that never materialized.
Too few celebrating mothering from a deep place of self love and balance.
And so many tales of well-intentioned women wreaking havoc while following the “perfect parenting” playbook…I’m in that club.
Years ago when I read Dr. Christiane Northrop’s “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom” I could comprehend the clear pages of raw heart truth of her own ambivalence, and acceptance of - embracing - living a life as a mother when her deepest fabric held a more complex pattern.
So last Fall, navigating the abrupt loss of “mother role” for my daughter, only 10 years old and in the midst of her own crisis of gender identity, the breaking left me looking at pieces…did I want to reassemble what was? Like a kintsugi bowl, gold instead of silver-lined cloud, was the tragedy remedied by bringing all the same pieces back together? Meticulously replacing each in a shape obviously vulnerable to destruction?
Maybe the space held by the bowl, and excluded by the bowl’s contents, deserved examination. Because the truth of my “dreams” was closer to nightmare, and my fierce loyalty to “family values” subordinated my commitment to integrity and self-love…most of my life more like a bumper sticker slogan than actual “commitment”.
Choosing sacrifice for the “greater good” of keeping a family intact resulted in years of woeful harms - enabled by my allegiance to an ideal constructed before I was born…maybe it was a memo I received before I was old enough to know what a memo is? (Shout out to the real mom cougar pimp)
Letting it all fall apart, allowing the pieces to connect within a larger space, the emptiness bringing shades
of truth previously invisible to bridge what beliefs formed the solid structure of my reality…Left me stunned - I don’t recall the deepest part of me wanting children.
What did that mean? How terrible of a woman am I? Who would understand the complexity of simultaneous gratitude and awe for the shared living - memories from before their birth “mothering” my 20, 18, and 10 year old children - and struck insight that the person they called “mom” was not me? A construct, house of cards built on memos and fantasy snapshots driving me…to fill the lack of love I felt inside.
In the context of a larger space, my “beliefs” weren’t beliefs at all - more like planks in a scaffolding that held my world together in a way that made “sense” of my place in a landscape of continuing trauma.
For years, I’ve twisted the tumblers in the lock of my heart, desperate to crack the code and feel truly “me”. This most recent breaking can’t be undone, and I am undone. Except the I that is undone was another layer of Russian nesting doll I had placed protectively over the truth of my essence. Not me. Not the wholeness of me.
So today, after 51 years in this female form, contemplating “Mother’s Day”, I see for the first time the family of women that have shared their lives as reference points - to more fully show me the relationship of woman to mother.
Mother to child.
And my truth was all that I ever needed to share with the humans I gestated and housed. Truth that what I give as love will continue to be distorted to the extent it comes from a place of incomplete self-love. That the journey to wholeness in self yields fruit worth serving to others. That the “mom” my children experienced was a model for inconsistently showing up, hiding authenticity to fit in, in deference to age-old real time systems that devalue and indignify. Is that a word?
The space in my consciousness where that bowl lies shattered holds the truth I spent years of life energy hiding. I am. Ok. To feel anger, sadness, guilt, and just plain not liking.
And leave, when someone abuses me. Because I don’t like it.
And live my life according to who I have become, in a truth that maybe I’m the only one who sees.
Maybe the bow breaking is the only way for the truth of human love to be freed - for us to be our own mother, nurture our child selves, and fill our human chalice to overflowing so that what we give to others…is the truth.
Maybe when that truth is lived, like in my family of real friends, the tree is strong, with deep roots, and the babies we care for are soothed by the gentle winds and sheltered from storms, knowing from birth their own truth is solid, flexible, always growing, and a part of the whole.
Maybe we will stop cutting down the saplings to mold planks for the scaffolding holding “family values” in a precarious position of external authority - and the cradle can fall away.
Hold our babies, but only until they can stand, even with wobbly legs, on their own. Be the mature taller trees that shield from the full force of storm winds, but allow all the sunlight needed for new souls to reach their own heights.
All the while holding our own tender younger selves and what we lived through inside as our strength, not a dismissed hollow core we abandoned because the pain was so intense we couldn’t allow it to be real.
Creating a forest of shared roots stabilizing the soil for new life growing its own uniqueness in form, from a template beyond our comprehension.
And help them see, when they are ready to look, that like the acorn holds the oak, we are in truth our own mother, all along.
*did you think these names would be the real identities of ma buddies? Heck no.
the bast is forming…music and musings here…stay tuned for new web3 presence