Motherhood as a River
So far, parenthood hasn’t been the hard chore so much of the internet (and people I know) implied. Every day is a joy of discovery. Granted, I have amazing help, but not always. It’s often just little Cricket and I trying to find a way eat breakfast before 11, composing work emails while breastfeeding, and circling the neighborhood wearing an ergo.
What I’ve learned so far:
• My lifelong battle with anxiety has significantly diminished and now there is a low hum of contentment in my being.
• Said anxiety, when present, is no longer existential, but very much about the well-being of my daughter.
• it’s good to have neighbors.
• Bath-time is happy time. Naked butt is happy time. Morning wake up is happy time.
• Getting out of the bath is sad time. Putting on clothes is *#%! bs sad time.
• It is possible to make lunch one-handed.
• It’s also possible to pee while wearing a baby.
• Apparently watching a human figure out how to be in a body is the most darling thing.
• The wrinkles on my face are from years of practice making silly faces, which are now in high demand.
• Babies can literally grow bigger in the space of a nap.
• It’s okay for my body never to be the same again. Mom’s are warriors.
• I still love coffee.
Everyone’s motherhood journey is vastly different, and the kind of support you have plays a huge role. That being said, my experience of it being more joyful, content, and fulfilling than expected comes from my own history of grief, longing, and years of preparation. It has taken me a decade to get pregnant again after a heartbreaking miscarriage. Between 17 and 30 I attended four births. I watched and supported my goddaughter grow up. I had a lifetime of adventures and travels. The whole time I wanted to be a mother.
Many people were very supportive of my choice to have a kid on my own, but I also heard a lot of warnings: it will be very hard. Am I sure? Do I know how I’m going to make a living. Am I ready? Why don’t I wait a little longer? Really now? Do I know I’ll lose my independence?
I also heard to prepare myself for grief and identity loss. I was very scared of postpartum depression. I had experienced a version of it after my miscarriage: the hormone dump, the fatigue, panic attacks, anxiety and depression. I didn’t know if it would happen again, but I did know that I am prone to anxiety and depression. (Side note: interestingly, I haven’t dealt with panic attacks, serious anxiety, or depression since discovering I have the MTHFR gene mutation - common in 40% of population - and starting to take methyl folate as a result).
I had spent so many years processing grief around miscarriage, longing for family, loneliness for partnership, rejection, fear of my biological “clock”, etc that I had gotten used to things being hard. It became part of the narrative of my spiritual journey. But if the spiritual journey is all shadow work, then in some ways, you run the risk of finding yourself addicted to shadow work. You’re subconsciously looking for the next underworld journey. To the big excavations. Somehow it makes to good stuff acceptable as something you’ve earned. Oh hello, culturally prevalent Christocentric programming. 👋🏻. It’s not all that different that spiritual bliss bypass, so common in the washed-out versions of western spiritual capitalism (⬅️yeah I called it that).
I’ve done my share of “shadow work”, and I even let my ego start to tell me that it was somehow more valuable than all the “light work” so popular today. Either way, if you are only working with one end of the spectrum, you’re stuck. Life is a lemnicaste ♾ when we spend to long in the underworld winter, we forget that sometimes ice melts and rivers just flow.
My pregnancy was a flowing river. It scared me so much. I had to consciously remind myself to accept that my body was healthy and things were flowing. Around me the world literally burned. I stayed inside with air filters on for four months. But I was a textbook healthy pregnancy at 39. I felt luscious. I felt the most beautiful I’ve ever felt in my life. Good thing the medical industry made sure I knew I was a geriatric pregnancy 🙄.
When Aurora arrived, the panic came back for a couple weeks. If I napped while someone held her in another room, I would wake up with an animal-dread and burst into tears when I saw her safe and contented in a loved ones arms. It was hormones, for sure, but also a deep unwinding of fear, and slow acceptance that indeed, just because the other shoe CAN drop any moment, does not mean it’s going to.
Therefore, when I say I am delighted by how content and happy I feel, it’s not because all mothers should feel this way, it’s because I didn’t know I could. I was preparing for the inevitable identity loss and grief for my former self, and instead I have landed in myself in a way I really didn’t expect to experience in this lifetime. I though I had figured out how to be in my body before. I spent a decade studying under a shamanic tradition that centers around embodiment and womb connection. It prepared me for this, but I could never have imagined what motherhood embodiment actually felt like.
I know not every mother experiences things this way. This is just my story. But I do think it’s important that we acknowledge there can be ease. The river can flow. Even if there are rapids, whirlpools, and the occasional eddy. I will not step into the Christocentric model that motherhood is martyrdom. If other mothers feel that way, remember that we are responding to a colonial, religious, white suprematist, patriarchal system which has methodically suppressed and oppressed women’s spirituality, women’s voices, and women’s leadership for thousands of years. The village was dismantled in exchange for the factory. The woman doctor (midwife) was literally murdered. The multi-generational household was exchanged for the nuclear family. Of course women feel abandoned and alone as mothers. It can help when we hear that other moms are having a rough go of it too. To hear we’re not alone.
However, it also helps to hear that motherhood can be joyful, easeful, rich, content. Even if you’re single. Even if you don’t know how it’s all going to work out. Even if you gave birth during the Anthropocene.
Mothers are the fiercest, strongest, most earth-shaking force in all of human history. We move mountains. We break hearts open and rip down dams and blockades alike. We craft estuaries of safe haven. We build temples to the imagination.
She, the mother, is in you, regardless of whether or not you ever bear life from you womb. She is in everything you create with you precious life. She is in every way you mother the land, the community, and the furred and feathered ones in your charge.
This is a hard time to be in the world, but the babies still come to us, the spring still blossoms. Clearly, there must be some delicious goodness worth the grace of our presence.
