I Am Mother

My life has been shaped by a story about motherhood, by an inclination toward mothering, by a deep belief that we are here to nurture and be nurtured. I grew up in an embrace of hills holding me always in their arms. My two-year-old heart expanded when my younger brother was born and I had my very own baby to care for and worry over and love. When I was around the age of ten I decided I wanted to be a midwife and I read every book about pregnancy and birth I could get into my hands.

I’ve not become a midwife, at least not in the traditional sense of helping women through the process of pregnancy and birth and early motherhood. But the importance of supporting new life to have the best possible start and all life to come into the fullness of its being, including in this the grace of dying, is still what sings my heart.

At some point on this journey of motherhood I came to see that I wasn’t trusting fully in the life in me. I wasn’t nurturing it as much as it needed to be nurtured, or renewing it, or releasing it, or accepting the reality of it.  I was living too often in an imaginary picture of what it meant to be human, meant to be me, meant to be in the world and survive, and this was doing enormous damage to me as the life that I am.

I am life. You are life. We are born of the great life, of mother earth, of mother universe, we are part of her, we are her, and to her we will return. Our lives are not linear, but circular. When we come to know this it changes how we live.  We begin to live with life and not apart from it.  We begin to love life and not reject it. Our heart softens and opens and comes to know this moment and all that is possible.

In the past years, while my body has often been so exhausted—so in need of rest I might stay in bed for days at a time, I’ve also felt this building pressure for my life to arrange itself in such a way that I could have children.  Not only are there true biological urges to have children, real desire to live with this experience, but also I had a whole life built up around the idea of myself as a mother.

Finally, this winter I came to the place where mothering myself, mothering the true life in me was more important than trying to sustain an image I have of what my life should be, and I paused long enough to recognize the reality that my life situation isn’t conducive to having children and may not be how my life unfolds in the future either.  I felt great waves of grief pour through me, and then in a surprisingly short time I was awash in relief.  The actual cells of my body were released of a pressure that had been bearing down upon them.

All of a sudden the life in me could simply be where it was, could heal and discover the possible from here.  It didn’t need to get somewhere or be something other than what it was—alive and achy and sore and tired and full of discovery and potential and new streams of strength running the length of it.  I realized that as I let go of the idea of having children I created a great opening inside myself for new life to be born.  Maybe not the new life of a child, but new life none-the-less in forms I couldn’t imagine or envision from this place.  And I also recognized that life could still turn in such a way that I would have my own children, but that I no longer needed to try to force this.

Life cannot be forced into being, into health, into fullness.  Watch how life unfolds within and around you.  Sense the movement and what is there before the movement begins.  Listen to the song stirring in the late afternoon sunlight coming through the trees.  Recognize the mother that you are and the mother that you come from.  Motherhood is an expression of the great feminine, but is in no way the sole domain of women.  We are all mothers.

What are you mothering today?

This post is part of the series The Seedlings of Listening.