When you are on a precipice…
I will be having my second child this week. The feelings are a mixed bag and, they are a ceaseless roar. A maelstrom of madness seems to have taken over my mind and my capacity to face the reality of my own choices is small. I haven’t been able to write very much-or at all-in months and sitting with my own thoughts and the slippery slope of looking to what’s ahead has been simply too much to handle. The real fear is that the hard part is not even here yet, how do I proceed knowing I could be walking my way back into the darkness of postpartum depression/rage/anxiety it took two years for me to get out of?
The only way out is through.
These last few months in life have not been easy (is anything worth doing ever truly easy though?) and I have missed my self. There have been wonderful people who have shown up for me in ways I truly don’t think I deserve . I can’t seem to move through this feeling that I am simply performing and those beautiful humans should have the more full and authentic version of me that I have been too exhausted to be. Deluded was my mindset about going into pregnancy with a (what some circles call) spicy toddler who needs a lot, a commitment to doing a master’s program and working full time. We are finally here now at the end of it all and I realize now that I am 100% not ready for this next massive shift-too little too late I fear.
This pain has a purpose.
Motherhood has been so many things to me in the before times, the first after and now in the next iteration. It has been something I didn’t want-and fought- for a long time. It was something I was deathly afraid of, it’s been a death and a resurrection. It’s been a total body imprisonment, a breaking apart and restitching, an imprisonment and a freedom from so many beliefs about the self and meaning that I can’t even find the words. Trying to mother whilst healing my own inner child has brought me to my knees and had me weeping I can’t do this. In this space the original mother-our earth-has held, heard and supported me as I climb back to my feet, trees sighing but you must and you will and somehow I do. Somewhere along the way I have learned to make peace with the evolution of myself and I trust that like the tide there will be a coming and going of motion and turmoil, tranquility and power. My landscape will be different, shaped daily into a fierce newness, never to be exactly what or how it was before.
Each breath I take fills me with calm and energy.
Truthfully, I am not sure when I will come back to writing here. The freedom of time in this stage of life is very tenuous and my demands are going to increase there is no way to get around that fact-even as I mourn it. Making and being will simply be occurring at a slower, quieter rhythm underscoring a very full, busy life. A life that will be lived primarily in service to others who don’t owe me service back even as I, with my limited perception of me being the center of my own universe, crave it. I think the greatest change I have wrought in myself in mothering is in my realisation that I wouldn’t want it any other way. I have been awakened to an entirely different way of living, one where I don’t know if the heights of my gratitudes and joys could ever be so if I hadn’t walked through the darkest shadow places and experienced a grief so visceral you could call it a soul death. I do know this next season is going to bring me back to that place, and then perhaps who emerges will be an even greater illumination of the profound gift it is to raise the little constellations in my care. My tornados, my lie breakers, my shadows, my purposes, the ones who will show me once again how very strong I can be.
“Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”
Read this full, beautiful poem here: Song of Myself (1892 Version) by Walt Whitman