Questions My Mother Never Asked Herself
a series of shorts on mothering, remembering, re-mothering & coming home, pt. 1
For a little over six and half years, I have been a mother. Postpartum is forever when you surrender to letting mothering transform you and your lineage. And, the first seven years are the new postpartum years.
The musings, poetry and writings in this series of shorts represent a small part of an ecology of work, or part of a living library called, The Womb To Spirit Archives ~ somatic, parental, historical, ancestral (intergenerational), physical, social, ecological and spiritual work I have participated in since becoming Mother. Though the work is ongoing, the time to publish some of these shorts is now. They will be forthcoming this month of mothers. I hope you enjoy them.
Questions She Never Asked
Where did this pain start? (hint, it didn’t with me)
Why am I so mad at my sister?
What or who am I protecting when I dismiss and repress my pain?
Who or what am I affecting when I continue to dismiss and repress my pain?
How did being a second child to a 19 year old mother affect me?
What stories could Great-Grandmother Sophie tell who walked the Trail of Tears when she was eight years old?
Who hurt me and put their wound in me? And, where did their wound come from?
What does it feel like to be alone with no one else to serve or control?
What does it feel like to be connected to my Inner-Mother?
Who am I underneath all the doing and performing?
What is my relationship to joy? To the land?
What is my daughter trying to teach me?
What is my deepest longing?
What am I most afraid of?
Who am I?
will she ever ‘let’ herself fall apart?
Perhaps there is nothing more beautiful,
Or powerful, than a woman or a mother,
Who will choose to fall apart
Inside a dominant paradigm,
Putting herself back together,
Womb to spirit,
On a cellular level,
Knowing that when she rests,
She changes the mitochondrial structure
Of her cells and the next seven generations.
dear mother
Instead of tying up loose ends,
paper rigid on a list, cursed and resisted,
what if we let loose ends dance with the wind,
in the breeze, of the breath
and made space and silence in between the fibers
of our very being and remembering?
What if, in this silence, the shape it takes
is a greater silhouette,
multi-dimensional, and free?
Dear Mother, who are you
when you’re not tying up loose ends?
love song to remembering
No landscape is wrong.
No body is wrong.
Inside one tear,
A river that
Flows to the
Mother ~
There is an
Ocean inside of you.
one breath, then another
These almost seven years of being and coming home to (Inner) Mother takes the shape of a circle having healed lifetimes. Because of the essence of who I am (love) , not just what I do, I know this is possible.
Mothering, or motherhood, is not one-dimensional, but multi-dimensional.
As our young grow in their own neurobiologies and spirits during the first seven years, with their brains beginning to come online to higher frontal lobe processes, mothers are stretched beyond stretch marks, foot sizes and waistbands.
Mothers are constantly in a morphogenic field with their young who are not just learning to walk, talk, name colors, stack blocks, but what a felt-sense of truth, trust, safety and beauty feels like ~ a felt-sense inviting us into this expansion, transformation and surrender will not just destroy us if we do not heed it, but degenerate our lineage with increasing burdens
We must remember how to feel ~ because we all have wounds.
As much as we try to write about, catalog, create courses for, or compartmentalize motherhood studies, or nod heads with our colleagues about what we think is right and evidence-based, the road to healing with mother-wounding, the road to connecting to Inner-Mother, the road back home to our spirit is messy. It is often misunderstood, misunderstood, over-marketed.
The work of healing with mother, earth, Creator and the mystery of it all, will bring us to our knees over and over again, will break us open and finally set us free, but it is not a wisdom I or anyone else can sell.
It is a work we each must choose to do. It is a generations work and more. It is not just for mothers, but for fathers to do, too. It is for those who are aunties or uncles or cousins whose wounds are so weeping or bellies so full they might choose to not have children. Fall, and forgive, and come back to our lap, and only ever fail if we give up.
What Holds Us Back?
What keeps many of us, and kept many of our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers back from really getting to an understanding of their own trauma and pain, is the fear of immense grief and loss it takes to move through it ~ and we have to go through it, we can’t go around it.
Perhaps, if every mother wept
And felt their grief,
There would be enough
Water to fill the
Colorado and Ohio Rivers.
grieving a way forward
My knowing that it with grief in one hand and gratitude in another, we will feel our way to a new paradigm. This is the essence of integrating trauma - holding brave space, witnessing cellular memory, validating our pain.
With our eyes open to fear, metaphorically, we build holistic trust with ourselves and find our way back home, drop by drop.
Empowerment takes courage. Joy is on the other side of remembering pain. When we stay connected to gratitude through the process, we stay connected to choice.
Maybe one day I will ask her, my mother, “Mother, who are you when you stay with the pain?
I will say, “Do you know, the earth grieves, too?”
For now, I offer a nod, a thank you, a smile, a nudge, a hand held out to mothers before me, behind me, and horizontally.
If you would like to explore offerings and services of Wild Rose Motherhood, you can find them here. Thank you. Yakoke.