Motherhood healing

I’ve wanted to be a mom my whole life. There isn’t a moment that I can recall that I ever doubted this. I wanted to fall in love, get married, and have babies and I felt this calling deeper than I had ever felt anything in my soul. I loved babies growing up and would marvel at pregnant bellies in my 20’s. There was nothing inside of me that whispered an incongruence that I was not meant for motherhood. 


The moment I got pregnant is when things showed up differently than I imagine. I thought that I would be one of the glowing mommies, but I felt like an alien in my own body and it was and continues to be one of the most challenging times in my life. 


Then when my daughter was born, nothing was as it should seem. It was all so much harder. I can rattle off the list of challenges with sleep and being a new mom and how impossible she was to put down, but the truth is so much of the story isn’t the truth. I guess the details are true but it isn’t truth. It isn’t the reason motherhood was hard for me. 


Motherhood was hard because at that stage in my life I was attempting to create a persona of myself. I was showing up in such a way for something that wasn’t real in my heart. I was giving it my all and I was doing it alongside being a new mom. By not being myself in one space, I was unable to be myself anywhere. 


Five years had passed by the time I realized this. I always feel the need to defend myself as a mom. I’m a good mom. I love my kids. And my kids are really great humans. But that’s five years of habits built in an unknown environment. It’s like which was causing the hard? I didn’t really know.


Now here we are. Present day. 6 1/2 years later. Living in a time of a global pandemic unlike anyone has ever lived through. A quote that has always stuck with me is “Life is happening for you, not to you.” Nothing felt more true. I knew that in this cataclysmic time there is a lesson available to all of us if we were willing to hear it. To sit and wait for it. I am always a hungry student, sitting in the front row with my hand up. Me, me. Pick Me! 


Through these passed two years of deep work and healing on myself I have finally learned not just what my intuitive voice is but to trust it fully. Over and over again my kiddos were bubbling to the surface. I had romanticized homeschooling last year and decided against it. I even recently told a friend how glad I was that I decided against homeschooling. Yet, even before the pandemic hit, I could feel that there was something still not in perfect alignment with my kids education. Over and over again, that was my message. Align my family. SO I turned down the volume of the outer world so I could turn up the volume on my inner sphere. I got offline so I could get inline with my people. Like many of you, that has meant more time outside, more time cuddled up, more books, more conversations, more patience. We spent an entire day letting them just be outside and popped a tent in our living room for a campout. The times that stick out so profoundly in my life as a kid are the times when I had too much sun, wind, and water. When I would clean off the day after hard play. The way I felt connected to my family and just fully alive. I went to bed each night physically exhausted from it all but more energized in my soul than I have felt in a long time. 


I’m still not sure what the outcome from all of this will be. I don’t think any of us do. We still have weeks of lessons to pour in. But what I have discovered and articulated in this space of stillness is that motherhood has been hard for one reason: Because I had a vision in my heart of what I thought motherhood would be like for me and when it didn’t exactly work out that way, I truly felt like my soul, my intuition had led me astray. It may have take 6 years, but in this time of stillness, I learned that my vision that danced in my heart all of my life is still very alive inside of me. I just had to break some old habits and break up with the story that I have been telling myself since. 


This is just one more piece of me that has realigned so fully. And for that, the words of gratitude aren’t vast enough.