I'm in I'm in I'm here

Oh but I'm afraid I'm afraid

Lately I’ve had moments of feeling something I can’t quite name. Most likely brought on by a level of sleep deprivation that seems somewhat inevitable with a 7 month old teething baby at your side day and night. But it’s this abrupt, fleeting sense of uncertainty - how did I arrive here, exactly? In this exact moment.

I’m a mother of two? What have I been doing the last seven months? Or for the last seven hours, for that matter? I feel a little dazed. Who is she? Huh, I really have arrived here. Through every choice I’ve ever made. And also, through the entire labyrinth of life I have no power over at all.

And how evocative. This layer, like fine motes of dust, settling all over my mind and heart as I try to recall exactly where and when in time I am placed, and what my most conscious decisions are today. I’ve never worked harder - never been on my feet more, carried more physical weight on my hip all day, multi-tasked to a degree that I know (with all due respect) would leave a man in disoriented shambles - these moments are curated for mothers alone. Often moving from meal to clothing to baths to car rides to scheduling to play to conflict resolution to a quick email to nursing to diaper change to laundry to dinner to sweeping to dishes to bedtime to nursing to nursing to nursing - usually doing 2-3 of these tasks all at once - I relish the small window of time at the very dark of the day, when I lay in bed and am finally, stationary, at rest.

art by @herlovelyface on instagram

There’s a feeling I wasn’t acquainted enough with in my life before motherhood. It’s the split second when you push through the not-wanting to do something, and do it anyway. Oh, and without resentment, blame, or half-heartedness. I really and truly began to know this stopping-place, this blip in time, a couple years in. For some reason it took me awhile to really believe I even *could* be a mother who did more. Yes, even when I don’t want to, and my body aches, and all sorts of things, there’s a calling and a value judgment in me that considers, and decides: we move forward.

I think mommy culture for the most part has ridded us of this skill - convinced us, in fact, that if we push beyond “a limit” we’re being taken advantage of, not performing enough self-care, or disrespecting our boundaries. If you’re tired, stop. That’s good enough. Well, the place where I stopped when I was tired wasn’t actually good enough. I push a little further now, almost every day. I do know my limit, and it did take going way too far to find it - but now that it’s there, I can sense her arrival, and with peace in my heart I let go when it really is time to. We eat pizza, I don’t touch the laundry or clean the floors, don’t pick up a single toy. I go right to my bed when my husband gets home. I just exist. In a day or two, usually after my monthly bleed has slowed, I pick up again. I meet the crevice in the moment, where the “no” resides, I feel the resistance, all the reasons why, and then I stay with the feeling, and move forward into the yes.

I entered adulthood a brainwashed liberal-ish agnostic-ish product of public schooling and culture (am I allowed to say this, since it’s also a self-drag?) so like the rest of us, my work ethic and level of entitlement were abysmal. As the years have gone by, I’ve found myself an incredibly productive and hard-working person (or at least a consistently aspiring one) and a mother as well. I’ve become entranced by women who already knew these things. Knew how to be. They’re usually rooted in a value system or livelihood foreign to me. They’re often quite religious. They are devotional in their days and in their mothering and in all of their labors. Women who have three times as many children as I do. My biggest role models in mothering are women not much “like” me - but of course, in striving to emulate them, I’ve become more like them.

Other factors, of course, determine a loyalty to a certain way of life: my husband is a blue-collar skilled tradesman, we’re small business owners, we’re parents of young children. What do these things really say about us? I’ve never described us in that way before. But then, I wake up on a Wednesday and I just can’t believe the price of groceries, and the physical toll my husband’s job is taking on his body, and I’m knee deep in diapers and temper tantrums, and well… we are just another middle class family on an unremarkable street in an unremarkable city, aren’t we.

Though for some reason you’re reading this, and I might be reading your publication too, and we find our musings beautiful and relevant and worthy, and this might be where I start to talk (again) about how it’s the divine weaving itself through our lives and selves and that we love the reflection and the belonging and it’s present everywhere, and anywhere. If each life is sacred, then each life is sacred.

But I digress.

This feeling. It’s been coming and going lately. Sort of like when you start saying a word over and over it begins to sound weird. Has that ever happened to you? Say it, really think about it. How it sounds, how it’s spelled… isn’t it a bit weird? A bit… made-up? That’s pretty much the way it feels to be a 34-year old mother of two, juggling several very part-time entrepreneurial gigs, and keeping house, and marriage to boot.

But it seems like yesterday you were a twenty-something with no true responsibilities beyond yourself (ugh, but the BURDEN of it all, you know!) wandering aimlessly on a Tuesday at yet another retail store or I don’t even KNOW what I did with all of the time (so much time) I had before children. But even then I wonder, how did each moment pass of my first pregnancy, of Max’s second year, of last month? It was just right here. But tomorrow I’ll wake up and I’ll meet each moment of resistance and I’ll stay on task as God asks of mothers of little ones, and time often flies.

I think the feeling might be the sort of thing that arises when someone joins a convent, and leaves behind the old self, and takes on a new identity which wraps itself around them - in their new garb to solidify this truth. A podcast episode I listened to not long ago described the full change of a man in the Bible to such a degree that everyone began calling him by an entirely different name, so changed he was in his journey with God to do as he bid him do. Who he was at 30 was so vastly different in his old age that he was literally no longer the same man, and not known by who he once was.

With the internet, you’ll always be able to dig up who I once was. The record itself, documenting such dramatic change, will probably be compelling (to a very small percentage of the world, like, ideally, my future granddaughter.) Mm, but it’s interesting to think about. In the ritual of a rite of passage, we move through separation, transition, and return. Often again and again we cycle through this in life, and of course, on the spiritual path we are on the very same arc with God.

I’m in I’m in
I’m here
In service to my highest possible good
Oh but I’m afraid
Let me pick and choose what stays and goes
There’s things I’m not ready to leave just yet
It’s all or nothing? No, wait -
I’m in I’m in
I’ll go

When I look backwards I know
Each leap of faith I was held in trust
Oh, maybe that’s been good enough
This version of me, she could be complete
But there’s another river crossing coming fast
I brace myself for the impact

No, wait -
I’m in I’m in
I loosen up
She takes me downstream
I lose myself under the current
Oh but I’m afraid

I’m here
In service to my highest possible good
Oh, the good requires everything?
Oh, okay I say, deep breath in place
Yes

I’m in again

In the transition we become disoriented. The sense of self has to loosen up, or we’ll be too rigid to ever let something new arise and become integrated.

Have you ever pondered being something completely different than who you are? Something playful. I do this often with things big and small. I’ve never liked the color orange. Could I like the color orange? Could I love it? What would that be like, with the color orange in my wardrobe, in my art? You might notice I do this often with color in my work. When I first became an artist I only wore neutral colors and black.

I’ve never cared much for cleaning. Could I care about cleaning? Could a clean table and kitchen become meaningful to me? Could shifting this part of me make the step from no into yes, flow better? How do these thoughts serve me, through the lens of 100% responsibility, better than questions framed around: Expectations shouldn’t be so high for mothers, they’re unrealistic. I should have more support in cleaning the house. It’s perfectly fine to have some mess, you’re a working mother of two very young children.

When these questions are allowed to arise, the rigidity of my self falls away. Mm, I could almost be anyone. There’s this “me”, almost like the gorgeous, iridescent form of a Jellyfish, within the entire expanse of ME, which is the aquarium’s pool of water. I can stretch to every corner, move through every drop of water, but never fully inhabit every space of myself. I’m composed of the world, my past, my choices, the choices of others, epigenetic history, ancestor presence, my future, each day, and nestled among the ethereal tendrils of my jellyfish heart, I alone also sit.

four_living_creatures

A post shared by @four_living_creatures

"Suhrawardi says that the Spirit is a being of Light that shines in the mind. When this light wavers, we are consumed with melancholy and the energies of life wane. Yet even such despair is a form of presence, transformable, redeemable by the imagination. All of life can be transformed in the presence of the figure of the unknowable Guide, who offers the possibility of seeing the true self, the Face we had before the world was made.
"The supreme paradox is this: you cannot know who you are without opening to the darkness of the unknown. You cannot be present in the fullest sense until you are able to follow the fearsome Angel leading you on into the dark."

I can’t grasp too firmly on who I am today, she’s in transition. I just rest in the pauses, when the current lets me up, when there’s some time to lay motionless at the end of the day. In a corner of my mind I visit the timelessness I hope to find at my old age - where I could read a book for 8 hours straight again, and be unbothered for the stretch of it. A gift in that. A gift in this. At the end of life I’ll face another daunting crack in the ice - full of darkness and unknown - holding the hand of my resistance, we’ll step over together.

Mm, when you put it that way, the aliveness of these challenges become rich - Oh, to be young and tired and have babies that need and love you, endlessly. There’s some things money can’t buy and I’m living them and they’re unraveling me, and a new form is woven underneath that will get to rise up eventually.

Megan