Does it get easier? Being a mother.
It gets harder, easier, harder and so it goes on.
It gets harder being a good person everyday to eternal dependent beings that you grew from seeds and eggs.
It gets so boring repeating, and nagging, and beating yourself up for the days when you’re not so good, or some just give up completely.
It gets so draining feeling so guilt-ridden for the lack of gratitude you feel. Those shoulds, shoulds, shoulds drowning your better judgements. The perceived judgment that you feel from the ‘others’. Women stoning each other emotionally, invisibly.
Then you catch the length of the lashes in the profile.
Their words melt your bones mispronounced that you don’t correct because it’s just too cute!
You absorb their accomplishments as they tell you with pride in their voice,
The nape of their neck makes you want to nuzzle it.
The bite in the toast that they couldn’t finish.
Their baby hair still there, hiding under familiar curls when they’re 27.
When you’re deep in the trenches, as days melt into one, and infancy rules; running in the background is the constant reflection of who you were before and who you are now, when you don’t recognise her in the mirror. Guilt runs deep until it is all you know, buying time, bartering childcare, to jump into the familiarity of freedom, the woman you were with the world at her feet.Though the shine has gone, and you miss them. In hindsight you were oblivious to the absolute autonomy you had over your days, nights, hours, minutes.
It gets harder, motherhood, if you navigate years of being unconscious, getting through, just about coping with the enormity of it all, firefighting life, maybe marriages breaking down. Motherhood and heartache are not cordial company.
In stomps perimenopause, and the women above who “just got on with it” roll their eyes.
The 5am wakings about the end of the world. A world if they were ever snatched away from you. The 5ams of reliving the times they nearly were. The times you lost them, and found them, on repeat infinitely and your nervous system silently screams while “getting the fuck on with it”
Bring forth the crones and their wise embrace.
Motherhood is heartbreaking and heartoverflowing simultaneously..I wouldn’t change it for the world. Those beautiful people sharing it with me. Allowing me to fulfill my purpose, to honour their rite of passage to the end. They didn’t choose to be born, but I chose to have them, and I owe them, forever.
In my experience, unless we have trawled through the suffering of our pasts. The pieces of the jigsaw we would rather ignore, the bits that are jagged, that scratched our innocence. If they aren’t handled, turned over, and made sense of, each time your child is your age scribbled on the back of that lost piece, you will have to address it, by either reliving it unconsciously, and likely self medicating with whatever addictive behaviour fits the void, or you will sit with it. We all have those grazes. Some deeper than others.
And this, this, will break your heart into a million pieces, for the child you were, and how things could have been done very differently. How to manage the blame, and blame you will until you soften and thaw. And, if you're brave enough, and have hands to hold you, you can sit with your inner child and soothe it all, without drugs, without alcohol, shopping, food, sex …….. Whatever numbs you….
The blame will dissolve in the honey of connection, to the parents, the parents who as Rumi says were also just walking eachother home.
And so it goes on.
❤️
Comments