Mothering & Soul
This writing is for the mothers who have complex feelings about mothering…who are finding their way as mothers and humans outside of mothering. I hope my experience echoes something in you that might not be echoed in normative culture.
Three years ago today I went into labor, which lasted until two days later when my daughter was born. Each birthday has become more about her and less about my experience giving birth. Yet while planning a Frozen-themed birthday party, my inner world has been begging for attention, calling out to me saying, Pay attention… something important is happening here. In the way anniversaries seem to have a consciousness of their own, this one has been calling me to remember that there is a thread of a story unfolding and to listen well.
What’s happening for me on this threshold of my 3rd give-birthday could be called a soul retrieval. I’ve been visited by part of myself, the One Who Left, after three years away… tentatively and with conditions.
Since my daughter was born, I’ve noticed, as has my husband, that I look different in pictures. Not only because I have physically aged, which is true, but because of a soul-level change that’s harder to pin down. When I look at pictures of myself from the Before Times, I look alive. I have a spark of life that reverberates through the image.
When I look at those pictures I ask, Where did I go? Where is that soul spark that animated my eyes? Will I ever look alive again?
On Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, I hustled myself out of the house to a new moon fire ceremony held by an elder woman in my community. I was hungry to get there, like a craving for a hamburger that is met by nothing less than a hamburger. In a culture that is anorexic of ritual time and space, I could feel this need ringing clear as a bell. When I arrived, it was so dark out; it was so cold. I climbed into the dug-out kiva where a fire was being tended and found my place in the dirt.
Once landed, we were invited to consider the threshold we are approaching between now and the Solstice. I was thinking about the threshold between now and my daughter’s birthday, how it’s been almost 36 months of having her outside my body and how I’ve never been the same. When the drumming started, immediately, the One in me who left when my daughter was born came to my mind’s eye. It was a visitation of soul.
I saw her so clearly: the One in me who is not a mother, who does not want to be; the One who cannot be confined to the domestic life I have settled into. I was surprised to see her and, in the way these soul encounters happen, I asked why she was coming to me now…
The day before the ceremony I had paid a deposit for a new office outside of my home. I have not worked outside of my house since I was pregnant three years ago. I don’t really need an office. Very few of my clients want to meet in person. I don’t know if I can afford it. But I saw it and knew I needed the space for a hard-to-articulate reason.
The One Who Left explained to me, the way soul parts do, that she came to me because I’m taking steps to leave the house for my work and wellbeing. She explained how she is not interested in domestication. She is not interested in mothering. And she does not want to be home all the damn time. She is distinct from my mother-self and this distinction was so stark in the ceremony that I wasn’t quite sure whether I wanted her around my child. But this One Who Left seems to be the soul part that took a leave of absence for quite a while, this is the One who might be the spark of life that animated my eyes in the Before Times.
Encountering the One Who Left reminded me of a dream I had when I was pregnant in which a teacher of mine who is a free, dancing, world-traveling spirit, decided that she didn’t want to mother and left her husband and baby. I woke up from this dream with a clear understanding that I needed to know that I would want to leave sometimes, that I have a part in my psychology that would not want to mother and wife and would want to leave.
This dream was very important to me in my psychological preparation for motherhood, but the meaning of this dream changed at the fire ceremony. I now see this dream as a forewarning saying, “Not only will you want to leave, a part of you will leave.” I was visited by this One who does not consent to be confined in a house, domesticated into marriage and mothering to the detriment of my soul-level health. So she simply… left. The problem with this, however, is that I will not physically leave my family—so I have settled into soul loss for these years, tolerating a half-alive feeling that is louder and quieter at times.
All of this has me wondering about what we call postpartum depression and whether mothers are actually tended to on a soul level. This is, of course, rhetorical— no we are not. I don’t feel that this soul loss I have experienced is wrong or pathological… but it does need attention. It does have valuable information about who I am as a mother and a not-mother. It is integral to my personhood which exists outside of my role as a mother.
In the ceremony when I shared what I heard and saw, another mother commented that she has always wanted to leave, even after 23 years of mothering and multiple children. The echo of this flight urge feels ancient and so real—to be tethered to mothering when the soul has other needs and other agendas is the tension of mothering it seems. Blessed are the mothers who have a primary soul calling to mother. Lord, I am not one of them… but thankfully they exist. Since I believe in the multiplicity of the psyche, I also know we are not reducible to one longing, one role, or one calling. But it is convenient if we really do like to be home doing the domestic tasks of cooking and cleaning and planning birthday parties.
The emotional complexity of mothering is staggering to me. My choices reveal my privilege and also, my choices are not without intensity. To remain home-bound is a soul death of sorts—my analyst commented on whether I could tolerate staying home, “Well, a lot of mothers die that way, not listening to soul.” I was not prepared for the complexity of mothering and working; of maintaining/regaining personhood outside of mothering; of the soul-level transformation that mothering would bring. But on this third anniversary of the start of my labor, I feel in the growing pains once again of living this life to its depths, fully and completely with all the mystery it entails. My give-birthday wish is for more mothers to share their soul stories so we may be better midwifed into these experiences collectively and into motherhood personally.