I've conversed with many, many women the last few weeks about their experiences with pregnancy, birthing and motherhood. Each woman's experience is so very unique and yet, shared in a universal mother-tongue that is readily understood. I'm absolutely fascinated by the different archetypes that all these women embody through the telling of their own stories: the suffering/martyred mother, the earthly grounded mother, the protective warrior mother, the life-bringing mother, the free-spirited mother. The shape-shifting between dual roles and multiple archetypes is amazing and awe-inspiring to me, the idea that we can hold all things within us without having to be everything to everyone.
Much of pregnancy that I can tell is journey inward, a journey towards darkness or the underworld really- a winter's hibernation within one's body, something akin to a death but without the despair- a loss of what we once were, and the rebirth of what will be. I find it hard to not think be aware of death and my mortality when the birth of a new life cycle is so near. The changes in my body are like the changes in the season, slow but sure, steady and unrelenting in that march of time. My childhood was my spring, my young adulthood was a heady summer and now I am entering the glorious autumn of motherhood, where the harvesting of possibilities and the unleashing of new destinies will take place.
I am curious, now more than ever, about the feminine as well as the masculine- what energies exist in this world that allows each of us to shape-shift throughout our journey as we evolve from a spark of hope in the womb to what the world sets fire within us to become. The place that calls to you is “... where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." Frederick Buechner.
Pregnancy seems to be, to return to my Irish studies, (for those of my fellow Ireland Program peers, you will hear me well) a very liminal space. Our dear-dear teachers Patrick, Dorrane and Sean each spoke so eloquently about the liminality of in-betweenness, the shape shiftings, the veil between worlds- the neither here, nor there... the swinging in the balance between life and death represented by sickness, pregnancy, births, menstrual cycles (where you bleed, but do not die). Places that are liminal pull us all at sand shifting shores and mountain tops where water, ground and sky kiss, and at all the doorways and windows of our lives. Much of our lives are defined by such liminal events and places.
As I stand on the cusp of becoming, the mask of motherhood lies before me- that mask which does not belong to me alone but is passed on from generation to generation, from woman to woman, in a long, endless line of life-bringers before me and stretched out far ahead of me, I am aware of accepting stewardship of a new life, of becoming a safe, guiding and nurturing hand in someone’s destiny; a person and a destiny which does not belong to me but one that I can watch unfold and if I am very lucky, walk with for a short while.
“Your Children are not Your Children
They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.”
© Kahlil Gibran, 1923, 1973.
Found in Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
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