The Ideal Mother Doesn't Exist.
A healers touch, an eclipse and the wilderness of motherhood - a paradox of devotion, exhaustion, imperfection, and the raw, radiant truth of wanting more.
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After tying the red thread around my fingers and toes, he knocked on the back of my heart and asked me what I was so sad about.
The world, I said.
My daughter growing up.
Missing my connection with spirit, with my partner, with myself.
“All the worry,” he told me, “doesn’t change anything. We are all going to die. Or become Buddha. Which do you prefer?”
He reminded me: Your daughter is your guru. She feels you. She is all you need.
I felt his honouring of me. His hands over my wet eyes. Tears. His palms holding my cheeks, steady, warm, safe, like a cave of love where nothing could touch me.
I let go.
He sealed my wind gates. Oiling spirals into my palms and soles of my feet.
”Life is suffering,” he whispered. “Once you accept this you can let go and focus on the simple things that make you smile.”
He invited me to reread the Four Noble Truths.
Life is suffering.
I felt it in the sleepless nights, the dry skin of my lips, the ache of wanting to be more than I could be, for her, for myself, for life. The desire binding me in restlessness.
Suffering is born of longing.
I felt it in myself - the hunger for connection, the ache for spirit, the fantasy of another life.
There is a way through.
Not in striving, not in perfecting, but in loosening the knot - in breathing again, in trusting the wind, in resting my cheek against my daughter’s perfect silk hair.
And there is a path.
Not straight, not easy. A path woven of small rituals: tea, touch, breath, late night and early morning phone calls. A path that leads me back to myself.
In the softest corners of my mind I run away with this man and have his child.
We are bathed in the scent of clove and Tibetan sandalwood.
My life is a prayer.
I am full of peace.
But not this life.
He put his hand between my breasts, pressing firmly on my chest, combing my hair through his fingers as if he was purifying me of any excess sadness and stagnation. A stranger’s tenderness. Unexpected. Disarming.
The light felt different after. As I drove home, everything looked beautiful, as if for the first time.
Days later, the eclipse whipped me through its portal - into the all permeating weight of my own inner chaos. Shadows crossing the sky inside me. My mind swarming with longing, anxiety, questions.
Questions about love. About sustaining connection in this modern paradigm of survival.
“You are in the wilderness of motherhood,” my own mother told me as I howled down the phone. My face pressed to the hot coals of parenting, crying myself into the soft feathery bed of acceptance.
I tried to remember the healer’s words: Breathe. Stop holding your breath.
“Your resistance is the suffering,” he said.
But resistance to what?
I am alive with contradiction. Burning in the paradox of love and grief.
Elaine Glaser reminds us: “The ideal mother is an exhausting, imaginary figure. She doesn’t exist, but we are all still trying to become her.”
I AM in the wilderness of motherhood.
I am the wilderness.
Alight with glowing tapers of grief and gratitude, rage and tenderness, love and longing, confusion and hope.
Walking with thrones in my feet, in constant prayer that the path I am walking is leaving a trail of goodness behind me.
Motherhood is its own Noble Truth. Perhaps the first. The one that keeps teaching me how to live, in wild honesty, even as I am undone.
Five Practices Holding Me in the Wilderness
Breath as Reminder
The healer told me to inhale for a count of whatever felt comfortable, hold my breath, and release when ready. To visualise light on the inhale, send it all through my body on the hold, and release all worry and negative thoughts on the exhale.Simple Nourishment
Warm tea, sunlight, music that is calming. The simplest rituals.Finding an Anchor
Lighting a candle, a stone in my pocket, lighting incense. A way back when the noise is too loud.Become the Water
When frozen, overstimulated, exhausted, I shower, bath, or get in a natural body of water, river, ocean, whatever I can find.Listening to the Wind
I let it hold me, clear me, move me, and I try to listen in to the silence.
Winding with your words, like a spiral, i'm consistently surprised at how I am guided into some secret, private, personal whisper. It catches me off guard, when I read your writings, how the simplicity of what's being expressed can suddenly illuminate some of the most isolating, harrowing hallways of motherhood. And open them up to touch the sky. Big breath. Reading you always softens me. Thank you :)