Mother's Day.

The sacred contract of motherhood.

Good morning,

I would be lying if I told you that I had any idea where this post is going to go this morning. I’m just showing up for what’s ready to come out. Having been up with the rather tenacious birds since 4am this morning, I have had time in solitude to write, sip coffee, and contemplate this day.

The theme of “mother” has been coming up a lot lately. Maybe with the impending holiday it tends to rise for people. It’s come up in conversations at work, with other friends, and even in my own journal pages.

I realized through some writing yesterday morning that I am on a new precipice in life. I am one that believes our lives come in chapters, and I do know that I am embarking on a new one. My daughters are older and more independent. I am feeling like I am on more solid footing. I give 0 fucks about most things these days, particularly the opinions of others. I know myself, and am getting to know her more and more each day. That might come with age, or simply a willingness to strip down to my soul. Either way, I welcome this new skin.

Within my writing yesterday I was reflecting on motherhood as a journey and how if it wasn’t for the birth of my daughters, I don’t think I would have uncovered the actual meaning of love. True, unconditional, blood, sweat, and so many tears kind of love. Love wasn’t love until they came. With their arrival came a deep undoing of the life I was living and the new way my life was going to go. I had to stand up in a way I never imagined I would have to. My eyes opened wide and my heart shattered into a million pieces.

What I have been realizing though lately is that within this deep undoing over the last 7 years, is that I haven’t had role models for who I want to become. I have always known who I don’t want to be and how I don’t want to be, but I have never seen the love, the mother, the woman I want to become shown to me in a tangible way. I have clipped pieces of the woman I aspire to be from authors, teachers, television, and friends, but never had it directly in my life. So part of motherhood for me has felt a bit imposter like. Yesterday though, I reminded myself that I am not those other things. The things I don’t want to be. I didn’t become that. I actively chose a different path. I chose the way of the unknown. I chose the path of vulnerability, love, and life, even when I had no idea how to go that way.

I think sometimes when we steer our life away from things we don’t want to be, we still carry with us a belief that we are those people. That we somehow became it anyway. We didn’t. I didn’t. I became and am becoming the mother I want to be for my daughters. The mother I didn’t have. And I have to remind myself that my daughters don’t know this wound, because I decided to do it differently. I actively and very consciously chose them and chose love. They don’t know what it means to not have a mother.

For those of us who choose a different path, particularly in our families and as mothers, it doesn’t come without its gut wrenching days. Repairing our hearts while empowering our children’s, oof, it stings. No one talks about that. No one talks about the chronic work of becoming the parents we didn’t have. The work of reconciling our inner child while simultaneously giving our children the protective, nurturing, unconditional parents that we didn’t know.

In my softening over time I have learned to simply hold space for all of this. To hold space for myself and acknowledge the needs I had that weren’t met. To honor the love that I didn’t receive, but can now give to myself. To know thyself, and to trust that I am creating a new path forward. I am the woman I desire to be and continue to get to know her every day.

I guess this is just a morning reminder for the Mamas, for the folks that want to be Mothers, for the Aunties, for the women, for the souls that just want love: to soften. To keep softening into ourselves. Allow ourselves to become and let our lives unfold. Do the work to dismantle the patterns created before us. But, please remember, we didn’t become the pattern. We recognized it. We see it. We can create the love we have yet to know, because it has always resided in us. Vulnerability is simply the space in which we willingly allow love to enter us, even when it hurts. Let yourself be there.

All the love,

ah