Untaming Motherhood
Pregnancy is a subversive experience where another being overthrows the existing system of your body, morphing it physically, emotionally and spiritually to the point of no return. Birthing babies through your body is visceral, wild, bloody, bold; the bravest, fiercest act a woman can perform.
Birth takes you to the very edge of your existence in human form, to the brink of death. And from this, you are meant to come back only soft and fluffy, accommodating, endlessly giving, affectionate, tidy, conformist? This modus operandi is unattainable, unbalanced and ‘tame’. It is the formica of kitchens when you’re rough-hewn granite.
You come back from the birth experience forever changed. You have touched your deepest void. Your womb has been activated, as has your ability to create. You have found the unseen realms, unseen resources. You are then expected to return to the seen and appear to be ‘coping’. To ‘appear’ to be all sorts of things that are not your remit.
Coping is not living. Nor is managing. The only way you find your way back to you is to accept you are unhinged. You do motherhood by doing you, however that looks, whatever people say. It is the only route to expressing the fullness of you, the key to your creative genius. Trying to fit into the norm of motherhood is killing you.
The tamed mother is an impossible paradigm. To have birthed is to have entered the space between life and death, to have touched your innate wildness. You are then expected to package it all up like a pocket raincoat and stuff away the wildness to conform to a societal norm? Pah!
Motherhood is the ultimate initiation into creativity, and then, bam, it gets closed down by the narrow paradigms of societal expectation. When you adhere to these paradigms, you close yourself off to your potential. You control yourself when really, you want to liberate yourself.