I'm so grateful for your responses to my humble video, thank you, all. All over the webs I've heard your resounding feminine voices of support and the yearning to bring more sacredness to your experiences. This fills me with love of humankind, to know that healing, releasing, and growth are finding even more ways to thrive, and die, and then sprout up again like a determined vine and shoot to heights yet unknown by previous generations.
I know that I'll never stop finding reasons to deepen my love of Wild Woman, even when I feel spilling-over sated.
I do want to share a meandering clump of thoughts about being mama to a twenty-two month old and a five year old, as I attempt slowly to deepen my practice and offerings. I'm thinking, as I write this, of a few mothers I heard from today who want to live a spiritual, self-fulfilled life while sucked into the black hole of motherhood.
It may seem as though I live a double life: my dream life as an artist, writer and healer, and my life as fully accountable and nurturing mother. But this is not the way it is. I'm blessed with an open floor plan, a flexible schedule plus lots of counterspace, not to mention very accommodating grandparents two parcels down.
Also, at the very good advice of an elder years ago, I threw my husband to the wolves early on, having to trust he would figure out what to do -which he survived, of course, allowing me to escape the demanding clutches of pudgy fingers now and again. The condition is that I can't critique the job he does if I'm going to claim solitude. It works brilliantly. I don't care if they eat popsicles for every meal and ride the dogs into town bareback. What I do know is that I have to get away and recharge or I will freak the hell out. Letting go gets easier as I practice it.
When I'm at my best, I don't see my two or three jobs (let's face it, the house is another job entirely) as mutually exclusive. I think I'd resent one or more of them if did.
Often, my work is done while children eat, nap, build marble runs, fight over toys, scream for a third squirt of toothpaste, bathe, pee on the floor when I'm not looking, feed their lunch to begging canines, and most effectively, when they lay their precious heads down to sleep at night.
The children come along to snip herbs in the garden with me, learning as they go, as every moment around here is an opportunity to teach or explore. They get dragged along to metaphysical stores to buy stones, and shout from my aching hip as I consent to pay, onehanded, eleven dollars for a heart shaped piece of jasper to quiet her. They come along feather collecting at the nature center, as I take a hundred shots of the Hawks and Coyotes, double timing them while they slurp sugary push-ups and devour those cookie/ice cream sandwich nightmares. On nights when they can't sleep with restlessness or the result of too much cookie ice cream, I pace between their rooms and my studio thinking about how Snake and Moonstone would really go well together and...hmmm... what might be a great Valentine giveaway?
My spirit practice, my artwork and business, my children and my home are all my babies. Isn't it true for you? Women are the great multitaskers. Does any one of them get more time than the other? Blending and integrating has been the only thing that has saved me as I've set out to fulfill my own soul and keep them all humming peacefully.
Except the reality is that nothing operates peacefully because they are all restless beasts, every one of them. Simultaneously draining and feeding me like on-demand morphine. It's pure chaos, and my adrenals scold me mercilessly.
All I can think to do, when the nerves are frayed at the ends, and there isn't enough of me to go around, is to throw love at all of them-the babes, the unfinished paintings, the jobs, the grungy baseboards. Just fling it. Heap it on and roll in it. I mean, do you have a better suggestion? If you do, I want to hear it. I figure if I trust that there's a bottomless well of love within me, then that is my greatest ally when one of us needs me. Patience and sleep I fall short on, but love I got plenty of. The part that gets tricky on this program however, is giving it to ourselves.
For the mamas who mailed feeling not-enough yet, and are buckling under the creative inspiration that being a mother brings, mixed with the lack of time it suckerpunches you with, this is for you.
Our job as mama is so important, especially in the early years- but our job taking care of ourselves is equally important. All the hungry souls need fed, including our own. We have to find a way to be kind to ourselves as we begin to trust the new trail, while designing the day that allows for cacophonous meltdowns and total clinging dependency on us, but which carves out a bit of sacred solitude, too.
I am thinking that we must love our way through it all, though no one taught us to do such a thing.
It takes time, but the wild one always finds the trail back home, the one that is marked with her own magnificent breadcrumbs.
