Unsilenced Woman

Introverted mothers, it’s time for a reframing

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Dear Introverted Mothers,

Those whose spirits crave solitude and require quiet communion to feel like themselves:

We will make it. 

Are you feeling the cumulative absence of alone time during this pandemic? Is it starting to wear on you and to come off as a sharp edge in your voice?

Life with young children can surely be loud, physically jarring, emotionally demanding, and pervasive. We’re grateful to be mothers and yada yada yada, but the needs follow us everywhere. Right now when we are sheltered in place, it feels almost impossible to get the inner space we need.

Before life suddenly changed, we relied on our office hours, our park excursions, our gym time, our errands alone, our grandparent visits, and our babysitter nights. We counted on those supports to be the parent we want to be. True, we weren’t always patient, centered, and well-rested. But we learned the structures we could put in place to feel more capable.

Now most of those structures are unavailable. I have grieved the loss of those tools. It’s normal for you to grieve them, too.

Now we must be shapeshifters.

I am grateful to live in a time period and in circumstances of privilege where I am a woman who is aware of being an introvert, an empath, and a highly sensitive person (HSP). I can normally work to accommodate the needs of those descriptors. 

But right now I channel a deeper heritage, an older identity. I call on the ancestors who knew not those words; they pushed forward with a different kind of resilience. I call on a steadiness that lives in me as certainly as bone.

I call on my great-grandmother whose name I can’t even pronounce. She was a Cambodian woman whom we lost to history, perhaps in a prisoner of war camp. Someday I will track down her story. For now, I only have her photo, her birth date, and a name I forget how to spell. Thi-Dam Dong.

I call on my great-grandmother Rosalina, who came to this country from Italy and married another Italian immigrant who died in a Kentucky coal mine while my grandma was a baby. Rose lived through the Great Depression and raised five kids on her own. She even ironed their underwear.

I call on my great-grandmother Marie, who escaped Algeria in wartime and survived abuses that are still unspeakable because her children are alive and remember.

I call on my grandmothers, my mother, and my aunt, whose stories are living and whose strength mapped out a mountain range of red flags and seas of unknown freedom. Their stories showed me a way out.

And I call on the woman I am, with a spirit of persistence and a dogged commitment to hope that delivered me from years of sexual and emotional abuse into becoming the powerful healer I am today.

I call on every unbreakable part of myself. I call on everything that could not be taken from me. I call on every survivor who has brought me here. When I remember all of the women who are with me, I know I can do this.

My body is safe. My family is by my side. We have food. We have shelter. The emotional strain is real, but it is only one facet of the truth.

I am strong. I am capable. I am from a long line of survivors who managed to birth beauty through hard times. They are with me. I am theirs. They managed to feed their children back then, and they still nourish me today. I am thankful. I am thankful. I am held.

Introverted mothers, we have powerful tools of imagination and inner resources that have more than likely protected us and enlivened us for years.

Now is the time to get creative with our image of who we are. In the absence of elongated blocks of time alone, perhaps we can call on the part of ourselves that nimbly survives–even thrives–with less. The garden rose becomes a desert rose.

This is hard, and we will make it.

Dear mothers of today, who are the ones who are holding you? If you are struggling, now is a time to call on your great cloud of witnesses.

Photo credit: Josh Hailey Studio

I had a natural birth, and I don’t want your trophy

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“You know there’s no trophy, right?”

There is no trophy for having an unmedicated, natural birth.

There is no trophy for breastfeeding your baby.

Those words are part of our stock script around childbirth and mothering. And we deserve better.

First, I want to say that birth and breastfeeding decisions are deeply intimate matters, and they can activate our wounding and our defenses as fast as a match to kerosene.

This post is not meant to be flogging material for anyone. I honor the mother in you. We are women with complex histories before we become mothers, and our stories are way less simple than they are often made out to be. Motherhood is not a story of winners and losers.

“There is no trophy.” 

Those words can feel like another way to cut a woman down to size. To discredit her motives. To minimize her dreams. To not bother to truly hear her. To pit her in a false competition against other women. To disrespect her decision-making center. To make her ashamed of wanting something and pursuing it.

There is no trophy, but there is incredible satisfaction and life-shaping meaning in traveling the journey that feels integral to you.

Does this mean plans don’t change? Absolutely not. Does this mean a woman can’t reassess and change her approach if new information and unexpected situations present themselves? No. But let’s keep trophies out of the conversation and focus on supporting her.

I have experienced two very different kinds of birth: a cesarean birth and a home birth.

I want a trophy for neither one.

Each birth makes me fiercely proud of my strength. I hold each one with tenderness as part of my babies’ origin stories. Each birth has shaped who I am as a woman. My first birth was a natural birth-turned-cesarean birth. My second birth was a vaginal home birth. 

Each time I entered birth with thorough preparation of the body and spirit, knowing down to my bones:

“Whatever happens in these hours matters to me and will forevermore. This birth is important to my health and my family’s health. My body will hold imprints of these experiences for a lifetime. I will approach this birth passage with informed decisions, moment-to-moment awareness, sacred intention, and the best care available to me.” 

I could tell you all the reasons my birth choices made sense and were the safest, most appropriate plan for me and for my family, but that’s a story for another day.

What it had nothing to do with, however, was proving myself to anyone else. Maybe I did have something I wanted to prove to myself, and maybe even that was instructive and generative, shaping the woman I am today.

But I did not choose natural birth for a trophy. I wanted no prize. I did not feel the need to compete against other mothers and to rise up victorious above them. I wanted no gold star or special recognition.

Birth was the soul’s call.

Even before I was pregnant, I knew it was my path to experience the unaltered, uncontrolled, world-shaking force of a woman’s natural physiological birth process. Unmedicated birth and breastfeeding called me like the wild howl of my soul. It felt right to follow that call with passion and courage, with a clarity that few things in my life have brought. 

I was called to birth and breastfeeding by my aching body that had survived sexual trauma and by my hungering spirit. I longed for the enlivening intensity of birth the way I yearned for God and for something bigger than a story of pain and brokenness and numbness and suffering. I came to birth and breastfeeding knowing they held the medicine and power I needed.

Were they perfectly sweet and easy to swallow? No. They challenged me to my core. They were not what I expected. They disappointed. They shapeshifted. They transformed. And they healed.

But one thing is for sure: They will never be reduced to a trophy for me. Something to gather dust on the shelf. Something to remind me of my achievement and how I excel above others. Something to assure me of my former feats and glory.

Birth is not centered around any cheap prize or token.

We never wanted a trophy. We wanted birth with dignity. We wanted birth with full reverence of welcoming a new soul. We wanted birth with our whole picture of long-term wellness centered.

A trophy is a cheap thing that ends up in a box in an attic. A birth is not a cheap prize. Feeding a baby from your body is not a cheap prize and neither is needing to make another choice. We make our decisions with gravity, with privilege, and with necessity. We make our decisions with our individual sense of integrity, sanity, and wholeness.

We all navigate where we are willing to be flexible and where something deep within us is calling us to rise to unwavering courage. Sometimes that courage is pushing a baby out without medication, and sometimes that courage is having your baby cut from your belly in an operating room. 

I want no trophy that declares my victory over my friends who chose epidurals, over my repeat cesarean mamas, or over those who relied on formula. I would never accept a trophy above them.

To even mention a trophy disrespects all of us.

I’m not trying to be a birth or mothering unicorn, a magical being who glimmers with perfection. I am not writing to you from a high horse of plans gone perfectly and victory won by my heroic efforts alone.

I am a woman trying to live into the deepest expression of my humanity. Messy. Unpredictable. In the breath-by-breath revelation of this human journey. 

There is no trophy. That is true. Please don’t try to put one in my hand.

Photo Credits: Jess Bollaert Eddleman, Clementine Birth Services

Mama said there’d be days like this

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Today is one of those days. I get dressed in thirty seconds, don’t brush my hair, don’t even look at myself in the mirror. Tooth brushing? Ha! When I see myself in the hall mirror as I walk out, I notice my shirt is kind of small and not very flattering—not how I remembered this shirt fitting…Oh yeah, I had a baby four months ago and it shows. How could I have believed that I actually looked good all this time? It was all smoke and mirrors, strategic angles, calculated fits and colors. But THIS is the truth, this ugliness right here.

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When resolutions feel too small

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“We all have the tendency to struggle in our bodies and our minds. We believe that happiness is possible only in the future. That is why the practice ‘I have arrived’ is very important. The realization that we have already arrived, that we don’t have to travel any further, that we are already here, can give us peace and joy. The conditions for our happiness are already sufficient. We only need to allow ourselves to be in the present moment, and we will be able to touch them.” -Thich Nhat Hahn

I feel the pull of a new year, a fresh start, another chance, a reinvented me. It is shiny and sexy. It promises something better than what I have known before or at least it promises something different. The year stretches in front of me like a verdant wilderness. I’m the eager explorer, the brave pioneer, the hopeful discoverer.

Or am I just the restless wanderer, moving camp so often that I keep myself distracted by change and never have to sit with–really sit with–myself?

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I won’t force reconciliation just because it’s Christmas

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To the person who’s choosing to be separate from someone you love during the holidays,

I don’t know why you have found yourself in this place. I don’t know how you arrived here. No one has a story exactly like yours. But I find myself standing here, too. It is a heavy, hidden place. The kind with secret passages, cryptic codes, and closed doors. I feel like no one around me can quite understand why I make this choice, but I also try to be ok with that.

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When a life ends early, and we go on

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I wrote most of this in the month after my 14-year-old former student Liam died by suicide, as I struggled to move through each day and develop a new understanding of the world without him. I share it now as I remember him in the days when we approach the one-year marker of his death.

To some, you are an angel. You came to the end of your worldly journey. You took flight. “Your wings were ready, but our hearts were not,” we say. You wait in heaven, kicking cloud-wrapped soccer balls across the great expanse of the sky. You smile down on us, and we hear your laughter shaking from the tops of the trees. We will see you again. 

To some, you are a resonance of energy passing between us and through us and shining from us. Your physical presence is gone, but your life force and your bright light live in us still. Your physical journey ended, but the work of your spirit did not.

To some, you are preparing to be born to this earth again. Your life as the Liam we knew ended, but you will return. You are gestating somewhere in a womb across the world, growing in darkness. You will be born in flesh as a baby again and live another life. You will continue in this grand life cycle of birth, death, birth, and though we have lost you, others will meet you soon and love you just as we do. Others will feel the blessing of your life. Others will know you. You will be a different person with different talents and personality. But in moments, they will see glimpses of the boy we knew and love.

To some, you were 14 years in ecstatic, cartwheeling, exquisite and painful human life. And now that has ended. You have returned to the quiet land of darkness from which your body was knit and your spirit sparked. You have returned to the silence, to the gentle void. You are our memories, and you are the way we will live and love differently because we knew you. 

And to every one of these stories about where you are now, there is a moment when I think, “That’s about right”, “Yes, there he is”, and “I believe”.

This universe is so vast and full of mystery, and we understand and perceive so little. I know nothing for certain. I know not how I can have a foot in each of these worlds of belief, standing suspended over uncertainty and faith like some Twister game of shifting perspective. But there I stand. I shift where I’m leaning, I move between here and there, and I rebalance. I find a new spot that feels comfortable–as comfortable as we can be in this process of grieving and emotional contortion. 

Sometimes I lose my balance, and I fall.

“Forget comfort,” I say. “Nothing about this should be comfortable.” Death is violent. Death is permanent. Death is darkness. Do not send others who are in pain there with visions of angels and charges of light-filled energy and soccer games in the clouds. Keep us rooted here, feet on the earth. This is tragedy. This is suffering. Don’t make it transcendence. Don’t make it peace. Don’t make it beautiful. We need not romanticize death and ending life when other people in pain are listening and feel the heaviness of death calling them and claiming them more than the slow, mysterious unfolding of life. 

For them, I want to cry:

We want you alive, here with us. You matter. Living, you bring something to the world no one ever has before or ever can again. The world needs you. The permanence of death will steal goodness and joy from a future that right now you cannot even imagine. It is a permanent ending to a temporary state of being. Death is permanent, but life is always changing, always moving, always transforming, always becoming. What seems impossibly heavy and stagnant and endless will find relief, will feel change. 

This pain will end. Yes, new pain will come. I won’t tell you it won’t. But you will be a different person when it comes. You will know, “I survived it last time; I will survive this, too.” And somehow as you grow, you will be struck by both your smallness and your significance, and the suffering you experience will be only one piece of a swirling dance of sorrow and joy in a world where 350,000 babies are born every day and the sun rises no matter what and the birds sing no matter what and the moon pulls the sea, and you will feel deep in your bones that you are a part of this mystery and wonder. 

When I look back on the darkest moments of my life, while I would wish them on no one, each piece, even the ugliest, most traumatic ones, begin to emerge in a larger picture of who I would become and how I would impact the world. Even as years later I fight “why?” and cling to images of how different I could be without those wrecking balls from my past, I cannot deny that where the wrecking balls landed, I found a way to build something new and undeniably beautiful that never could have risen without the initial destruction. 

I don’t know your story, but I know that when you survive this pain, you will hold the power to find a deeper gratitude, a new understanding of yourself, and a closer connection to all other people who have also survived. Bit by bit you will find yourself in rooms where you feel you belong. Piece by piece you will patch together a shawl of compassion for yourself, and you will watch your life unfold slowly, guided by what you have learned about your power, shadows, and passion.

This place is somewhere on the other side of choosing life, receiving help, and working through the darkness.

If you’re already getting help and working hard to overcome the darkness, and you still feel like the empty black swallowing the stars, wait. Please wait. Sometimes we work through the darkness, and sometimes all we can do is wait through the darkness. The pain continues no matter how many people try to help or how hard we work to end it. Sometimes all we can do is wait for the sun to rise again. And again. And again. And we trust that one day the sun will rise, and something new will rise in us, too.

A child has died, and in order for us to survive the pain of the loss and continue our good work and love each other, we develop some shred of understanding. In order to find hope and courage to continue, we find meaning in what has wrecked us. If we could have him back, we would choose his life over these lessons a thousand times.

Every piece is real to me. Every piece is true. Angels, energy, rebirth, endings, and darkness. I will gather all these stories in my arms and hold them tight. I will breathe them in. Hold them to my face and learn their scent. They will catch my tears. Together they will give me understanding that any one narrative alone cannot. As I am ready to drop any one of these stories, I will let them fall away. As I find need to reclaim stories lost, I will pick them up again. New stories will find me, and maybe each one will be woven together so that what was once separate threads on individual spools now becomes a tapestry of an image that holds the very message I need.

We each move differently through the processing of our grief. Let us allow ourselves to hold what we need. Let us sit with the emotional contortion of grief when it demands to be felt. Let us allow ourselves to hold whatever affirms life, acknowledges truth, and inspires courage.

We deserve a life abundant. We deserve the same fullness of life we would want for Liam. The light that he held, we hold, too. 

Photo: Josh Hailey Studio