Motherhood as disability

Nurturing In A World On Fire

Your mother´s body is your first home in this life.

I was the home of one child, my only child, my teenage beautiful girl Alfie. When I was her home and she was inside of me, I was protecting her without giving it a second thought, effortless. Without even knowing the good I was doing. I was breathing to give her cells. I was eating to give her nourishment. Pretty much unaware of my powers, my womb was giving her the nurturance she needed at all times. She needed to play, I was there. She needed a song, I was there. She needed to sleep, I was there. A steady home with food, warmth, electricity, telephone, all inclusive! My heartbeat was constantly in sync with hers. Deep inside my growing belly, I was imagining how she would be, who she might become. I was feeling her movements so precisely; it was sometimes pretty crazy. I could feel every tiny muscles she was growing, day by day. My body was in conscience creating and attending to her body.

For a body and a nervous system to be able to function and essentially to get the message that the world is a safe and kind, children need to be surrounded by adults who are capable. Capable of nurture. Capable of doing small everyday things and also miracles. As human beings, this is how we develop our emotional resilience, this is how we can relate to others, bond with others, and anchor ourselves properly in the world.

At that time, I was strong.

At that time, I was ready.

But things have changed.

Beaten up by a pressured system, beaten up by the elements and also just by myself (oh I do this so well!), motherhood is the most disabling event of my life.

Since some months, I am constantly reminded of my incapacity, my unpreparedness, my intolerance, my guilt, my shame, my unhealthy boundaries. All the aspects of my toxic upbringing are boomeranged violently back to my face and into my life in my late 50s. Of course, one could say, the world is on fire. Of course, there is so much suffering. Of course, she is a teenager. Of course.

Shame, grief and vulnerability blend together creating its own concoction of misery in my blood. A brand of misery mainly felt by mothers who are going through the ordeal of unveiled centuries of pressure, burden, and responsability - capitalist expansion and extraction.

Disability. A word I had never really thought so much about before. You see I lived in harmony and privilege. Though I was very sick when I was younger, disability was a concept I had considered only from a (safe) distance. I heard the stories and read the books and saw the movies and learned a lot around the notion of disability. But even with so much empathy and so much genuine curiosity , I was never really confronted directly to it. I knew nothing then.

You don’t know until you experience it inside of your body.

Mixed Media Collage - Sage Canellis - Ghost Girls - December 2023

The physical symptoms of my grief are so debilitating some days that I am hardly recognisable; the mirror shouts who are you? I feel like a zombie! Fog is there constantly. Most of the time, it feels like my brain and body are not compatible - my heart races, my breath is shorter, my muscles feel tense. I forget things I say. I say things I forget. One thing is really scary: I started forgetting my dreams, too. When I try to explain how I feel, nothing really makes sense. I don’t even know how to formulate it. I can say I am grieving but does this really help? Grieving is supposed to be short and if it goes for too long, it is pathological which is non sense. I am grieving and I am crying tears inside of myself cause I am not able to help my teenage daughter. She needs help and I am mesmerized, scared, unable, disabled. So I am crying. Red hot tears from the sky. Red hot tears inside my blood. Like monsters falling from the sky. I was not prepared for this.

I know a lot of women and men and parents who are struggling. I know a lot of kids who are struggling. These are tough, rough times.

Motherhood is in danger.

Our time as mothers is on the threshold. I feel we need to awaken to that. I feel we need to come to terms with that. What I experience now, what the individual and the collective goes through, is in itself a sort of initiatory journey. What is happening in the world (Gaza, Ukraine, Congo and so much more that we don´t hear about but that we do sense afterall…) is apocalyptic in many ways. We are experiencing a global change in consciousness and experience. The apocalypse - the unveiling has started. Through this threshold, through the crossing, there is for sure an unveiling. The routine structures that carried us instinctively for hundreds and thousands of years are on the verge of collapsing. Nothing makes sense anymore.

I am closer than ever to the collapse. How can it be otherwise? The ground trembles under our feet, the curtain rises. What is behind, the hidden reality, is still to manifest itself. But down deep we know…don’t we? We feel the cracks. We are forced to encounter the unknown, the unresolved aspects of ourselves. Here lies the fundamental tension of our time: to simultaneously perceive what is highest and lowest in our own being and in the world. Whether in personal life, the life of a people, a country or all of humanity, a crisis is a rupture. The pillars of the past are collapsing.

In the chaos of parenthood, we often overlook the “cosmic” purpose of having children. Sure, we guide them, feed them, nurture them, but on a spiritual level, it's a deeper dance of energy and soul alignment. Sometimes, when a little more clear (when writing at night) I am tempted to interrogate this disability as a door as a portal, as something that can offer further questions, further evolving material, further knowledge. Are the events that happened just before Christmas meant to be pushing me out of my known territories - out of my comfort zone? The things I do, the challenges I face, everything orchestrated to make me realise of my true power? Is Alfie in her innocent wisdom, becoming my greatest life coach? Revealing aspects of myself that need healing and growth? If so, thank you for the triggers, thank you for making me a disabled mother. If not, thank you anyhow…

Maybe at this point of history, we should only ask questions to one another without trying to answer them or without trying to find solutions. Fixing will not help. As Bayo Akomolafe often suggests : “What if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis?” Without knowing, by being so eager to find solutions, we seem to be repeating the cycle, same and same and same again. The cycle of sameness. But are we really listening?

Here are some of the questions I have written down these past days and weeks.

What parts of me is this situation revealing that I get to have more love and compassion for?

What ancient pain was stored in my body that this situation is inviting me to meet and release more fully?

How would this situation be an invitation to sharpen myself or my discernment?

How is this situation an invitation to open my heart more fully, without abandoning myself?

Then I wrote this as well:

Who were you [really] mom?

Where are you from?

Who was your own mother?

How much did your background determine your destiny?

What tragic moments, lovelessness, exclusion, and deprivation have you experienced in your life?

What did my (great) grandmother endure and how did it shape you?

How did you become the person I met and suffered from often?

Is my father really the bully you always talked about? Who was his father?

What have you kept from me that I will never know?

In what social and socio-political circumstances did you grow up?

Do I really know who you were or do I have to correct my image of you?

Come back.

Every seed of grain, every stone from the mountain, every goat and sheep that you eat was once your mother, your grandmother, and their mothers and grandmothers, who have loved you through vast cycles of leaving and returning. These mothers and grandmothers are always ready to feed you with their bodies...

I cannot imagine no heroism greater than motherhood.

At this precipitous point in the history of motherhood, I encourage everyone to raise their voices and ask questions.

What are your questions?