The Myth of Maiden To Mother

It Can Be A Myth If You Want It To Be

Peony On 35 mm Film in the Pacific Northwest

I have been thinking a lot about the maiden to mother myth that the internet seems to be so in love with. I’ve been horrified by several Substacks that I have read recently where mothers are writing mothers-to-be that their lives are going to be over and to get prepared. And I want to say, that you don’t have to shed yourself if you don’t want to. There are many things no one prepared me for, like the relentlessness, and the sleeplessness, and that I would find myself unable to ask for help, but what I wish more people talked about was how motherhood didn’t have to be a death, motherhood could actually be a widening, a deepening of the self. I watched movies while I was breastfeeding, I made time to read, I wrote poetry. I gave myself the permission to continue. And I think, maybe because I came to motherhood not searching for rebrith, or for a way to define myself, but from a place of curiosity and surprise, that it allowed mothering to become an act of devotion. Exhausting, yes, but a gift when I accept it. That alongside being a poet, and a filmmaker, and a wife, and a sister, and a daughter, I also get to be a mother.

And I find more and more as the world turns into chaos, heat, and drought, and fire, and flood, and famine, that I am thinking more and more about having another child, which I wish was a sign that I felt hopeful, but really is more of a sign that I am looking to be full. Being pregnant was the only time in my 32 years (at the time) that I was full. I didn’t crave a single thing. I was so steadfast in love. My body becoming a home.

The wildfires are back again, and the smell of smoke from Banning met me this morning, settling on my hair and my nightgown coming in from taking the trash out. I close whatever windows are open.

And because I am feeling that tug of overwhelm, I am thinking about last year, and how when the world got too much, I signed up for a mediation teacher training. At 14 years sober, the 11th step was still my most avoided step and I thought it would be good to learn something that I could turn into supplemental income, and I only signed up after my girlfriend said If you were the one teaching meditation I’d do it. And for 6 months without fail I began meditating, mostly in the mornings, but if I couldn’t get to it in the mornings I would do it in the afternoon, at 5 pm even, for 20 - 30 minutes a day. I meditated with mantra, with visualization, with mala. I meditated with the breathe. And I was immediately submerged in whatever was bigger than me. I often found myself in a field on the edge of a cliff, the sea below me, building a foundation for a house that would be my inner landscape. The place I could carry around that could not be disturbed. And in this inner landscape I planted lupine and hollyhocks. I wandered the wooden rooms marveling at their cool dark. I had wanted to teach but found when I considered it, a shimmering went up my spine, my sign that something was not sitting totally right within me. And so I haven’t taught, and I haven’t meditated with much consistency since September. But my cushion are still set up, and I think maybe it is time to return there. Would any of you want to join me?