finding my way home: motherhood

when my daughter was born, some portal opened inside me.  as i held this perfect and beautiful little woman-to-be, i felt such a deep commitment to her.  during those first moments holding her in my arms, it was like i made a little pact.

i silently promised to do my best, my very best to teach her what this woman thing was all about.  i wanted her to have the benefit of all those lessons i had learned, i wanted her life to be easier, her confusion to be smaller, her happiness to be bigger.  i wanted her to have a guide.

when she was still in my belly, i could feel her femininity blossoming.  although i kept it a secret, i knew she was a girl; i knew it all along.  images of a woman dancing kept gliding through my mind, and even more, i felt this aura of soft womanly light surrounding me.  maybe all pregnant woman get that little glow, but i definitely felt that mine had a pink tinge to it.

when she was still an infant, i found a blank journal that said "i hope you dance" on the front.  i bought the journal, and since that time, every six months to a year i pull out the journal and write a little passage to my woman in the making.  my plan is to save the journal and give it to her during her own time of transition.

the reason all this guidance probably means so much to me is because of how messily i slopped my way from little girl to adolescent.  it wasn't that my mother and the other women around weren't there for me, but just that they didn't have a clue how to lead a young girl through the dense jungle of puberty.  none of them had a leader, none of them had fared much better on their own treks; how were they to know what i needed?

but i suppose after spending years of my adult life unraveling yucky patterns and processing poor choices from my own unguided youth, i just couldn't bear the thought that my own little girl would have it just the same.  sure, she'd make mistakes.  sure, life would be hard sometimes.  but wasn't there something i could do to make it easier?

and, that was the question that filled my early years of motherhood.  that was the question that overwhelmed me with shame when i saw the ugly patterns of wanting validation from men surface when she was just a baby.  that was the question that told me i needed to figure out two things for myself: how to be the mother i really wanted to be, and even more, how to be the woman i really wanted to be.

i tried to find all that within myself in the community where i grew up, but it was just too easy to fall back into unconscious patterns, to act out what i had seen elsewhere, to act either from resistance or attraction to what was happening around me.  i just couldn't chart a new course being surrounded by the things that had built my old course.

and this deep feeling that i needed to do it differently was a large part of the fuel behind the desire to move cross country.

i hit a major turning point in eugene, oregon.  two special kindergarten teachers at the eugene waldorf school, ms. bonnie and ms. lourdes, were some of the first guides to me in how to parent from a different place.  i remember sitting at the kid-sized table in their lovely classroom crying because i didn't know how to console my daughter during violent spells of crying in her sleep.  i was overwhelmed with guilt that it was all my fault.

that guilt had strong roots in the fact that having her in daycare was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life.  i only dropped her off there once, and i stood by the door listening to her cry for a good twenty minutes before i could leave.  then, i only was at work for an hour or so before i just had to take a sick day, run back to the daycare, and take her home. 

from then on, my husband and i made do with an 'i never take her to daycare' arrangement, and then, my husband and i stopped by a bookstore one afternoon, and the cashier recognized us.  she told us how she used to work at that daycare, and that she quit because of how her supervisors would never let her pick up our daughter.  her co-workers told her that my daughter needed to cry it out, and even after hours and hours of non-stop crying, they wouldn't let her go and give some love to our little baby girl.

ouch.

so, getting back to that little kindergarten table in eugene, oregon, you can now hopefully see why i thought maybe these night terror crying spells that we couldn't wake her up from somehow had to do with our awful parenting choices.  and as i went through all this with these kindergarten teachers, i felt no judgment coming from them.  they clearly hadn't made the same choices for their own children and were not advocates of such choices, but they just held this loving space of compassion for both me and for my daughter. 

their whole way of being was this immense lesson to me.  they didn't try to solve and conquer; they just listened and offered their loving insights with an open hand. . .and within a couple weeks the crying spells were gone for good. 

from there, mentors in my new journey of both motherhood and womanhood came from everywhere.  all sorts of women seemed to model little tidbits of the path i was seeking, and before long i didn't even need the mentors.  a process began to unfold inside me, a process of intuiting my way into the mother i most truly wanted to be.  and i've got to say, it has been amazing path - one that could fill many more pages on its own.

but, all this leads into the present, and how that time of transition for my daughter is finally coming to pass.  after getting a permission slip from her school last spring asking if she could attend the girls only video presentation at school, i was cued that the time to get serious about this transition stuff had come.

i jumped on amazon and started ordering books: first, some of my judy blume favorites for her, and then, some books to help me get a sense of how i could possibly guide her through this stuff.  one book in particular grabbed me: becoming peers by deanna l'am.

i happily floated through the pages after it arrived, absorbing the ideas and formulating my own, until i got to her discussion of the "coming of age year."  in this chapter, the author talks about identifying a year for your girl to work with different women in her life.  she suggests gathering a group of women that love your transitioning girl, and asking them each to choose a task or project to do with your daughter during that year, creating a sort-of net of wisdom to hold her as she moves through the confusion and questions of puberty.

i loved the idea . . . but felt this pit in my stomach as i saw how logistically impossible it would be.  i lived so far from my friends, from my own mother, from my relatives.  there was no one in my current town that really felt close enough for me to ask them to mentor my daughter's coming of age year.

as the weeks passed and a really difficult time arose in my own life, i felt more and more of that pain of not having a community of women around me.

part of why i'd left my hometown was to discover a different way of being a woman, and now, all these years later, the whole plan seemed to be turning back on itself.  now, i felt this great need for all those women that i left behind.  they weren't just like me, but now i could see how their different perspectives and even their different values were their wisdom.  those different ways were the great jewels they could not only offer me, but they were those things that i most wanted them to offer to my daughter.


and within some months, these feelings about geography, marriage, and motherhood all converged, and the answer to all the questions about "finding my way home" started coming clear. 

the path that we've been on is a circle.  little by little, the plans started to evolve, and it seems that in the spring, we'll be moving back to where we started: the eastcoast.  we'll have family and friends around, a house of our own, and a new adventure to watch unfold.

although it turns out that our search for a home out in the world was in vain, it's turned out to be quite a fortuitous wave of ignorance.  by blindly looking around every corner for this perfect home to appear, we started to break down and realize there never would be a place with all pluses and no minuses. 

finding a home for us was about releasing all the resistance to seeing the great blessings of what was right in front of us from the beginning.