MA

I feel like I have been nudging up closer to something lately. Whatever the piece is that it is all about. The thing that is holding all of this in orbit all these years. And whatever wisdom or insight it is that comes with the stacked lessons of all the years.

A bunch of things have been lining up sweetly as of late. Reigniting and reaffirming an inner resonance that I think I may sometimes forget or neglect or question into the periphery. I have met a couple of mothers that I feel some kinship with recently, beyond the surface connection of kids and family. Into the deeper terrain of mothering as the modality for the great unlocking of our own, as well as our shared, humanity. One woman shared some Jungian resources and influences with me and I had to laugh when they were shared again by another influence only days later. That is how it goes I suppose. What resonates, simply does. And builds its own whole vibrational infrastructure that magnetizes or repels. Or is neutral. Maybe most often is neutral actually. Which feels like dreamless sleep. Dull and typical and set on cruise.

Jungian analysis has been a particular lens of influence for many years. I have shared that here time and again I am sure. Women and archetypes and the unfurling and becoming of ourselves… But more recently I have been clued into some particular new writings on Motherhood considered through the Jungian perspective and it feels holy and fundamental all at once. Like the baseline to the forever story I have been weaving and telling in my most central heart fire.

I chatted with an old friend of mine the other day. She is one of my life’s big teachers in the ALL CAPS sense, irreverent and sacred and brave and so tender all at once. I have learned a lot from her. And even though I had been mothering for half a decade or so before she crossed over into the world of the MA, I think we are perhaps more similar to one another in our approach and our experience of mothering than most other mothers I have yet to meet and know. She and I let our children devour us. We let them do with us as they will. And we, for the most part, love it. We say things like Yes and More and Come Closer and I Will and I Do and I Am Yours and on and on. And it doesn’t make us less or compromised or hollow. It makes us sublime.

Now before I get any push back about boundaries and respect or whatever it will be, from my own swlf or anyone else, I want to be clear that I am not saying we don’t have those things. Some more than others and sometimes more than others. Sure. It is just that the tone of it feels different to me. The sacrifice and the declaration both of some different ilk than what I think I am encountering through the narrative retelling of other mothers. And what I think is maybe different is this: she and I, my old friend and me, we have let the wild animal of our womanhood loose with our children. We have exposed them to the raw righteousness of our largess and it is something that our kids feel both protected by and in awe of. And sure, when they are older perhaps a tidge annoyed by, but in a way that also makes them weirdly proud. It is unique in that it is so essential. A big mama paradox. More of me is more of me is more of me and on and on like that.

This longtime friend and soul mama on the path also has some children that didn’t stay in their bodies. Maybe that is part of why we are the way we are. Walking the shadowlands of motherhood makes you something different. But also something that, in the end, isn’t separate from any mother anywhere. We all know it in the end. Or at particular endpoints. Perhaps we don’t all choose to light that darkness up, but it is there nonetheless. As real and huge and whole as any one of us on our very best day of living.

So, we connect well you could say. I got to know her right on the heels of the loss of her first child and she was so real and raw and revealed and I knew right away that she had it going on. Living in the bright impact of the pain of parenting. And now, over 10 years later, I still relate to her attitude and approach to parenting. Put it all out on the line. Why wouldn’t we?

After talking for almost an hour, she said: hey megs, while I’ve got you here, I need to ask what you think about something- in that special way that we often save the meat of the conversation til the very end- what would you think if I had another kid? I mean, I am 42. To which of course I said: yeah you are asking the worst possible person. The only answer in my opinion is yes. If you feel it, why not at least try. I mean, thank god that Chris had a vasectomy at the start of the pandemic because I would have 100% been like, hey, why not? what’s to lose? let’s go for another! Which is ridiculous and not a big desire really. I no longer feel someone knocking, pressing, waiting, to be let through like I did with Wilfred for always until he finally made it home to me. But if you feel someone waiting… then I am all for trying. All for it. At whatever age, in whatever form. That shit is undeniable in my opinion and one better listen up, cuz otherwise the shadow mother may be pressed too hard.

All of this said even from deep in the trenches of an extended breastfeeding endurance event. We are living regression to regression right now: waking up over and over in the night to nurse, refusing bedtime from anyone but mama, and sometimes care from anyone else as well. It is an event! I am at that stage in nursing well past the hey day of the first year where I felt lean and strong and vital and well into the end of the second year where my whole body feels like goo and anything vital in the marrow of me has long since been sucked clean. Yet even so. I persist.

Because, why make a fuss? One day it’ll end just like that and the past will be just that. Past. No child nurses forever. But it may be the case that Wilfred nurses for less than the other Newlin babes and is made to wean around 2 or so. I am not sure I have another year in me. Eider was done at 3.5. Maple at just before 4. I can’t imagine that right now.

My friend said that she weaned her oldest when he was about two and half. He had a breast in one hand and a cheeseburger in the other and she was like yeah we are probably good. We can be done. Lol. It is so classic. A certain kind of toddler mayhem that is so perfectly relatable. It is mayhem. The other day someone in my fam left the chicken gate open and Wilfred wandered down there to hang with the girls. When I found him, he had smashed an egg on top of their waterer and was leaning onto it licking up the yoke. See! He’s a big kid now! Just kidding. He’s my bb and he can probably nurse forevs.

Anyway. All of it, always and forever, spins around the theme and the image and the archetype of The Mother. I mean, of course. What else? All of this attraction to a mood of nostalgia and a longing to re-member certain moments. Crystalize them in my being. They are close to the truth. But maybe not quite.

I think the real story may be more closely a longing for the whole experience. Not the good mother but the mother who lives both in the light and the shadow. The mother who sees it for what it is, but also the glittering sublime expression of the mundane. The wild mother. The one who was born of bone and prayer and is equally ready to hold and carry the weight of all the world’s babies and also build the pyre and feed it with the marrow of time.

I am getting closer to her. To the real truth telling of the mother who is all stages in the cycle. Like that. The whole universe inside the MA.