To be a mother is to be forever turned inside out; your vulnerability personified in the human you grew from your very body, at first little and needing your protection, then grown, becoming into their own protection.  What nobody tells you is that you, as a mother with heart forever exposed and walking around in this world, have no way of protecting yourself. 

We know, of course, that the child must and will leave and, if we are lucky, bloom fully into their own life, their own personhood, walking a path they began with you but must diverge from you.  They take a piece of you with them in this leaving, a piece fully alive and connected to you as an invisible nerve floating in the space separating you, and the question emerges…“how do I live without this person?”; what do I do with the empty chair next to me at the breakfast table?…it is not fit for my dog.  

I remember the shock of giving birth, when that little human went from one minute inside my belly, to the next on top of it.  That moment was otherworldly, like a dream that didn’t make sense, but one I knew to be true. I didn’t understand then how fundamentally my life had just changed, how much I had been living contained within my own motivation and whims and living emotionally separated from the world around me; I didn’t know how very selfishly I had lived my life until then. I found out soon enough in those proceeding months when I thought I would break from the demand of such a little one, of being pushed to give more than I thought I had, to being slowly peeled of my emotional casing, the rawness that meant I was forever exposed and vulnerable; nobody tells you how painful it is to be a mother, not that you’d understand if they did.

Oh, but the love.  “Love”; what a tiny, trite, insignificant little word to describe such a feeling, feelings, really, as these.  There are not enough variations of the word in English to fully encompass all the nuance in these feelings, euphoria and terror intertwined and inseparable.  We, as mothers, no longer belong to ourselves because as long as this human exists in the world, whether a small child or an adult, we belong to them.  We have no choice.  Without any control or participation on our parts, all sense of identity, all understanding of the world is shed and turned inside out, reconfigured…it is soul-shaking.  

Moving out of the hubris of knowing everything and into a place where you suddenly fully realize the depth to which you know nothing… it is humbling.  And magical because you find yourself dissolved, no barrier between you and creation itself.  It is, in fact, a spiritual experience, and were it not for the grounding of the pain, you may be so bold as to feel like a god; powerful beyond all human understanding, infused into every living thing on earth, devoid of the troubles of everyday life, above the differences, the struggles, the fighting, all the superficial suffering we create in this world, beyond even having a sense of self. It all dissolves and we understand, as we can only understand in our bodies when we are fully connected to our souls and our minds are serving rather than trying to control, that we are part of everything else; every person, every tree, every raindrop, every cloud, every living thing on earth.  We suddenly understand that all perceived barriers are just illusions.

In that moment of transition from labor to birth I was thus naked and born anew myself. Nothing existed, but the bond, forever felt and known to be true, though unseen, between me and this child and the understanding of the unbreakability of it. Through the knowing of this bond, I understood, for the first time, that I, too, am bound to this love, born of it, through it, every cell of my being steeped in it.

That has been the true gift of motherhood for me; to feel once again what I had forgotten – that penetrating, cellular, dissolving kind of love, which is my birthright and is, in fact, everyone’s birthright.  It is past all feelings of smallness and inadequacy, past all ego, all expectations of sacrifice and the inequity in the responsibility of raising the child, past all the worldly struggle and doubt that returns after the birth.  Past all this we are blessed with a memory of belonging ourselves, evidenced in the person of the child who made it possible, not because we are mothers, but because we are human.

We return to that dissolved experience with every laugh bursting from the child’s mouth, every embrace exchanged, with the very feeling of their presence, even if it’s in the next room. Perhaps that is why, having lived so many years in a state of such penetrating, cellular, dissolving love that the idea of the absence leaves me so insecure, and a great sense of fear emerges, fear of being left stripped bare to every electric nerve of my soul with nothing to connect it to, without the daily reminder of my belonging to something greater than myself.  How do I protect myself from the pain of this disconnection…because I feel I may just implode with sorrow.

I am confident that I have been the very best of mothers for my child these last 18 years; firm when necessary, measured with discipline, observing keenly in order to provide in the best way, supportive, encouraging, always loving and affectionate, being mindful, after a time, to not parent from my own perceived sense of lack.  So, I am not worried that I send my child out into the world unprepared, in as much as a child can be prepared.  It is not a question of no longer being able to protect my child, of releasing them to the world, fingers crossed, but I am overwhelmed with a sense of a void opening up inside me, not unlike childbirth where the presence leaves the body, but this time, instead of being delivered into my arms, delivered into the world out of my arms’ reach. 

Despite my confusion of how to move into this next phase of life, despite my difficulty in accepting what comes next, despite the sorrow, I sense a wisdom in me that knows it is never possible to lose connection with this love because it is not of the material world but is of something eternal and divine.  It is not dependent on physical presence. Something experiential remembers it within my body and is so much a part of me as to never be forgotten, hidden or taken away.  I can not separate myself from it any more than I could separate from my skin.

So, I will sit with the sadness, allowing myself to feel it and learn from it as best I can while resting in the wisdom of knowing, in every cell of my being, that I can never be abandoned from this kind of divine love.  I always have access to it because I am, as we all are, born of it.  Reminding myself…this is all the protection I need.