08 Jan Motherhood, an Initiation into the Great Mysteries
Joyous Mysteries
Nothing adequately prepared me for childbirth. At seven years old I witnessed my half-brother’s natural home birth and was not nearly as amazed by the spectacle as the adults who were present. While pregnant I read Spiritual Midwifery and other natural birthing books and I also attended hospital classes. Through all that I had experienced and learned, I was under the impression that labor would be a rhythmic pattern of intensity and surrender in which the woman could sink into deep relaxation between contractions, or even orgasm. So, naturally, I showed up at the hospital with a bag full of massage tools, essential oils, and snacks. Once admitted to the labor and delivery room, the nurses checked my vitals and the baby’s position. I ate half a banana and immediately threw it up. My doula suggested I try getting in the bath, but after a few minutes I found it was unbearable to be confined in the tub. I quickly transitioned to active labor and spent six hours on my hands and knees, braced by a yoga ball, screaming through every unrelenting contraction without pause. The doctor apparently didn’t expect that I, a first-time mother, would have a short six-hour labor, so the nurse caught the baby. When the obstetrician arrived a few minutes later to stitch me up, before introducing himself to me, he asked the nurse if I had delivered on hands and knees, then grumbled audibly when the nurse confirmed that I had.
When they placed the baby on my bare body I was in shock from the intensity of labor and pain of childbirth, and I felt emotionally numb. I looked at my daughter blankly and wondered who the small stranger was and why she had chosen me to be her mother. Yet, knowing that these first moments of mother and child bonding were crucial to healthy attachment, I kissed her wet head and held her to my breast. She suckled, pooped on me, then fell asleep.
The nurse and doula who assisted my labor and delivery regaled me with praise and told me that the birth had been amazing and beautiful. I was speechless. When my husband and I were transferred to the postpartum recovery unit with our little one, we were both stunned. Why hadn’t we known the truth about childbirth? He wondered out loud why our culture fetishizes violence and death in cinema but censors the violence of birth.
Roza was born minutes before midnight on the eve of the 2016 U.S. election. Laying in the hospital bed the night after giving birth, as I discovered the election results on my phone, I felt frozen by fear. My body and my daughter’s felt unsafe in a world where savage greed and misogyny win ultimate power. And, along with all that was torn to shreds in twenty-four hours, I will add my professional identity which was invested in a role working for the government.
After leaving the hospital I felt I couldn’t share a joyful announcement about Roza’s birth when, it seemed to me, that the world was in a collective trauma response about the U.S. election. At home I began to tend to healing the demolition of my body and my life as I had known it, and to rise to the demands of caring for my newborn baby. All the while, I felt fragmented. What was that awesome creative – destructive force that had taken over my body in labor? Who was I now, other than a warm, lactating body? During vaginal childbirth, the tissues which won’t stretch tear. Similarly, my being resisted relinquishing who I had been for who I was becoming. Eventually, continuing to suppress and conceal my transformation from maiden to mother felt violent to my whole being, so I surrendered to the metamorphosis.
Storytelling, brazen truth-telling, with other moms has helped me integrate childbirth trauma and postpartum depression and to slowly transmute my wild, bloody birth initiation from sorrowful into powerful. The dominant culture fears the untamed tsunami power of childbirth and refuses to acknowledge the true magnificence of motherhood initiation. The epic experiences of new mothers – the joy, sorrow, and glory – must be heard for the culture to heal from pathological patriarchy.
The Joyful Mysteries of the rosary offer us a path for reclaiming the miracle of childbirth initiation through Mary’s heroic story. (Annunciation) Angel Gabriel greets the maiden Mary and informs her that, if she so chooses, she may bring a child into the world and that this child’s mere existence will threaten the status quo. (Visitation) Unwed and with child, Mary visits her cousin who is also pregnant despite her advanced age. They celebrate each other and rejoice in the miracle of new life stirring within their wombs. (Nativity) After walking from Nazareth to Bethlehem to be counted for the census, Mary’s labor is established. Away from the familiar places of her home and village where she is known, she surrenders to the thunderous force of emergent life and her own transformation. She labors among animals and squats low to the earth, in the dirt, to birth her child. (Presentation) Mary flaunts her sovereignty as a new mother when she boldly presents her child to the larger community. (Finding at the Temple) Later, when Mary’s son is soon to become a young man, he disappears, and she finds him in the Temple debating scripture with a group of male teachers and she brings him home to complete his learning under her guidance.
Initiation into Motherhood: Sorrowful Mysteries
When my daughter was seven months old, I flew with her from Colorado to Arizona to see my mother. My mom’s lymphoma was progressing, and I came to help her navigate an eventual move into an affordable assisted living situation. My relationship with my mother had been strained for many, many years because of her addictions to cigarettes, painkillers, sugar, and me. As soon as I was old enough, as a teen, I left home to escape the vortex of her insatiable wants. Regardless of the past and what was still unhealed between us, as her only child I felt responsible for supporting her end-of-life process.
When Roza and I arrived at my mother’s home it was obvious to me that something was wrong because she didn’t leap out of her chair to give me one of her typical clingy hugs which always made me recoil. Ignoring my instincts, I rushed her out the door because we had an appointment at a ‘facility.’ Throughout the tour my mother seemed unusually out of it, almost delirious. I asked her if we should go to the hospital, but she insisted on returning home to rest. When she laid down in her bed she could barely breathe. I curled up next to her and nursed my baby. With caring concern, I told my mom that I thought she might be dying. She said, “it’s coming fast,” and again she refused my offer to take her to the hospital. Part of me thought that this was exactly how death should come, daughter assisting mother. But then I thought I ought to get some advice from relatives, so I made calls to my step-grandmother and my mother’s siblings. Everyone urged me to take her to the emergency room immediately.
Although resistant to leave her home, the family consensus convinced my mother to let me take her to the nearest hospital, Saint Mary’s. During admission, the nurses found that my mom’s blood-oxygen level was dangerously low. The ER doctor asked her to stay overnight for testing and her hospitalization extended for nearly a week.
While my mother was in the care of professionals, I began to triage her whole life, taking over decisions about her care and finances. Knowing it would not be safe for her to return home, I rushed to get things in order to relocate he after she was discharged. My Godmother Anna, one of my mother’s oldest friends, was also in Tucson at the time and she spent several days helping me begin to clear out my mother’s filthy, cluttered home and she also supported me as I navigated important decisions and toxic extended family dynamics. While wearing Roza on my body to keep my baby daughter safe from the hazards on the floor of my mom’s mobile home, Anna and I moved quickly to sift through my mother’s belongings, separating important documents, necessities, and a few modest valuables from nicotine tar and dust covered detritus. Graciously, Anna boxed up things from my childhood, a few family heirlooms and my mother’s cherished rock and crystal collection and then she delivered the boxes to my home in Colorado on her way north to Minnesota. At the time, only focused on the urgency of the situation, I had no idea how important those objects would become to me after my mother was gone.
Roza and I visited my mother twice a day at Saint Mary’s to bring her things she asked for and to track down the latest information about her care. Each time I entered the hospital my heart would sink, aching with anticipation of the inevitable. As I walked the long corridors to her room, pushing Roza in a stroller, overwhelmed by the enormous task upon me, paintings and statues of Saints Mary and Joseph comforted and centered me. Photographs of Catholic clergy and former hospital administrators also covered the walls. The images recalled my mother’s Catholic upbringing and her childhood as a doctor’s daughter. In those institutional hallways I felt ancestors, angles and Our Lady surrounding us, witnessing me walk another passage of initiation, becoming mother to my mother and accompanying her to the end of her life.
Roza and I went back and forth between Colorado and Arizona two more times that summer. After my mother was discharged from Saint Mary’s and went to rehab briefly, we helped her settle into a small group home. My mother, no longer driving, had us running around in the 115-degree (F) heat to satisfy all her needs and wants; doctor appointments, upgrading her phone and sweet treats. I felt annoyed by her unconscious privilege and incessant demands, and I longed for a moment of deeper connection before it was too late. Before returning home again, I sat with my mother in her small new room, side by side on her bed, and I tried to kindly explain that her litany of wants left no time for experiencing a meaningful presence together. She paused, looked me in the eyes and said, “You know what I really need? A new cell phone case.” The heartbreak stung like salt in a wound, but I let the grief roll through me without reacting, then we said good-bye.
Two weeks later, Roza and I rushed back to Arizona after my mom fell and had emergency hip replacement surgery. This time my mother’s youngest brother Gabriel also came from the UK to see my mom and, as it unfolded, witness her passing. Gabriel, Roza and I found my mother in critical condition, this time at a different hospital. Although conscious, she seemed delirious again. Her vitals were unstable, and her oxygen level was very low. She was agitated and she kept taking off her oxygen mask which would set off alarms and send the nurses running to her room.
Childhood attachment trauma and a stressful life as a poor, single mom had calcified in my mother over her lifetime, making her stubborn and a fanatical magical thinker, fiercely committed to living life on her own terms, regardless of the consequences. On that final day her coping strategies faded, and she seemed vulnerable. As I sat by my mother’s bedside, I held her hand and repeated what I had told her two months ago hoping we could at last be honest with each other in the end. “I think you are dying,” I said. This time she said, “I’m scared.” My heart ached and tears stung my eyes. I told her that we would find each other again. I invited her to be with us in spirit and to watch over Roza from the other side. At that moment, as though my mother and I were setting coordinates for a reunion, I imagined her as a hawk, circling above me and Roza while we played outdoors back home in Colorado. I told her that we would always keep a place for her at our table, which I envisioned as one of her crystals as an ever-present centerpiece at family meals. Time deepened as we loved each other without the tethers of past wrongdoings. Decades of discord dissolved.
At the end of the day, a hospice nurse came to evaluate and transfer my mother. Before giving her consent to be moved to hospice, she looked at me and asked, “Is this okay with you?” Flooded with grief but still on the surface, I nodded. While she was being moved to the hospice center, Gabriel, Roza and I went to get dinner. By the time we returned to her she was unconscious. We stayed by her bedside until the next evening. The last thing I said to her silent body was “Thank you for giving me this life. It’s time now for you to go and show us all the miracles you know are possible from the other side.” After we stepped out for a meal, she took her last breath at 6:30 pm, on the eve of her seventy-third birthday, at the exact time of her birth.
Initiation into Motherhood: Glorious Mysteries
Shortly after my mother died my daughter began to speak. “Mama.” For many months that was Roza’s only word and she repeated it with different inflections, seemingly verbalizing my interior grief experience, “Mama! Mama?” My inner child and my body longed for my mama and wondered where the woman who bore me into this world had gone.
I began to search for my mother among her belongings, studying the evidence of her life in images and objects, probing for who she had been before I knew her and before her pain and addiction won. In the broken pottery and rocks I found treasures and eternal mysteries.
Childhood photographs of my mother show a privileged little girl, dressed in church finery, making her way through Catholic coming of age ceremonies such as her first communion and confirmation. The pictures also show her family growing as a new sibling arrived nearly every two years, making my mother the eldest of five children. In family pictures I saw my grandmother’s flat gaze and knew that motherhood was not joyful for her. There is a photograph of my mother in her graduation cap and gown, showing her successful completion of an all-girls Catholic education. My mother came of age in the mid-sixties in San Francisco and claimed her freedom through sex, drugs, and spiritual seeking. Her hair grew longer, and her dresses were no longer tailored, but sewn by hand. Tucked in a box of photographs I found her hand drawn and decoratively colored astrological chart. And, I found the birth certificate for my brother who died at birth in 1977, two years before I was born.
In her stone collection I found rocks and crystals which hold stories that my heart yearns to know. One rock looks pregnant, its form is smooth, round, triangular, made of ordinary gray granite and it is embedded with a smooth pink granite circle which looks like it bulges with life. As I hold it, I imagine my mother as a young woman fifty years ago finding it while hiking in the Sonoran Desert, the place she felt most at home. I see her pick it up and feel its weight and the warmth it has absorbed from the sun. She runs her thumb over the stone’s belly and feels her own longing to become a mother, so she takes it with her as a fertility fetish. Another rock is gray and porous and clearly came from the sea. As I hold it in my hand, I imagine that she found it in the surf at Stinson Beach after she and my father cast their first child’s ashes into the waves. The rock is stippled with pin holes that go right through and I feel the aching absence of her baby, from her body and from the world in the same moment. A deep, dazzling, dark purple crystal with geometric surface textures seems to recall her story of being abducted by aliens late one night while on a road trip in the Arizona desert with two friends. Two small, plain wooden boxes hold a variety of sacred items, crystal balls, gems, pieces of metal and little bundles of dry grass. The collections seem to add up to the wholeness my mother sought in life and failed to find in herself.
Bringing these fragments of her life together I created a mosaic. I could see how my mother had struggled throughout her life with deep shame and insecurity. I saw how hard she tried to free herself from the oppression she had internalized from her upbringing. I began to feel the depth of her grief from losing her first child. I knew her chronic physical pain from sever scoliosis. And, I had witnessed the burden she carried as a poor single mom without a profession or purpose other than motherhood. My heart cracked open. The sorrow overtook me, and I went to nature seeking a place where I could freely sob and weep and howl. I longed to know the young woman I had discovered in her relics. I yelled out to my mother, “Mama, I wanted to know you!”
It was in nature where my mother began to show up. Freed from her burdensome body, after her death she came to us flying and flitting in different winged forms. I sensed her presence as the sparrows on our balcony pecking seeds from our planters and peeking in on us through our windows. She came as butterflies dancing and sipping sweet nectar. And, just as I had envisioned when I had sat with my mom in the hospital on her last conscious day, she came to us many times as hawks circling overhead while Roza and I played at neighborhood playgrounds abutting the Rocky Mountains foothills.
I discovered that nature allowed me access to the unseen world where my mother had departed to. Wild places became my refuge for feeling my grief and, later, claiming my joy. Trees, boulders, and streams became holy shrines where I placed my prayers and petitions. I began to sense the presence of Our Lady on the breeze and to feel the support of ancestors underfoot. I began to hear the voice of my soul speaking again. In this way, my mother led me back to the Great Mother.
In Our Lady’s Garden life and prayer are undifferentiated. Now I often take my children with me to my outdoor prayer places to play. There I quietly call out to our dead and my children are awed to meet their timeless grandmothers: Raven, Cottonwood, and Brook. In the forest, too, I am finding the mother who I am becoming.
Photo: Natalie Lennard, Birth Undisturbed