Once again, I've stumbled onto a gem that fits perfectly with the themes and emotions swirling in me.
"Rebirth: What we don't say"here is the full link, some excerpts, and my thoughts:
http://thesagemama.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/rebirth-what-we-don’t-say/
"Here are things that no woman tells another about motherhood. I will tell you this: I died. It was not childbirth. My labors were long and hard and beautiful. I have given birth twice: once to a screaming soul who shattered my idealistic visions of motherhood, the second time to an infant so ancient she didn’t utter a sound as she was lifted by the midwife from the water of the birthing tub, she just started at us. Both times my heart was cracked—shattered really and there would be no repairing it. The love that stretched and tore and suckled and broke my sleep was one so profound that nothing could have prepared me for it...
...When I did get back to me, I was gone. This is the thing that women don’t tell each other about motherhood. That you will never be who you were. That you will not see anything the way you used to see it, you will never hear language the way you used to hear it, music, color, photos, friends, family, career path–nothing or no one came through my transition from single woman to mother unexamined. Least of all myself...
...Old friends with self-absorbed ways didn’t make sense to me anymore...
...I just knew what she had to do. Knew what she needed to do to help her family get through that day and the next. She was lonely sometimes. I surrendered. Let myself dance invisibly. Let my identity fall through the cracks. Waited for a new self to emerge...
...A new self did emerge. This is what women do not tell each other. I want to say it here: You will die when you become a mother and it will hurt and it will be confusing and you will be someone you never imagined and then, you will be reborn...
...Their births have brought me closer to the earth and they have helped me pare my life down to its essentials. "
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Oh wow. I copied the pieces that jumped out and grabbed me and pertained, for me, just how I would also describe what transpires after the death of a loved one. The other night on a walk with my mom I said, "one family member dies and all the others are reborn". Death propels you into an instant rebirth. Remember what I said a few blogs ago, how material things no longer made sense? Spending money to dye your hair, amassing things, going the same places for the same purposes extracurricularly suddenly seemed foreign? That's what happens. And it is sudden.
Right now I still feel trapped inside myself. Thinking too deep. Feeling too much. I have what I call my "internal days" more often than not. I still don't completely trust myself to be good company or to come out of this new shell. I've become unreliable to myself in that way. I have a web of heavy emotion over me and it's so fragile that it's hard to get out or pretend it's not there. You can't go on as before, because there is no such thing as going on as before. When Chuck died, the person I was did too. You can never ever ever ever prepare for a death even if you know it's coming. But I was never prepared for my own. I have never heard anyone in all my life say that that's something that happens to a person. To a family.
When you lose someone, they way things were just one second before and everything you were and thought shift instantly. I was instantly reborn. I was aware of the simplicity one really needs. Follow your heart and live authentically cried my soul.
I feel lonely, too. Because I can't shake the sad and I am letting myself feel everything I need to feel whenever I need to feel it. I will be in the car in the morning and suddenly my eyes will well up with tears. I'll find myself sobbing on the living room floor when earlier that day I thought I was doing...okay. The process of grief is all over the place. It hasn't followed the "stages". It bounces around and there's no such thing as being "done".
It is what it is.
This is part of the new me, the for now me at least. The me who's now beginning to understand soul and death and metamorphosis and the cycles of life.
The me who in learning loss first, can begin to grasp life. For the first time ever, truly seeing that this is life in itself, this is the way it must be, and desiring to participate in the change, the switching of roles, from daughter to mother herself and fully accepting the death of the old me.
What this also teaches me is that there will be more. More deaths. Which mean more rebirths. When someone is lost. When someone is born. We have multiple layers of skin to shed through a life. Metamorphosis is the essence.
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This is so true and so well written: "when Chuck died the person I was died too"..and you are not prepared for that!!
ReplyDelete6 years ago I lost my uncle, my granny and my father in one year. I was feeling exactly the same!
Death-Rebirth the circle of life.....
" Follow your heart and live authentically cried my soul. " I'm still not quite there yet. Like the blogger you quoted, whoever I was died with the birth of my children, but in her place was someone else who looked like me, but wasn't quite. And then suddenly, SHE died again, when I lost my mother. And now, the "looks like me" who isn't really me, waits beneath surface, biding her time to be resurrected as who she will really and truly BE. The process is happening, but slowly. Too slowly I feel sometimes.
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