Wild & Woven Women

As is the Earth, we are born to attune to, to attach to and attend the living world we are a part of. Tending is a vocation that manifests in many forms, whether we tend ourselves, each other, our children or the work we do and the places we inhabit. This tending requires empathy, attunement, awareness and attention… and though these things may come naturally to us, how do we replenish the well which provides these resources to each of us in our to offer them?

I have been on the path of tending my birth children for 13 years, becoming a mother to my first child on Mother’s Day itself, but perhaps this journey began long ago when I first started to tend the land and all it’s children as a child myself. I would play in the garden, under huge bushes making stews with mud and flowers, singing with the bird song and weaving the grasses. My Earth mother taught be how to tend just by taking me in her arms and giving me a home to belong to.

We are all born to this Earth with an innate intimacy with nature, our first home, our first mother and our first relationship. As we are raised up in this modern world we often become further and further from this source of life, attachment and intimacy creating a grief we cannot name.

Many of us have a deep longing to become a mother ourselves from the very beginning, but when we actually are given a child to tend, we can feel unskilled, unsure and untended ourselves. Though our instincts often kick in, our isolation can begin, and it is here that we most often feel the first pangs of the mother struggle.

“We are designed to receive touch, to hear sounds and words entering our ears that soothe and comfort. We are shaped for closeness and for intimacy with our surroundings. Our profound feeling of lacking somethings are not a reflection of personal failure, but the reflection of a society that has failed to offers what we were designed to expect.”– Jean Liedloff- The Continum Concept.

As mothers we are often tasked with mothering not only our babies but ourselves, our families, friends and possibly our whole society as we all move through the collective loss of not receiving what we were designed to have. Even if our parents were wonderful, our society is not set up to properly nurture the collectives we were made to be a part of, thus is there is a perpetual wound of an unseen grief of longing for our tribes.

Because this need to belong is so innate in humans we all suffer from this invisible wound, but we rarely have the words to even express it. This unseen ache is often omnipresent, yet little tended. Sometimes we call it loneliness, sometimes loss, but often we don’t even name it at all, internally trying to grapple with it but because we aren’t even given language to unstained this grief we privately over identify with it as our own problem. Because our lives are so “good” in the western world we rarely want to give this quite grief a name and much less room in our lives. We internalize it or push it far from view, taking on more than we are meant to carry.

Your class was absolutely beautiful; you created such a nourishing place, where we could form a supportive community of parents and babies. On the days Sarah and I came to class, we both were so much happier for the rest of the day. It is like food for the soul.

– Abby & baby Sarah, and Sam and Anna

Your class was absolutely beautiful; you created such a nourishing place, where we could form a supportive community of parents and babies. On the days Sarah and I came to class, we both were so much happier for the rest of the day. It is like food for the soul.

– Abby & baby Sarah, and Sam and Anna

I see this pattern amplified in the early stages of motherhood because we are living a culture that expects us to be overjoyed with our new babies. Even when we are filled with joy, the quiet, unnamed loneliness can persist unprocessed and unwelcome. Because Motherhood is such a metamorphic stage of life, we don’t always know what is happening as we turn to mush and sprout our wings on our matresence.

Often it isn’t until afterward we have moved through the first years of motherhood, can we look back and see how much process was at play. Grief of the old self, abilities, communities, freedoms, capacities, but also grief of the innate expectation we didn’t even know was in our DNA that we would have a village to help raise us and our children, a system that we were designed for, but often don’t receive.

For me it is when I realized who this grief was and named it, was I able to not only welcome it’s teachings to the table, but work to create the village I had been longing for.

Sometimes we don’t always know what we need until we get it, and the internal relief is palpable. Because I have been through this initiation of simultaneous rapture and loneliness, I have the ability to detect and name it in the field of motherhood. I feel a responsibility as a village member to mentor mothers in the art of tending their families and themselves.