I am 34 years old.
A new mother in a foreign land.
I have approached motherhood as a marathon that might one day end; just keep running, keep performing, keep doing. I am going to win this battle.
My competitive, driven nature is what steers my mothering. I do everything and I do it very well. I wake endlessly in the night, feeding, changing, rocking, caring, I am so focused on the life of this little being, I forget who I am. Did I ever really know? Nothing else matters. Only he matters.
I have no needs, I don’t require nurturing. I live in a world of doing for others, never for myself. This is what I was taught is a good mother. My needs have no validity, no substance, what I want doesn’t matter. I devote myself to the needs of my family, this becomes who I am. Maybe who I always was. I lose all sense of my creative self and focus only on providing – physically, financially, emotionally, and otherwise.
At six months of age, we send Finn to a nearby daycare, a Dutch creche. I hand my baby over to a girl in her twenties in a small room full of crying babies. I don’t know what I am doing, all I know is that I have to work to care for my family. It is not only my job to mother, it is my job to provide.
In a fit of tears and overwhelm, and against every cell in body screaming to return, I leave the doors of the creche, walk to the train and head to my first day back at work. Something inside me begins to die.
Over the next few months, I pump breast milk in between meetings, on trains to client sites, at lunch, in bathroom stalls, and the car. I try to make it all work. I try to be everything to everyone, everyone except myself. My life is completely externalized.
I lose the baby weight quickly as stress becomes me. In a foggy sense of reality, I show up to meetings zombie-like, dimly lit by my competitive will to survive, but it’s not enough. I contribute very little, my energy isn’t sufficient to produce the same level of results as I once had, and I begin to realize that I am a failing.
I am failing my child by being away from him. He is sick every two weeks, some new virus from the creche which I inevitably catch and carry around for weeks. I live life with him vicariously through a few pictures that are sent to me during the day.
A part of me cries out, “What are you doing? You need to be with him!”. But I can’t. I must provide money, care, loving, nurturing to the entirety of the family unit. I must work to live.
But my work equally suffers. The promotion on the horizon fades away like a setting sun. It won’t be mine. My creative life stifles under the weight of it all. My soul withers. My light is in danger of going out.
To save myself, I start to work from home on Friday, Monday, whenever I get the chance. I leave early, arrive late, sneak around, scrape by, producing only the bare minimum. It is not enough. The death of something inside starts to pull me down, down, down. I suffer from intense insomnia for three weeks and decide I need therapy. Something is not working, and I struggle with myself, a war rages within. I cannot let go. Resistance is all know. I resist the ache, the overwhelm, the deep knowing that this is not the life I want, this is not who I am. My soul is pulling me pulling me pulling me, but I don’t have the ego strength to descend. I am lost in the middleworld, I am deeply hurting.
I arrive to her office on a cool spring day in March. She is a large, warm rotund Dutch woman. She is a mother and a psychotherapist. I sit with her in the stale office, on old wooden chairs with one box of tissues and small metal table between us. It’s been a long time since I have been in therapy. Years have gone by, and I am a completely different person.
In a way only a mother can do, she comforts the lost parts of my soul. She holds me in her warm embrace without ever touching me. We don’t speak the same language, we are not from the same culture, but she understands what it means to become a mother.
I am held by her over several sessions. I feel the life enter my body again, summer arrives, and we know that a move is imminent. To this day, I thank her for the role she played in warming my cold body back to life and showing me a glimpse of what it feels like to be mothered.
I spend the next several months before we leave on the banks of the Grote Canal. This is my first encounter with Great Mother.
Each day I ride my bike to the large canal lined with old growth poplar trees, perfectly planted on either side of the canal forming a tunnel of majestic emerald, green into eternity. A passageway to heaven, I think.
I find one tree, always this one tree, she calls to me.
As I am finishing up dinner and the nightly chores, I can hear her. She needs me and I need her. Regardless of the weather and waning daylight, I venture out. I ride my bike 10 minutes to land at her trunk. I sit for moments, sometimes hours with my back pressed gently against her trunk.
I can feel her.
Her roots stretching down into the earth beneath me. Her heartbeat, low and slow and steady. She calms my ravaged nervous system, I slow down to her pace, her frequency, her knowing.
I imagine she has arms that wrap around my body and hold me. Occasionally I look up to the canopy of protective green leaves above me, shading me and blocking the rain. I say thank you under my breath.
We watch the billowy clouds pass along the skyline, the rays of sunlight dancing across the murky canal waters, the sound of small waves writhing and splashing against the canal banks. I am being mothered.
Nothing feels more true than these moments on the canal with her.
Nothing heals more, loves me more, supports me more than these stolen moments in time when I come to sit at her feet.
Nothing else in the world seems to make sense, except for this.
And soon, I will have to say goodbye.
