Showing posts with label acceptance. Show all posts

Musings of a Mum: 24.5 Weeks





Baby Star,
It has only this week occurred to me that you are an actual baby.  I have felt you move in baby-like ways, and I have experienced my soul growing another soul - which may be why my soul feels especially depleted these days.  Well, just as I nourish myself for the two of us via food, drink, and movement, so must I double-nourish our collective soul.  It feels good to experience the reality of you for my excitement at this new life change is directly correlated. I am an excellent adjuster, but I am a rather terrible imagine-r.  The anticipation of something hard is almost always worse than the actuality of enduring its reality.  This is in part because we are simply not equipped at the pre-stages with tools to endure the changes.  It is only when immersed in the reality of our situation that the universe grants us what we need to know.  For instance, I doubt your Aunt Kelly would have thought she was strong enough to endure breast cancer, but she was.  And she did.  And now, she knows more about what she can endure than ever before.  Oh how worry steals our ability to just BE.


When I was but a child, I asked my mother how I would ever possibly manage to pay all my bills.  Cute, but indicative indeed of my tendency to worry about the future.  She said the strangest thing back to me, "You don't need that ticket yet."  Her mother  passed down that phrase from a story of Corrie Ten Boom.  Apparently, Corrie begged her mother to hold a train ticket weeks and weeks before their actual trip.  It wasn't until they were standing on the platform of the railway station that her mother handed her the ticket.  She simply didn't need it before that time.  I remind myself of this constantly.  I am sad to lose my current lifestyle, but eager to know how I will perform in the new one.  I want to make future decisions NOW based upon the sad lack of information I have to actually make those choices.  We have to wait for life to give us what we need, for it always does.  We can plan and hope, but borrowing emotions from the future always results in an inability to enjoy life as it exists NOW - in this very moment.   This includes accepting myself as a worrier - embracing and loving it while gently nudging it into its right place.


We are losing Jessica's mother very soon.  This grieves me deeply for many reasons, but as it pertains to you, I am very sad that you will never meet her.  She has been a magnificent example of motherhood to me.  Every time I think of cooking, I think of pouring a cold glass of Chardonnay because of her.  Every time I imagine an adult relationship with you, I imagine Jessica and Denise's relationship.  She is fabulous, trusting, truly interested, wise, talented, serving, and beautiful.  You will know her by legend and the turquoise ring Jessica gave me that I plan to bequeath you (it was Denise's mother's ring), but you may not know her indelible hospitality which immediately puts people at ease.  I could begin now to mourn her passing, but it has not yet come.  I will therefore discipline myself to stay in the moment, remember that each day she is still with us.  I will not mourn what is not yet to be mourned.  There is this moment, my sweet Scout.  Only this moment.


I have a confession to make.  I am usually a wayfarer for self-care and stomping out that ever-present internal voice of self-condemnation, but the physicality of pregnancy has uncovered another wellspring of self-hate I wasn't aware of.  I've never liked that I am physically lethargic and fail to do much about it.  Well, pregnancy has me confronting birth (hello physical toil!), which makes me confront myself as I anticipate and prepare my mind for the marathon.  I know I can and will do it, but I am afraid of panic and losing my peace.  I have discovered that I still really despise myself for giving up so easily, I hate that I feel physically weak and pathetic.  I feel judged and incapable. and keep wishing I were someone else.  This - to me - is the most blasphemous of all vices.  The universe put so much time and history and thought into the making of me, how DARE I request a change.  It is not for me to pine for something impossible, but rather I hope to find a way to love what is already existing.  This is my deep wish for you this week, as your soul gathers energy from mine.  May it be given the most generous portion of self-acceptance, self-love, and self-admiration possible.  For it is within this that you will most deeply be able to love others.  I was prideful that I had self-love figured out.  I am humbled yet again by this life.  How beautiful it is.


Have some fun in there, but please ease up on my low back. 
The Voice
acceptance letters to the baby musings of a mum
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On the afterwards, the presence of fear, and the ugliness of birth

Apparently August has come and gone.  The traffic on the bridge can only be explained by the influx of students and parents back to the daily grind.  I've noticed myself looking back a lot these last few days, trying to assimlate new information, new faces, and new feelings into my daily doings.


I believe one of my greatest strengths is in analysis.  Also, as an introvert, my natural tendency is to look back and assess my and others' behaviors and words (read: obsess).  Both of these personality traits combined makes for an anxious aftermath to social events, and I often feel that I severely mirepresented myself, wish I would have not said ___, wish I would have done ___, etc...and suddently, that swift and severe axe of self-judgement comes swinging down upon my head.  Now, I'm bleeding and blind.  I wonder if other people do this?

It reminds me of a year or so ago after a particularly grueling ladies' night.  Lots of wine had us loosed-lipped and  unabashedly weepy.  I remember waking up the next morning not only nursing a nasty headache, but feeling particularly sheepish about my vulnerable behavior and spent a few hours replaying everything I said just in case I needed to apologize to someone.  I desperately wished to go back in time and regain the composure and control I then seemed so eager to rid myself of.  I comforted myself with the notion that the other girls were probably feeling the same way and wrote one of them a letter to that effect, encouraging her not to succumb to false insecurities, to not berate herself for something she may have said,  and to take all parts of the others into her being with willing acceptance, gracious forgiveness, and fierce loyalty.

In the end, there is nothing to do with my analysis of people other than to love them.  This includes myself.  I am human.  You are human.  We can be decidedly virtuous and altruistic. We can be atrociously maleficent and grotesque.  Even the most composed of people have hurt someone else with a flippant, impulsive comment.  Lord knows every single one of us has been hurt by the same.  We can spout off so much of our bull shit and soapbox about our arbitrary opinions that can crush others around us at worst, or (at best) keeps them from sharing their own opinions.  We do not listen well, we do not speak carefully.  We intimidate and dominate and in our eagerness to be known, bulldoze those in our company.

All of this to say that I feel this great need to analyze and obsess and ultimately forgive.  I also feel the need to assure myself of people's affections for me.  But in the end, my acceptance of Candace is what is really in decline.  I could easily demand assurances from others, but I know, oh dears, HOW I KNOW - this is my battle.   It is no one's job but my own to be confident and to trustingly accept people's words at face value without criticism or manipulative self-deprecation.


Speaking of insecurities, I have recently been stopped short by fear.  Many of you know I am working on a humble collection of poems for self-publishing.  I am in the editing stages, and I have to tell someone - the poems are total shit. They are simply not good enough to put out into the world; a world I love, a world of Plath and Rilke and Shakespeare and Donne.  I do not think the world needs another mediocre poet.  For the most part, I am a confident writer and care little about how my work is received (coming from someone who has received only positive feedback, so I realize I am lacking in the character formed by artistic rejection).  Now that I am really looking to put myself out there, fear is taking hold of my throat. I feel it very physcially.

One one hand, the fear makes me pissed and frustrated.  On the other, I see it as a necessary birth pang.  What mother wasn't afraid to give birth?  What artist wasn't terrified to put their canvas on display?  Fear is a right of passage, and I'm beginning to trust its presence and leave it alone.

"Oh hello Fear.  I forgot you were there.  You may go now."
(a small adaptation of Doc Holliday in Tombstone)

I am sick of the portayal of artists and designers and stylists online who chose to convey an overly-white, overly-simple, overly-amiable, overly-clear, and annoyingly overly-painless process to creating.  Even if it sometimes gets muddy for them, it seems they are unable to express the sheer disgusting ugliness that comes from birth.  Have you ever seen a woman deliver a baby?  It's completely violent and gross.  It's also the most naturally beautiful occurance.

What I am saying here is that creating is ugly. I am prepared to work hard on these poems and puke them up and be doubled over in labor pains and fight like holy hell to bring forth that which has been placed inside of me.  I am on the verge of something wanting out and it's gagging me and tearing me and I am not sure I will survive it.  

I hope you'll like the poems.  I hope you'll like me.
But more so, I hope against ALL HOPE that I like them, that I will like me.
And that the scars won't be too bad.
acceptance fear friends
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