This last year has probably been the hardest year of my life, and believe me, I don’t say that lightly. For 12 months or even more I felt myself falling into a void deeper than ever before. I glazed over the thin veil that divides sanity from madness and I wondered how long it would be before I irrevocably fell through it. There were good days too… many, but the void kept beckoning and pulling, and even when I gave in to it, it was never the steep liberating fall I was hoping for, but more like a fog that wrapped around me, that weighed on me, that blinded me. This is the true nature of insanity, this not being fully here nor there. This entrapment.
I’m used to going where the wind takes me and it usually turns out alright… Maybe I’ve been spoiled by life. Maybe I’ve never faced a real challenge before. Or maybe it is the fact that I haven’t been able to fully explore this new life of mine because I’m sitting at home being a mum pretty much 24/7… or perhaps I’m just older and more tired. Maybe my barely functional, ADHD brain can’t find its way back to normality after becoming a parent. Or my anxiety has gone through the roof since covid. Or all of the above. Who knows. But this is what I’ve been dealing with.
For the last year and a bit, scraping myself off of the ground has been a daily chore,what has kept me tethered to sanity is the little trickle of work (massage clients, my priestess course, etc) dance classes and the events I’ve been able to be part of. Not bubble baths or yoga. Not meditation or breath work. Just work. Just people. Feeling that I have something I can share with others, whether it’s my treatments or dancing. Feeling that I’m good at something in life. And this is something interesting to reflect upon.
Already being an immigrant, losing the little community I had, losing what I had left of “me-time” to fit around my son’s and my partner’s schedules and then losing my financial independence, completely threw me into a disenfranchised domestic sphere, that in turn made me question everything about myself: my skills, my worth, my beliefs, my understanding of why I do things the way I do them. Basically it made me question my capacity to do life and really rocked me to the core.
I don’t know if all mothers go through this or if it’s just this specific blend of uprooting + motherhood + ADHD. Who knows… you tell me.
But I’ll tell you what I discovered a few weeks ago:
I was sharing my tales of woe with my partner and trying to express all this in a less articulated, much more emotional way, when he said: “But why are you worrying so much? You don’t need to make money just yet. We’re tight but we’ve been fine so far” and that right there completely changed my outlook on things. I don’t know why I hadn't internalised this before. Maybe I just needed, as in a spell, for the words to be uttered. I needed him to say it. Because when I heard those words I felt as if someone had taken a bucketful of fucks to give and threw it out the window. Suddenly I was overcome by a lightness I hadn’t felt in for over a year. And then I thought, bloody hell, what the actual fuck! How did my brain get me here? I’m a bloody feminist and high Priestess and whatnot. How did I become so disempowered?
So there it is, after 2 and a half years of full time parenting, bedsharing and breastfeeding I can tell you with all certainty that these are not the reasons why I’m going mad, even if it is oh so easy to blame those. The reason I’m going mad is because I’ve lost my standing in the world and with that have gone my financial independence, and consequently, my self-esteem. There. As simple and as complex as that.
And the weirdest thing is that I “knew”. I knew with my head that this would happen. As I said, I’m a feminist, yeah, I’ve read some stuff. But one thing is to know it in the head and another to be right in the middle of it…That bottomless pit. Like Rita Segato says, the domestic habitat is that space where the world of a woman becomes nuclear, encapsulated and depoliticised. It’s the place where women go to die.
Here lies the truest and hardest challenge of becoming a mother: dying to the right of being a public entity, a being with agency. Becoming domestic and domesticated.
It is true, that spiritually speaking, we also have to die to ALL preconceived ideas of ourselves, which is good and could potentially be very transformative, not only for us and our families but for the entire world! but that’s only if the world allowed us to actually go through this process. (more on this on a future blog)
Instead, it will have us believe that the only way to keep ourselves from disappearing is to quickly get our kids in full-time childcare so we can go back to work; to stick them in their own room so we can go back to sleeping; to put them on the bottle so we go back to our bodily autonomy or whatever. But that is not it! This type of belonging, this entrainment that we feel with our children, can be desirable and desired by the mother. We want our kids with our gut but that feeling is clouded by the thought that it is them who are keeping us from the world. And yet, it is not that the baby burdens us, but that we, as mothers, are a burden to society. It’s not that parenting is too hard, it's that parenting was never meant to be done in isolation. We know this but we keep looking outside for a fix. I truly believe no one will save us from that fate, except each other. Each other. Women, supporting women. Women exercising the changes they need in the world through their own realities. Making the private, domestic space, public. As it has been since the dawn of time, the change will come from us getting together! And as the famous quote goes, when women get together, amazing things happen.
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