Another return
And many more returns
Dear friends, I wrote this a few days ago, on 5th of May, my birthday. Didn’t know if I would actually share it, but I want to now. Forgive the delay! Wherever you are, I wish you a safe return.
Rain falls softly outside. I have to close my door to hear it. The boys are playing downstairs. I don’t know what’s going on, but I hear the word “experiment!” being squealed every so often, which is partly cute, partly worrisome. All their experiment ideas come from youtube. Usually they involve ungodly amounts of coca cola and chemicals, and they result in a neon pink mass mushrooming like radioactive waste into the sky.
Today is my birthday. I’ve never been good at birthdays, neither mine nor anyone else’s. My kids are helping me change that, and to figure out what my resistance is even about. It’s just so hard to go back there, you know? To those times when I made those tragic decisions about life and myself. Decisions born of heartache and necessity. They served me well back then, I suppose. I was just a kid.
Around 8 pm last night, Axel started getting ideas. “I’m making you a birthday card,” he said, running off, only to come back a minute later. “I’m making you a really nice present too. And oh! I’m going to make you a surprise breakfast. I know where you put the party decorations,” he assured me. “And I do know how to put them up myself.”
It was all so heartening, as if my birthday had begun already. I thought, maybe this is when my birth did start actually. I was born just after 7 AM so it’s very likely that my mother’s body was beginning to open the night before. Maybe she was already packing her hospital bag. I surrendered to Axel’s feverish plotting. He’s the kind of person who won’t sleep at all if something’s on his mind. He’ll lay there all night, thinking and thinking, and then be up at 5 AM to try and solve it.
“Listen, no stress about breakfast,” I said a dozen times. “It’s better for you to get plenty of rest tonight so that we can enjoy the day together. We won’t have fun if you’re tired and grumpy.”
Nevertheless, dawn had barely cracked open this morning when I heard him galloping down the stairs. A pale gray light seeped through the crack of our bedroom window. The earliest birds were warming up their voices outside. Just Axel and the birds, both fine wonders of nature, clattering and chanting away. I couldn’t have stopped him even if I’d wanted to.
It was 5 AM, just a couple of hours before I arrived. My mother’s hospital room must have been noisy by now. Her pain coupled with the commotion of a 1980 labor and delivery ward. I’ve seen pictures. So many machines, so many people in pale green cloaks and masks. My mother was forced to give birth lying on her back with legs up in stirrups. I cannot even imagine that. I pushed out all three of mine on my knees.
Bastian woke up a few minutes past 7, and he woke up Rio too. Axel ran up to our room. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. 7:10, I was born, wrinkly and porous and shrieking. Back then, they didn’t give babies to their mothers. They took them away, turned them upside down, flicked them a few times, bathed them in sinks, laid them in plastic boxes.
“Give me a birthday hug,” I said, pulling my three as close to me as I could. If only I could have paused time, when they were all there, how they all felt. Rio still so squishy and happy to be alive. Bastian as sturdy as a rock yet also as tender as moss. Axel so thin now, so sure of himself, so ready for anything.
“Do you want your breakfast in bed, or do you want to come downstairs?” Axel asked excitedly. And, “what do you want to do today, mama?”
One thing I wanted is this, a small pocket of time to write. To revisit my tiny newborn body and wrap her up in my bare skin, tell her she’s not alone, tell her the world is not all violence and insensitivity. I tell her about all of the beauty and kindness, and yes the magic too. I do this every year, and every year I find it a bit easier, as if the edges are being sanded down. From something so sharp and jagged it once threatened to eat me alive to now something I can tolerate. I can hold my infant self longer and longer each time, and she becomes easier to soothe too.
After that, I wanted to reflect on the upcoming year. In my gut, I know this year will be monumental. In ways that are quiet rather than earth-shattering. Basically I just want to allow myself to be me. I was about to say that I want to make new rules for myself. But rules doesn’t feel right. Rules are still too rigid. Rules try and dictate how and where water should flow, not accepting that the water already knows how.
I am a person who needs to flow. I don't do well with rigidity, which might be a reflection of my current season in life, or it might be how I was designed yet never allowed to function. I was taught to live by clocks and calendars, hard work within hard lines. But actually, I’m far happier and more productive when allowed to flow in and out of work, motherhood, writing, rest, pleasure, and all the other demands of life. I need to follow where my energy is taking me, flow with what's moving, and sometimes that means I'm working conventional hours, and sometimes that means I'm working whenever I can fit it in. I need to be able to walk outside and feel the bare earth on my feet whenever it's a beautiful day, to respond to whatever situation or person I meet along my way. I need to be able to slow down when I'm worn out, and to crank shit out when I'm energized. As a creative person, I need to chase ideas down rabbit holes for no reason other than to see what happens. I need to respond to insights when they come – usually out of seemingly nowhere! I need more freedom, less confinement to labels. More fluidity, less rigidity found in corporate structures. I need to be in a creative environment, and to show up there every day with a plan, but also with enough space for the unplanned to occur. Which means I need to cultivate space in my days, not have every single hour booked. I need to be human, not a machine, and I need to be the human I was designed to be.
This time last year, I was 39 weeks pregnant with Rio. Since I’d entered my third trimester, I kept getting the idea that this baby was going to save me. Those words came like an audio message from beyond, and I couldn’t shake it. Some days it was a whisper, and other days it was loud. Yet I also struggled to believe it. I told only a handful of people. At this point, I didn’t know he was Rio. I didn’t even know he was a boy. I simply thought it foolish to believe that a baby could save me. And what was he saving me from? I came up with some ideas back then, but it turns out that those ideas were all too small.
Looking back to last year, I was stuck. Stuck in a confining job, stuck in a lifelong loop of people pleasing, stuck in a lifetime of self-doubt. All of which drained me dry. Then came Rio, our little river baby, and not only did I fall so deeply in love, I also fell so naturally into his rhythm. I did not listen to anyone else's opinions on how to mother him or what he should be doing. I did not give in to busy-ness or scheduling or even punctuality. We simply flowed so peacefully and intuitively through our days. This past year has been a process of self retrieval. Like remembering who I was before I was told I was unacceptable. Learning to flow with life again has not changed one area of life. It has changed everything. I accepted Rio so completely, and in doing so, accepted myself. And that has saved me.
So I don’t need new rules. I just need to give myself permission to be me.
Already this has allowed me to express my needs, and believe that my needs actually matter. It allowed me to wake up this morning and feel, maybe for the first time ever, that my birthday is really, truly, a return.
I’ve even returned to the vision I once had for Wyld. And still have for Wyld. The vision I never dared to follow because I was told it was incapable of succeeding. Now I find myself asking, what is my definition of success anyway? Turns out it’s quite different than theirs.
My wish this year is for many more returns. Widening the circle each year, but never doubting my essence, my center. I think of a line by Virginia Woolf:
I am rooted but I flow.
Rooted in who I’m meant to be, flowing with life.
Speaking of returns, it’s time for me to get back to the boys now. They have big plans for today, and I don’t want to miss any of it.
Wishing you many returns too, dear you.
xx
Beth