This year: A gift of Life

This year: A gift of life

Did you know that our nap-time was and will remain one of my favourite things? It was just me and you. A time of rest, no stress, rejuvenation, calm. You would read to me our story, that we made our own, a book titled: Just you and me. I would lie awake most of the time, seeing you drift into sleep rapidly, and trying to catch up to you in the dream world. Your breath became the only noise in the room. I tried to synchronise myself to it. And I always failed after a few breaths: or too slow or too fast. Following your breath-pattern wasn’t giving me the breaths that I needed in the long-term. I always had this thought: what if, when we are born on Earth and take our first breath, it sets off a rhythm in our breathing pattern. A rhythm that no other could catch up with. In that sense, it wasn’t me who couldn’t synchronise to you, it was just the way it was because we hadn’t started to breathe at the same time. I wondered where my twin of breath was: someone living out there, having been born and taken their first breath at the exact same time as I did. A memory of love in one of its purest forms when I think back to it. However, our relationship was not as synchronised-neither was our breath, you could say-and chaos was a ruler of many moments over the years. This year, coming back home to live with you, was such a fearful thing for me. I knew that being in person with you everyday would bring me to face my own shadows. I was tired of facing my demons after these two last years, but I also had the most precious key in my pocket this time which I knew would give the strength to let love be invited in again and again. The love of a mother. Having been pregnant, having that experience, even so short as it was, that love I felt move through me, lives in me now. This unconditional, world-creator, energy. I tapped into Mother’s love. I understood, suddenly, how much you were only doing your best, and that best sometimes lacked showing me the love in the form that I needed to understand that I was deserving.

Being a mother is one the most under-appreciated, underestimated, undervalued thing. One thing is for certain, this mother-daughter, mother child bond is one of the biggest and most meaningful connections I have experienced. When I say « this is a death moment right here » means that in the summary of my life, flashing through my consciousness in the last instants of my lungs taking in air, there will be you, us. This. So how come our bond holds so many extremities? How can you be opposite things into one being for me? Feeling into the polarity. How can both exist? Like day and night. It’s a lie when they say it is only one, it makes sense only this way, we can specifically say what is. Both go together, hand in hand. It always has a spectrum, with two opposites. Completing themselves by being one. The earth could not grow trees without the sun, but without night’s rest of the sun-light, no living being could integrate. It’s the cycle where each plays its part. Which is bad and which is good? Who can say? I’ve always wanted to only seize my attachment to your light, wanting the other side to disappear, not be there, and when it appeared, the rage, the anger, the non-understanding, it was heart-breaking. In those moments I thought: What was wrong with you, but most importantly what was wrong with me? Why couldn’t we figure it out? How could you not see that I just wanted you to tell me: I love you. I don’t understand everything, I am doing my best, but one thing is for certain I love you, and I am happy that you are my daughter.

 Writing is difficult because I need to go back to the darkest place, that has been illuminated since, with love, grace, and peace.

Your activism with breastfeeding, for me and my sisters is something I carry. The contact and affectivity it brought to the nourishment of my being, that I bring into my own relations, and the importance of the humanness of touch and closeness is a gift you were only able to give us through being and doing it. You were my best friend when I was little, I would tell you everything when I was too shy to utter a word in the public world. You made justice happen when I was bullied and you went to see my teachers. I never regretted speaking up and telling you things. I know angels smile when we’re together. There’s something organically mystical of just being with you. I don’t know if you’re always conscious of it, but I catch myself feeling into the little things we share, and feel the meaning it must vibrate through time and space. Nothing logical about it, just a « of course » feeling. One of the reasons why I’m on Earth is to be your daughter.

When you left for your treatment when I was 7 years old, life felt like it had stopped. The hours were going so slowly, the rhythm of a week felt like a month. You missed Christmas, my little sister turning four, and New Years. It was hard, but most of all it was so bland. Bland of taste, of movement, of life. You’re the engine that carries this family. That makes magic come into life. When you came back, on a cold day of January, the sun was shining in my Inner-World. When I saw you at the airport, colours came back into being. It was the night and day, you were gone and then you were back.

But sometimes stories don’t turn out as linear as we tell them to be. You brought back a big grey cloud over you that you’ve been trying to get rid of ever since. It was the moments I didn’t really get, when I was a child, when you were feeling something of your own experience, story, trigger, where I felt overlooked, not seen. However, I had to make sure you were feeling okay. If Mom’s not okay, then I’m not okay. You’re my lifeline. My umbilical cord to life is through you. How can I make you happy, smile, feel content within yourself? I became an emotional manager, something that I felt was love. An equation that made sense unconsciously: if I were to make you happy, you would be okay, if you were okay, it made space for you to love me or at least show me love. I repeated this pattern with so many people: friends, partners, lovers. I was inauthentic, not centred. It was coming from a place of lack and not plenty. I even put myself in danger because the emotions of someone were more important in that moment than feeling safe in my body. Trauma carries through in these patterns until they are seen. And in moments where you would scream at me and get angry I was thinking how dare you. How dare you be mad at me, when I give myself in all ways I know how to make you feel good. My desire was for you to feel content being a mom and be assured you wouldn’t want to leave us. Today, the want is still there, but the respect I have for your own path has opened: you can leave, my child inside would not totally get it, but the adult in me whose role is to reassure, knows that you have your own destiny, bigger than being a mom.

 I couldn’t save you. I can’t save anyone. I can just be me. And this is what I’ve been trying my best to do this year. Letting go of these walls of fear, of trying to find the love in places that are not giving it to me. Searching it in myself, that subtle place, where the end of the illusion of being separate is The start of the Entirety of the Allness alive and divine in me pouring into my own singular experience of living in myself, in my body, exchanging with the world around me. Embodying that love for me, in order for the ripple effect to be you seeing the love you have for yourself. I badly needed to show myself that love, and I feel that that’s what my baby that I never had came through to teach me. The love I felt for my child in my belly made me understand, at a core level, how much you must love me, and how much I must learn to love myself.

I witnessed you over the years being afraid of intense emotions, feeling guilty and ashamed of not tasting life as you know how to. And fight fight fight. Not surrender. Until recently, this last year. Maybe I brought to you a mirror of a surrender I was forced to do in my own life to come back into vitality. Can’t fight death, the invisible and the hurt and sorrow of not being able to be in the physical presence of someone you love. Life showed me the way into love. It showed me that the experience of life is to love, feel loved, be love. In all shape and form. And that attachment is not part of something real. Nature is always evolving, slowly, day by day, sometimes drastically with a storm, but it is never the same. The cycles are always turning, and they bring with each of them their unique experience. There is always a way. And loving yourself, letting the Universe hold you like a baby who’s just breathing, who feels and senses and experiences, is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself. And through different micro-phenomenons I bore witness to it. Seeing you letting your hair grow-out, going grey gracefully this year, throughout the whole process was so awe-plenty. You are so beautiful wearing your crown today. Looking younger, more revitalised, before your 60s. Being that example for other women to be more natural with what they are, in the moment and period of their life. There is beauty in Nature, in all stages of life. And you’re pulling it off. Coming out of the male gaze and re-defining beauty on your own terms.

Witnessing you and embracing you as the woman you are, gave space to the woman in me to emerge. I knew that by seeing and accepting the shadows of you, was going to break the illusions of the transmitted, conditioned and incaging pressure I put on myself to be only « love and light » and let them evaporate. You are light and shadow for me. Nevertheless, the more compassion I have felt able to hold this year for you, I know deep within, is the compassion I have cultivated for myself. There wasn’t any alternative to run away this year, of not looking at these patterns that bother, that are too triggering, that are too dense, that make me go in loops of reactivity and defensiveness. In a spine-tingling way, I was not able to run away, because you were in front of me. Relationships are a mirror, a close up of yourself. You can know yourself, but not as much as when you’re facing someone. That’s a way of meeting thyself. I feel okay in that space I’ve been growing into: I carry light and shadow, for myself and for all walks of life that will cross my path. I am human, I am whole.

Each song we all come to play, unique to ourselves and our own wholeness, begins when we take that first breath. I know this now, feeling the music deeply in my soul. I am spreading my wings, and when I’ll fly, I know you’ll be okay, I trust the Universe. I need to live what it is to be something other than being your daughter.

I have your rhythm in my blood, the harmony in my heart. I will carry it, by owning my own. It’s time for me to step into my purpose, knowingly. Spread that music I create each day when I wake up, and each night when I fall asleep, and its echo that will be played in the memories of time when I will be gone, no longer in this form. Mother ship, that will always take me home. When I close my eyes, I can sense you. I will always feel you. Holding me, tenderly, softly, lightly. A horizon. The world is open. Just you and me.