Lessons From My Mother
I was separated from my mother at about five years old. It was the most devastating experience in my life and to this day I am still processing it emotionally and working through the resulting traumatized parts of my personality. I am blessed that she still had an occasional presence in my childhood and that we were able to fully reconnect later in life, knowing without a doubt that her love for me is stronger than anything I could ask for. Still, the damage was already done. I had already been removed from the most important person in my life for reasons I was too young to comprehend. The only thing I could do to survive it was internalize the responsibility of staying in the custody of my new caregivers so I wouldn't be displaced again. This meant that I would learn to be afraid of embracing my own autonomy and speaking my truth. I wouldn't understand the power and necessity of boundaries and authenticity for years while seeking protection and love from family, friends, romantic partners; pretty much everyone but myself. This only fostered deep-seated resentment and exhaustion. I would witness the other women and girls in my life retell this same story with their constant masking, self-sacrificing and co-dependancy as they settled on a fraction of the love and life they sought. I have been carrying generations of hefty feelings for not only myself, but every feminine person who impacted my life. While it's socially expected that women and femmes be "emotional" there are still limitations on appropriate ways to express ourselves. Our anger is too loud. Sadness is too heavy. Pain is unattractive. Our ugly, weighty emotions are unladylike to other people and shame is often encouraged to keep us in check. Nature does not share these same principles. Nature is both gentle and ruthless. She is dark caverns and bright snow, rotted wood and blossomed flora. She is raging flames and calm waves, shifty sand and stable mountains. She is the only entity that showed me the shamelessness in being a mess as well as how to come back from it. She has taught me how to be destroyed with grace, and to resurrect myself from the fallout; how to let go and regrow. Most importantly, she has taught me how to advocate for myself when others feel entitled to what I am gifted to share. Nature embodies the duality of life in a way many of us have been conditioned to repress or feel negatively towards, and does so without remorse. She inspires me to be the mother for myself that I needed most in those critical self-developmental moments. I have written a poem to showcase some of the most important lessons I have learned from observing nature from the perspective of a mother talking to a child. This is "Lessons From My Mother":
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