Holding Tiny Humans
The right side photo is from 8 years ago. I’m overcome with wonder at the sweet, preciousness of my sleeping, spirit nephew, Sonny, in my arms.
I’m so grateful that my body easily knows how to hold others. My body is designed to radiate love and comfort to those allowed to get close enough to feel and experience it. I’m soft, gentle, warm, and generously available for holding tiny humans.
The sacred, outpouring of love, vulnerability, and protectiveness that babies activate in me is so powerful. It creates some ache in my heart to feel my natural mother instinct in my life where I intentionally don’t have human children of my own to teach me about the lifelong marathon of mothering.
The right side photo also stokes deep emotion in me because it reminds me of the left side photo of my birth mom taken about 45 years ago when she was pregnant with me. There are infinite ways to express mother love. The phenomenal ways that she chose to love me by blowing up her life to make sure that I could have a chance at a beautiful life and find my parents that were ready to raise me is beyond my comprehension. I feel that love in my bones. I don’t ever doubt the massive courage it takes to love and let go. The pain, the joy, the gut-wrenching bliss and exhaustion of it all, of mothering, I know that my body was designed for it and I still choose to take my entire adult life to mother myself because my heart and my soul tell me that this is my path in this lifetime.
In the photo of me, I see so much in my posture and slightly awkward expression. I know that I was feeling so much love that I didn’t know how to stay in my body. The alarm of being flooded with such love for life, for me, for others is something it may take me my lifetime to learn how to be with. It feels like trying to take a sip of water from a firehose. I’m learning every day how to be the mother of my own capacity to love.