Harbinger

In these last couple of weeks I have found the bliss of mothering this new child to be hauntingly accompanied by melancholy, as if the two emotions are holding hands and engaging in a conversation that tries to make sense of the present, past, and future. The bliss looks down at the child while he nurses, tries to find the memory of our knowing one another deep in his dark baby eyes. The melancholy rests sleepily nearby, sorting through what is to come...a low, dull feeling of sadness that—until recently—I couldn't quite explain.

Here's what I have so far. I have come to theorize that this underlying sadness is an emotional preparation for the impending, additional loss of self, as the layers of who I have been peel away with the unfolding of this new child.

I remember, deep into the 3 years of my first child, an awareness that I had changed significantly. When she was in the belly, I worried in my own self-centered way that she would never come to understand or appreciate the love I would give her, and that I would fade away into the vacuum of her unknowing, having very little left to give to myself. But it was not long into her life that I realized she had already blessed me with something much greater than her appreciation: mothering my child had completely rearranged my mind, freeing me from the barnacled images and perceptions that had relentlessly clung on for many years. And understandably so: they had nothing quite so forceful to shake them loose before. The union with my partner had begun that process, but being a mother kicked it into a higher gear of transformation.

This change has been sweeping, and I am still in the throes of it, palpably aware of the lessening of mind burdens that used to weigh me down: food worries, fears about the body, fear of letting go, impatience, anger, depression. There is much more to release, but I am overwhelmed by the impact thus far. A movement away from self and into Self.

And of practice: for me, there is no practice without this mothering. Indeed, practice began as an independent journey. But the arrival of my daughter merged with daily practice into a beautiful, symbiotic, holistic life force. In every vinyasa, I smell her, hear her in the breath, draw deep into the womb to find stillness.

And now my son is here. And in this pause of daily physical practice, this healing and holding, this constancy of nursing and giving and wandering through the haze of sleep deprivation and negotiating the fragile and enduring energy between my partner and me...why the melancholy? Am I sinking back into that undertow of mind-chatter that drags us all down, undoing the levity of strength and balance that has come from the bliss of mothering my daughter? I encounter the familiar resentment of the solitude of the mother that my male partner could never know; I seek his awe at the miracle of childbirthing and breast feeding, and feel deeply the absence of a recognition that he could never begin to offer, for I, too, cannot begin to acknowledge it fully for myself. I sense a palpable aging, a fear of the speed of time, a dark sorrow around mortality... Is it all back, this noise? Is the melancholy a blanket of regression back into the indulgence of self-pity and fear?

I do not think so.

The melancholy, I think, is the harbinger of what will fall away as this boy reveals himself to me. It is the beginning of another force bringing on the molting of the body, and of the tectonic shifting of plates of the mind. That force, with the force of my daughter, will continue to draw love out of me, from deep places that seem to go much, much farther down than the soles of my feet. When I return to the physical practice, with these babies in my soul, I expect to be beside myself, and that is really always where I wanted to be.