The Childless Mother
From my womb no children will birth and I will not be anyone’s mother. My eyes well with sadness and I am left feeling inadequate and incomplete.
As I wait for surgery to remove my womb I contemplate what this means and I contemplate how this feels.
I have in the past loved my menstrual cycle. It has made me feel healthy, purposeful, powerful; like I was functioning right as a woman and that I would one day be able to bear a child.
But now that sacred function that I once embraced, is a burden, a drain, an imposition and a barrier to living my life. It has changed; it has morphed into flow that lasts weeks and pain that brings tears. It is no longer functional, healthy, purposeful or powerful. I curse it and impatiently wait for that which is most femininely sacred to be taken from me.
I do have this sense that all is as it should be; that in this life I was not meant to bear children, yet it is hard to not feel that I have missed out on something so vitally essential to the human spirit- the creation of new life. To be engulfed in love so unconditionally raw, to stand in awe of the miracle of life and to be witness to the growth and evolution of another.
How do I welcome in this barren state? Can I be a mother without a child? I love and I nurture; I teach and I guide; I can be selfless in the care of others. Yet is that enough? Can I bring these things to all of humanity: my love, my nurturing, my wisdom, my guidance? Surely this is what the world needs, Mothers not just to individual children but Mothers to all. Can I, can we, be selfless enough to be Mothers to strangers, to be Mothers to those who intentionally cause harm. For surely in this time of increasing shadow, when the patriarchy is clawing to hold onto its power, that the Mother, both barren and fruitful, and all she represents is needed most.
December 2017