untethered

navigating identity as a new mother

We finally buried our daughter’s placenta. 

After touching base with the lowest realms of my lived experience; after moving our family, goats and farm operation a full three times; after landing on the remote windswept mountainside of the West Elk Wilderness; after knowing the most excruciatingly lonesome landscapes of human suffering - finally, on a sunny late summer afternoon, we buried the placenta beneath an old juniper tree. 

Someone once told me that burying the placenta registers the child to mother Gaia’s consciousness. Like most people register their children with the State, we wanted to, more importantly, register her with the living earth. 

Some women eat their placenta. Or they dry it and put it in capsules to replenish themselves after birth. Some women blend it in a smoothie or make placenta stroganoff. Many women relinquish it to the hazardous waste bin in the hospital without a second thought. 

For me, I just wanted to feed the earth with that unspeakably sacred life-giving universe that has connected flesh-bound generations from time primordial.

Scotty dug the hole. Deep. We lowered the bloody, giggling mass into the earth. I cried. Amara ran around perfectly entranced in momentary wonder. I dropped in some herbs, feathers, prayers. I cried again. A completion of some kind, I felt, in an oftentimes unacknowledging world.

And today, after nineteen months of around-the-clock devotional care to the livingness of another being, I am, awkwardly, taking the whole day to myself. A hot springs and a dinner date, in the solitude of my own company. 

And as I slowly unwind from the constancy of external demands, I begin to wonder…

Who am I?

I start to slow down, to come home to my own presence and I see: my previous body, mind, purpose and role in community, my languaging and practices, my self-centered meanderings through space and time – Obliterated. 

Who the fuck am I now?

I feel I am floating, untethered, unanchored – nothing is as it was, nothing will ever be as it was, and there is nothing to compare this to, no road map, no point of reference. Floating. Liminal. 

Bewildered and between worlds, I observe my humanity: the exhaustion, the doubts, the humbled pride in my unlikely successes, the curiosities and the total unknowingness of who, what and how… My humanity circles around me and I somehow find compassion, maybe even humor, at the total re-creation of my being. Who am I now?

I didn’t realize birth would permanently break open the bones of my hips. 

I didn’t imagine how these lines of sleep deprivation would engrave arroyos beneath my eyelids. 

I couldn't have conceived of the complete social readjustment. Mother and child. Husband and wife. Milk and blood and… 

Who are my people now?

How am I to relate to the world?

Who understands and how do I have patience for those who don’t?

At the hot springs I wear a hat and a scowl to ensure no one tries to talk to me. I find refuge in the empty sauna, the silent pool, the bathroom stall. I don’t want to engage externally at all. As I leave the dressing room I hear a new mother talking about how much she loves motherhood and I think, What the fuck is wrong with me? Motherhood slayed me, brought me to my knees, stripped me bare and burned away all I held precious. Meek, humbled, enduring, I feel I am barely coming up for air now.

And then, I remember. My daughter. 

Her humor. Her strength. Her goofiness. Her health. This little nugget of impossibility made manifest, she is my success, my light, the center of my galaxy, for a while anyway. 

And this newfound strength within me - unshakable - I did that. No nannies, no epidural, no advil or benadryl, no sleeping pills, no pumps… Much to the confusion and concern of loved ones, I gave that girl my all, my heart and soul, my blood and milk and breath. Her life.

Alive with Radiance. As it was done hundreds of years ago. 

And in the debris of all that life-creating chaos and beauty, I will find again, my own Radiance. My own light, re-imagined, upleveled, transfixed on a new point in the universe, a new star, a new galactic center around which to circle a new dance of Creation.  

The birth of a daughter, the birth of a mother. The birth of a mother, the birth of a universe.

But today, I will just float here, and, heeding the advice of three wise women, “Do nothing.”