A little midnight musing. A sleepy but can’t sleep prose about parenting realities so nebulous:
Hebrews 2:14. God’s awareness of our inner hearts; God’s compassion in connection and succor.
So, I’ve been having overwhelming nesting instincts lately, and I’m pondering what this means. Really? I’ve been a mother for almost 17 years! How can this be? Apace with these feelings, I dreamt of a giant, complex tree growing in the middle of what appears as my distinctive, whimsical house. My family is there, but I can’t see them; only sense them and their emotions. A branch of the tree breaks and falls, and goes against all logical sense by leaving the house unscathed. Impossible, I think.
Since we are only ourselves the best interpreters of our dreams, and because I believe our dreams are always some kind of manifestation of ourselves (objects and people), wherein lies divine revelation (but only if we are honest), I am finding a place of much to contemplate and to be curious about with this dream. It just might be connected to this nesting instinct I am having in my stages of being awake these days, but nesting instincts aren’t supposed to occur unless you’re pregnant, or at least that’s what I thought (and by the way, no, I’m not).
On a macro-level, I think it has to do with my sensitivity to the world’s own birthing of newness. The earth and all who are in it is transitioning, laboring to bring forth new eras of human development. The pangs of this global birth are really screaming and pushing right now. And there is much resistance. As an empath, at times it just doesn’t seem possible to imagine new life beyond so much of the current planetary and anthropological angst we face. I wonder if others, even those who haven’t given birth, but have motherly instincts, or creative urgings, or deep sensitivities, male or female, all along the spectrum, feel this way. I believe even the children of today hold a more distinct wisdom and intensity necessary to be in and to survive, to be hope-bearers, and light shiners specific to this moment of the ever evolving life as we know it. Souls coming into this world are capable of a more intensely grand awareness, but more painfully struggling, perhaps because they need to be.
On a personal level, these nesting feelings are partly due to the fact that my youngest fledgling will be a teenager in T minus 84 days, and I’m excited, but I can’t stand it. I’ll be a Mama of two teens! How super fun, and terrifying! (The sacred paradox reveals itself again, as it tends to repeatedly and uniquely manifest.) I know the empty nest will come, but as I live in the present moment, my body seems to want to cope by recalling the days I carried my babes in utero, and suddenly I want to remodel this, and organize that. I’ve even felt like selling the house and finding a new one to freshly personalize. Thankfully, we will be doing the traditional teenager bedroom makeover for Nathan on his 13th, so I can focus these maternal energies, creativities and newness desires there. Sometimes, when I feel this instinct strongly, I will place one hand between my breasts, and another over my uterus, and meditate on the gentle, and utmost power it is to be a Mother. Truly we can all do this, whether we have given birth or not, whether we are anatomically able to birth or not. The Feminine Wisdom is something we can all learn from, because it is part of all of us, like ribbons and twigs in the Nest.
Macro and micro, it’s a reminder, too, of the imperative need for all humans to find ways to nurture and be nurtured, to be held, to be fetal, to be vulnerable, to hold and sacredly carry, and be carried by, something we are both part of and independent of. As I hold this unexpected feeling in my early 40’s, something I thought I wouldn’t experience again, I am curious about what I might carry, deeply- a sort of belly/gut carrying that I can nurture and prepare for in this phase of my life. What can I patiently create with this instinctual nesting message in my heart? It’s one way I can cope with the residual gusts of my two fledgling’s wings freshly flapping in eager anticipation. It’s all I can do to embrace every moment of when those wings still choose a nest-resting-need to be near, in the sacred intermittence of treasured mother-child contact (for at least 2 and 6 more years, respectively, but likely forever…at least at some level). Oh, how those moments linger and weave into my mama-heart-memory. All the while, I continue weaving strings and ribbons. We all do, or at least we all should.
Poet and philosopher, Mark Nepo once wrote, “Time and again, I am humbled- broken and opened all at once- by the mysterious fact that life is all things at all times. For every death there is somewhere a birth. For every clarity there is somewhere a confusion. For every pain there is somewhere a joy. And being simple human beings, we can’t possibly comprehend or hold it all. But briefly, when still, we can feel it. Like a shell being hallowed by the sea, we are slowly cleansed. Hard as this is, it is worth everything.”
Sigh…mama-hood, and all of its glorious misery, its wonder-agony, its love-pain indelible defining…its symbolism within and beyond myself and the 12 & 16 year old teacher-heart, humans I once pushed into the world. Gather the twigs and weave the ribbons. Nests in progress, nests as only pieces waiting to be brought together, nests abandoned, but holding memory, nests fallen and breaking down into the earth once again, nests that held disappointment and joy, death and life, nests being borrowed, nests waiting to surround something new. How remarkable that every phase of parenting and childhood, or just by being, in any phase of life, is a fullness in and of itself right in the moment. Fully capable, and yet fully becoming. How remarkable.
In the spirit of parent-child reciprocity, the shared wisdom, a song to conclude:
In the spirit of parent-child reciprocity, the shared wisdom, a song to conclude:
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