Surrender some more.
Twelve years ago tonight was the hardest night of my life. My oldest child turns twelve tomorrow, he was born just after eight in the morning, an hour or so after the midwife who had been with me through the hardest night of my life finished her shift. She unfortunately, didn’t get to experience the most amazing moment of my life that made it all worth it.
Twelve years ago tonight I was experiencing the tail end of an eight day long invitation from life to surrender, to stay with my discomfort, to trust in my body and it’s wisdom. It was the first big invitation of my life and I declined with every fibre of my being, I sent it back, I burned it up, I fought it tooth and nail. I was not the tiniest bit ready but I was exactly where I needed to be to put me on the path to being here today.
I spent that night twelve years ago in a horrendous battle, trying to hold onto what I thought and completely ignore and deny what I felt. It’s what I had done my whole life, what I had learned to do and it had worked reasonably well for me up until that night. It had allowed me to appear ok, to keep everyone around me comfortable, to succeed and do well at life on the outside. I had accepted the way this hurt and damaged me, I had grown accustomed to dealing with that but that night my way of being, my hurting, damaging and denying myself became about someone other than me.
Without any awareness or understanding of what changed I began to feel that it wasn’t working, that I couldn’t do it anymore. That suddenly, the price was too high. The seed was planted and the journey began. The journey back to myself.
Twelve years ago tonight I felt a big bang go off inside of me. I suddenly noticed the damage, the disconnect, the depletion and disempowerment that had always been there, that had up until that point been a secret I held inside of me. I noticed it start to reach out of me like a dark shadow with its sights set on my tiny, perfect, vulnerable little baby and something in me snapped into gear. To pull it back away from him and begin the process of unravelling what that darkness held.
Tonight I’m sitting with that tiny but powerful seed, the idea of it, the way I saw it back then held up against the way I see it now. Tonight I’m sitting with gratitude for it, for each and every step of the way.
Earlier tonight I found myself dancing. In a ‘there’s no such thing as coincidence’ turn of events I showed up for an experience of moving my body freely tonight. Listening to and following how it wanted to move, in front of other people without a drop of alcohol in my system, without a single plan or thought process to follow. It’s the first time I’ve ever done that, the first time I’ve ever allowed myself to try that, let alone enjoy it. It was healing, I was connected, filled up and empowered. The opposite of what I experienced during the birth of my oldest child. There have been countless invitations between that first one twelve years ago and the one I RSVP’d to and showed up for tonight. Countless twists and turns and variations of no, I don’t know, maybe, I don’t think I can.
The seed was tiny and slow growing. The seed took it’s time to unravel after the initial big bang and the wisdom of my body provided the perfect steps, the perfect timing, the moments and the invitations, knowing that without the unravelling, without each layer of what had built up and tangled around me taking it’s turn nothing of use was ever going to be able to grow.
The seed was tiny and slow growing but my body’s process has been perfect. Tonight I sit alone and celebrate the hardest night of my life and give it the acknowledgment and reverence it deserves. Tonight I thank my body for its process over the past twelve years and sit with my intention to stay with that process, to stay connected and embodied into the future.
Tonight I’m just here with my body and all that it has brought to me on this night before I wake up in the morning and celebrate my beautiful, ‘so grown up it hurts’, son and the day twelve years ago when he made me a Mother and made me start to realise that how I feel and what I know matter far more than what I have been taught to think.
