comb

Nothing exerts a stronger psychic effect upon children, than the life which the parents have not lived.

C.G. Jung 

At the beginning of August, our blueberry baby, the little who completed our constellation, and the one we collectively howled home to our hearts over the course of years and across galaxies, turned two. His August arrival shifted  my experience of the month from the bittersweet end to a too-short-season to a deep love for perhaps the very best month of the year. In August the berries are ripe, the days are hot and slow, and the swimming is fine. It is as near to perfect as anything. 

So much of me in relationship with my children is intertwined with a slow nostalgia, filled with beeswax crayons, and fairie houses, and baked apples, and pushing swings, and rolling down hills. Everything that could possibly engage the part of myself that longs for a soft smile and a fond memory says yes to my kids almost always. And when they are still so small, I try my very best to make it always yes. I am a sucker for a particular type of theme and easy contentment. In my opinion childhood should be laced with as much joy and magic as possible. It all gets difficult enough over time and childhood needn’t be. 

I think my kids are lucky in that. By no means do I undercut the raw intensity of their emotions, or mine for that matter, but I definitely try not to belabor them and rather give them space to move through as they will. I am not sure if this was always the right approach, but it has often been the one that has felt most authentic to me. Hold space but don’t create a big and binding narrative. Open up the space for everyone to be someone new in this moment than they were in the last. As they have grown and the feelings get bigger and fiercer and longer-lasting, I am more and more and more thankful that our bigs have our little to remember their own wonder and the magic at the beginning of the story. 

We each carry a little bit of this bittersweet in our hearts from the departure of childhood. I certainly do. It is difficult to grow as a parent as quickly as your kids are growing. To not get stuck in what I just learned but instead be ready to learn the next thing. Like they are. I never feel far from a wish that I could have done better by each of them. Listened a little harder, held space a little longer, seen their big feelings for as big and real as they really were. Even though I think I did ok, I am relieved to have the chance to perhaps do a little better with our last as well as allow these opportunities with him to also be a chance to apologize for, as well as forgive, my many shortcomings and especially those of the parent I once was. I made some errors that I would so love to undo if I could. Even as they seemed wise at the time, I was, compared to today, so unformed, so narrow in my understandings. I suppose I will look back at now with a similar reflection one day. Ah well. I will continue to make mistakes as a mom, even as I try my very best not to. But it is so certain it is almost stone. The stones that line the path of me as mother. 

For me there has been this interesting unearthing on this side of child bearing, in which some of my energy is freed up toward the vision of the next thing, and yet another, far more exhausted and daily part of me, is very much not. I am far too tired to be much of a visionary. Too fatigued for much follow-through. In a way, I think it makes this space much more liminal than I had imagined it would be. It often feels as though I am waiting for the slowest revelation of all. 

When I was back in Wisconsin, a longtime-stretching-into-forever friend gifted me a deck of symbols. I work with it much as I would The Tarot; drawing cards here and there, more often than not picking a daily card, and on occasion opting for a larger spread. The card that I keep on drawing over and over the past few months is C O M B. Its images are garden sage; for cleaning, clearing, and banishing; hair for freedom and power and self: and of course the comb for release and magic and exorcism. It feels like a lot and I am sitting with it. 

The other day I was taking a yoga class with Christina and she shared a quote from Carl Jung regarding his view on the purpose of psychoanalysis and it was something along the lines of working with the past not to dredge it up and get bogged down and stuck in the stories of yesterday but rather to comb through the past in a way that would reveal some deeper truth and insight relevant for our present and our future. I am paraphrasing here obviously, but there is something juicy in there for me when it comes to this relationship with memory and longing and nostalgia and regret and savoring it all as a way of moving or pulling or combing those themes forward into the rest of my life. When I think of it, or really more accurately feel it in terms of images; it is like this beautiful arrangement of color and texture and form and shape that is many things but mostly pleasing and is the thread or the tone or the VIBE that I want to be pulling forward into whatever is next. There is a way in which all of this mothering and child-rearing and partnering that has lived inside of my body feels ready to invert itself into the world in some new form. Into my next becoming. I am always and forever Mother to these three. And I know it is not the only thing but it is for me central to ALL THE THINGS; it is the ground within which every teaching, every lesson, every bit of wisdom, takes root. It is the one song that lives inside of all the others. The heartbeat drum of whatever offering there is for me to make.