The Baby Inside of Me

Yes.  I wrestled with the title of this blog for a minute or two. How vulnerable do I really want to be?  Oh and by the way, if you think vulnerable, deep, and primal are not your thing, don't read more.  If you want to feel less alone in your own "stuff" then keep reading. 

What is happening inside of me right now?  I can feel a deep sorrow  - like a 100lb weight on my chest, the need to cry from a guttural primal place and yet holding in the tears in my low back all the way up my spine, like everything is twisted in tight there in my back, holding my heart up so it doesn't have me fall forward, flat on my face.  My back is counterbalancing my heavy heart perhaps.

Probably after I write this I will go sit and tend more to feelings. I have been tossed about on a wild sea today of obsessional thoughts that all boil down to "there is something so inherently bad about you that you will never be loved or loving."  I have all the diagnosis lined up, all the proof points in the way of relational interactions, facial expressions, lack of responsiveness, past screw ups on my part and then my whole being shifts from feeling body sensation and holding down the fort inside to obsessional thinking.  Of course, the obsessional thinking is so confusing the only thing left to feel is hopeless. 

In my attempt to find a way out, I called a psychiatrist, my husband, and three of my closest friends.  What triggered it all this time?  Well, I don't think it really calmed down from a week ago, first of all.  But, today I learned of some chaos in our larger playgroup that I have been a part of for 3.5 years now - a mother and father pair who were closet alcoholics and whose wounding has always been palpable to me have been outed because he has been arrested.  On the outside, these two look like the average American couple.  Of course, this stuff is taboo to talk about so no one is.  I guess it happened nearly two months ago and I am just learning about it.  I have been on the confidential receiving end of  two miscarriages inside the playgroup.  One mother has been quite public, another only told two of us and is holding her pain in silence.   And then lastly, a mother is moving away and despite my challenge getting close to her because I was always feeling less than, inside I did always "KNOW" that she had my back when push came to shove.   We shared a nanny together for a year and a half and she always had this magic way of reaching for me right when I needed her to.  We teared up a bit as she broke the news to me today.  A lot of emotion for her to show.  All of these "other mother" things are triggers and each has its own massively symbolic meaning for me that I won't go into here because I don't want to shift so radically into my head now that I am in my body. 

Of course, once I did initially get a whiff of this underlying stuff, I shot up into my head (hyperaroused) and started the mad hunt for "what other mother had left me" and started obsessing about recent relationships that are unsteady and blamed myself for their unsteadiness. Choosing a few, in particular to obsess about.  This heady obsessing about being left, diagnosing myself with mental illness.  One of my dear friends who was most able to hear me out is a friend, like me, who is woefully under mothered but who, like me, has done some deep and profound primal work on this wound.  Rather than unpacking the whole story she just said, "I really want to know what you are experiencing inside.  I don't see how diagnosing yourself helps you." and as she said that, just the invitation that someone would want to know about the pain that was going on underneath my heady interpretations and obcessing, well I burst into tears....of the primal nature.

Here is what I discovered after going inside my body to my body sensations, breath, bones, muscles, movements while my friend listened on the other end of the phone; you see, being in the presence of mothers ignited my whole trauma system. This whole "becoming a mother" has taken me for a loop because frankly, while a bit perfectionist, I thought I was pretty well on my way to being "healed".  Not too many blips on the psychological map in a while and then whamo.  And no, it wasn't having the babies or parenting that has been the hardest part for me about becoming a mother it is doing this all in relationship to other mothers.  It happened gradually. 

What I felt and what is still inside my chest as I type is a baby.  She is so tiny, still wrapped up and she is really quiet and really still.  She is waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting.  Not saying anything.  This baby is with me all the time but she has been tucked way far away for a lot of years but she is out now.  She sees all these moms and her wick has been lit. She is waiting for one of these moms to scoop her up and tell her "I see you are in pain.  I see you can't speak, you are just frozen in there." and magically take her pain away.  Long long outbreath. Long silence right here.  Being around other mothers makes the baby in me come alive with longing.

I can't express how profound it is to FEEL this as opposed to think about this or diagnose this.  There she is.  This baby.  And for whatever reason, the last few weeks, I have hated her with a vengeance.  I don't want to pick her up and hold her.  I don't feel she is entitled to feel these things.   I also blame her for making relationships so hard for me.  Why does she have to be so intense?  Why can't she just make light banter?  Why must everyone meet her in this intense place?   They don't want to be intense. Was her childhood really that bad? 

For years I have tried to minimize the pain underneath by explaining, by disallowing, by dismissing, diagnosing.  None of which, do anything towards healing.  Neither do telling her to stop it, knock it off or use some intellectual explanation without tending to her first.  My friend reminded me of that on the phone just now.   It is why I am a somatic therapist.  EXPLAINING does very little in the larger scope.  Relating to another person from our deepest felt experience heals the deep stuff - in its own time mind you.  Now that said, I needed years of explaining before I would even consider the possibility of feeling my deepest longings in my body so I still do explaining therapy too at times. 

I don't want to leave her right now though. She is still there while I get heady again.  This baby. Oh this baby.  This aching longing for a mother inside...a mother who knew to put her arms around me.  God.    I need to mourn with her and help grow this little baby up.  She has been waiting all this time for someone to come get her.  Can you believe that?   I don't want to say more right now.  I am noticing I want to tie this post up into a neat bow with some moral of the story type of comment.  I will just say, as I sit with more people as a therapist and as I relate to my friends, I am aware that we all have babies with varying degrees of need and tending internal babies, I am happy to say, is my life's work.  I feel grateful for my work with clients as we stretch each other in going deeper.  My work has grown with them as I have gone deeper inside of me.  I am proud of my courage as well.   It is dark, murky, complicated and unusual to be in relationship to me in my regular life.  Especially if you are a mother and well, here is where I am.  Doing my best.  I love me, even if you can't.  I don't believe it all the time but will repeat it often.

Mothering Ourselves

I have been steeped in readings from Hand in Hand Parenting in Palo Alto, CA.  It supports a style of parenting that isn't about "no boundaries" but just that whilst parenting your child - saying yes, no and teaching basic socialization - that it is all done in a context of connection first, behavior second.  What that means is that we deeply connect with our kids, honoring their emotional world in deeply empathic caring and connective ways.  Check them out here; Hand In Hand Parenting.  They have some great free articles and paid parenting training if you feel their style is something you can make use of.  I am not affiliated with them but hope to take their training at some point.

What happens when I read their stuff is a resonance and agreement followed quickly by guilt and shame.  Guilt and shame at my own difficulty staying connected to my two sons when I tell them no or set limits in a harsh way.  But after I have recovered from the guilt what I become aware of in the quiet recesses of my body is a dull ache in my chest and hollow feeling in my belly that feels like a reaching for something or someone - like a kid wanting a hug...what I am feeling is longing.  The longing comes from very young parts of me longing to feel protected and connected.   My mother was 18 and carried a lot of her own wounding into how she was with me.  I don't think I am special in this notion of having parents who are struggling.  She and her brother and my grandparents were often very unpredictable and aggressive with teasing and deeply critical and shaming in discipline style.

 For 39 years, I have gotten by with a kind of scrapy tough exterior...a kind of off the cuff bawdiness defending what was underneath.  But now I experience more often the parts of me that are clingy, anxious, worried, ashamed and with other "playgroup mothers" feeling unsafe that they might attack me the way my mother did.  So much in mothering has this very scrappily tough girl in me exposed as the truly vulnerable girl that she is.  Alas, motherhood has finally unearthed the true vulnerabilities of this frightened child and I  finally feel in connection enough with that part of me to write about it.

I am no longer trying to "get over her".   Instead I am committing myself to a daily holding and dialoguing ritual - like a daily meditation of mothering myself.  It has some similarities to Cheri Huber's "mentor" notion.   Hard to do some days but the ripple effect it is having on the rest of my life is profound.  I feel more in conection with my kids, my husband, my friends and I also feel more able to decide what does and does not feel good to me in relationship to other parents without being critical of them.  This blog will be about this process of connecting wtih what unconcious stuff comes up and what wounding can be overcome as a result of mothering ourself.  Come along with me.  Maybe some young parts of you will find some nurturance too.  I hope that you will comment about your experiences!