Surviving the Storm

I wanted to write "when shit hits the fan" on the headline. I suppose we're not there yet.

On Imbocl Bearded Daddy had an announcement to make. He was leaving. Well, technically he wanted me out of the house and out of his life. Me and the girls decided to stay and Daddy was the one who went away.

For weeks this has been too painful to write about. I have been keeping my-self busy with everything else - cleaning the house, doing the chores. Anything but thinking or writing. The analytic part in me recognizes the stages of grief: denial, break down, anger... I've been fuming with anger, crying my eyes out, rolling in despair and guilt, pleading, begging and trying to figure it out.

What has kept me up and running instead of crying and panicking is Will. I suppose this is one of those days when my true will hits the scales and is measured. Daily I keep asking my-self "what do I want?"
There are things I know I do want. I want my children happy and safe - untouched by the process of Daddy leaving and Mommy crying. I know they will me touched by it no matter what I do, but there is plenty I can and want to do right to keep them out of harms way. I want my own head and heart to come through this - if not in one piece, then in several, but I can't make grieving and bitterness my new home. They have their time, yes. But I don't intend to dwell in them.

It would be all too easy to make anger my new driving force - and some days it is. It has the absolutely great ability to get me through tough days and heartrendingly lonely nights.  But hate is like Sauron's Ring - it will turn on everything you love and make everything go sour. It is the panic-force when there is nothing else to sustain you.

Pain is a lot like fire. And right now I sit on Mother Kali's funeral pyre, watching the Goddess dance and laugh, allowing the cleansing heart-breaking fire burn away everything unnecessary, old and rotten inside me. Let the hurt come. Let the pain come. I keep pace with my breath and measure time with the dancing of the flames. This is not the first big hurt in my life nor is it the last. Living, loving and creating are all games of dare - eventually you're going to pay with the loss of what you love for all the happy moments. When you dare to love, deep down you know it will not last for everything lasts but a little while on this plain.

So I let the pain be and like the flames of the forge it burns through everything redundant and reveal my true nature and my true will. If I burn to ashes, if only charred remains are left, I let my children breathe new life in my old heart. Yet I know that the one who steps out of the flames is me, only better, more pure, more me and less a creature of habit and consequence.

I bear this in mind to keep my head straight. And when there is too much of pain, so much I want to react, I look ahead. In two years, how do I want my relationship to be with Bearded Daddy - he might not be my beloved but he will always be a father to the girls. How do I want my Princesses to grow up - tangled in a web of mixed emotions between me and Daddy or strong and beautiful. These are questions I need to answer now. These are things that will be shaped and defined right this very moment - weather or not I'm ready.

What steps out of Mother Kali's funeral pyre will either be solid gold or ashes to be cast in the wind. What the pain will make of me is a question of my Will. This is where my being will be weighed.

Whose body is this?

Becoming a mother meant giving up the mastery of my own body and becoming a temple for Creation. You'd think you get the control over your body back after giving birth. The child comes out and what's left is entirely you - yep, I would love it to be that simple.

My body has flexed and stretched in various ways - most of them not really flattering. I often feel of balance and still feel like my body is mainly a tool for someone else. It's a safe haven for Bigger Princes to climb on when she is tired or scared. It's a feeding platform for Little Princes. It is mainly needed and often used by - well just about everyone else but me.

I was utterly relieved by the words of Karen Maezen Miller in her book Momma Zen:
"For a long time after giving birth, I was sheathed in loathing and shame over my own body. You can be sure the child you deliver is yours, but the body it comes out of is not. ... I could not bear my nakedness, and I could scarcely bare my own body."


Gee! I'm not alone, I thought. Only months after giving birth to Little Princes our family went on a holiday with the in laws all the way to Tenerife. I told Daddy that I would rather drop dead than be seen in a swimsuit. I had not felt so insecure about my own body since my teen years. And I am a professional self-hater when it comes to how I look.

No amount of thinking "I can not hate the body that brought forth new life" did little to soothe the feeling of looking terrible. But I did find three things that helped.

First laughter with other mothers. It seems to be the best medicine to much of mother-hoods biggest sores. I am surrounded with loving, compassionate other mothers who are endowed with a healing sense of humor and a hearty laughter bright enough to make any self-doubt evaporate.

Second is the idea presented by Clarissa Pinkola Estés in her book Women Who Run With the Wolves:
"If she is taught to hate her own body, how can she love her mother's body that has the same configuration as hers? - her grandmother's body, the bodies of her daughters as well? How can she love the bodies of other women (and men) close to her who have inherited the body shapes and configurations of their ancestors? To attack a woman thusly destroys her rightful pride of affiliation with her own people and robs her of the natural lilt she feels in her body no matter what height, size, shape she is. In essence, the attack on women's bodies is a far-reaching attack on the ones who have gone before her as well as the ones who will come after her."


I can not teach my Princesses to love and respect their bodies, if I spend time hiding my own body and feeling disgusted with it. And I do look like my beloved aunt and my grandmother even - every day a little bit more. How  can I hate the body that so closely reminds me of the people I love - my own family?

And the third helping was an idea that I really need to do some spiritual work to reclaim my own body - that there is nothing wrong with it for me to say, look, I love my children and will nurse them, hold them, cuddle with them and still feel at home with my own body.

So I turned to my ever-helpful friend Francesca de Grandis's book Be a Goddess. Her prayer "A Prayer that You May Love Your Body and Be Cleansed in Spirit" worked wonders. The prayer seems to capture everything that I needed to feel at home in my own body again.

I am the Goddess's beloved.
My lungs take in Her breath.
My veins run with Her red.
Blessed are the feet
that have walked my path
of trials and pleasures.
My hands are Her hands.
I am God as surely as
I created the universe at the beginning.
I need bow down to no one
nor before any deity.
My body is Her body,
glistening with the sweat of Stars.
My tears and my sex are Her gifts;
I bestow these as I will.


Goddess within and without,
fill me with the light
that exposes evil;
fill me with the light
that evil flees from;
fill me with the light
that illuminates me in my hiding,
that I may come from hiding
and bathe in the joy of the light.

In my darkest moment I wondered about the possibility of ordering a burkha on-line to hide my figure - to hide my insecurity. So there definitively was a need for light that would illuminate me in my hiding before reaching the point of no return in my escape from being seen.

And as an after-thought - everything I deeply love - my children, my horses, my dogs - seem to depend on me to be a source of positive, assuring energy. It takes a brave, self-assured mommy to rear calm, out-going and happy kids. And it takes a calm and assertive pack-leader to manage both horses and dogs safely. (And yes, I love the Dogwhisperer). Both of these tasks are too important for me to try and cheat my way through them. And they are way too important to fail. So I have all the reasons in the world to love and respect my own body as the body of the Life-Giver, the Great Mother Goddess.

Are mommies allowed to be a little wild?

"Becoming a mother changes everything," I was told on endless occasions when I was expecting Big Princess. Well-meaning other women were inquiring when we were going to give our dog away, advising me to quit riding and hiking in the woods.

"There will be new things that are actually important" said a next-door lady after inquiring on my intentions regarding my horses. I would have quite happily ripped of her head or at least big hand fulls of hair for saying that - pregnancy hormones + someone being an disagreeable = not good.

I did (and still do) my best not to follow their advice. I rode with my beloved Uppa all the way to seven moths of being pregnant, and spent several nights during winter and spring (=freezing cold) sleeping in a lean-to. Only weeks before Big Princes' first birthday we did have to put our beloved 14 years old dog to sleep, but only a few days of mourning showed that we need a dog in the house. And by Big Princes' first birthday we found Iitu.  Before Little Princes was born we even outrageously got a second dog, Louhi.

There has always been an untamed spot in my soul. Well a huge chunk rather than a spot.  I need my share of the silent song of a forest, wading in deep snow, riding-trips and stable work to feel even somewhat like a human being. So every now and then I simply abandon my Princesses with their Daddy and run away with mixed feelings of pure joy, relief and guilt.

I suppose the idea that you need to reject everything you are in order to become a Real Mother has sunk in a bit too well. Yet I know with utter certainty that after a two-hour riding trip I will come back a better mother. A more happy and relaxed mother. A wild creature more capable of dealing with the entrapment of housework and the large-scale demands of children.

When my princesses grow up a bit, there will be a vast amount of wilderness they can explore with wild and untamed  Mommy. Sorry worried and well meaning other women - I think we're better of this way.

Mommies with a method?

I think we've all seen them: mommies with the latest baby buggy all of their clean and trendy children walking orderly in shopping mall. You can just imagine how they go home to their clean and well-kept houses (the likes you see in a journal of interior) and even have all their books on alphabetical order on their shelves.

The worst thing is to run into a perfect mom in a shop with plenty of mirrors. My inner self-hater jumps into action telling me that my clothes are covered in dog-hair, the Older Princess' clothes are all muddy and I haven't done anything to my hair since I braided it three days ago. My self-hater goes on to tell me that if I were any kind of mother at all, my house would always be spotless, my children would never scream, run wildly or argue with me. Without a total and utter control of everything, declares my self-hater, you're a pathetic excuse of a mother.

Luckily the best parenting guide ever written is available at all times in our house. A collection of moomin-stories. Fillyjonk is deffinetly an archetype of a mommy with a method. Clean, orderly a with three disciplined children she is the opposite of Moominmamma whose most beloved piece of wisdom is "if it makes you happy, it's good for your stomach." Their children are quite different too. Moomintroll is adventurous, happy, outgoing and brave - and hardly follows any outside rules at all. Fillyjonks children do not speak unless spoken to and seem scared of any good ald fun that might get their clothes dirty. (More about the moomin characters here.)

So when considering your own mommying method the thing to think about is rather "what it is that I want to gain" than "how does this look to others." The only "others" you need to be considering are your children (and your hubby). If I want my children to be happy and grow into self respecting adults what is the action I need to take right now? Is it cleaning? Sometimes it is. Sometimes the best action is to invent a cleaning-game and include the children in it. Sometimes it's living by the words of Dalai lama and deciding that a clean, well-kept house is indeed a sign of wasted life.

I suppose my mommying method would be to keep my eye on the ball - and the ball being happiness.