This week’s WORRY:
Am I working too much while my children are so young? Am I a bad mother because I WANT to work? shouldn’t I just want to be with my children all the time? Shouldn’t they be enough? Why am I so selfish? If I could wave a magic wand, would I wave away my need to work? Should want to?
This week I have been thinking about the marketplace….. images of sandal-ed feet walking through narrow isles teaming with oils and textiles, handmade trunks and rugs filling broad inviting merchant tents….. My hands fingering the contents of my bag – maybe some eggs, or perhaps jewels…. or maybe I have a cart with jars of honey, or sauerkraut….. Or maybe I carry my invisible trauma healing tools, or songs and stories.
What am I doing with this “working” thing? Where is the “I shouldn’t work?” voice coming from? I mean, didn’t women from time immemorial WORK?
Yes, women in traditional societies certainly did work! What’s different is they worked together, not always on the same thing at the same time, sometimes on their own thing near each other…..
We seem to swing back and forth between the poles of doing it completely alone and doing it all together….. with no space for ourselves. We get stuck in one for a generation or two and then shift back.
I think of a favorite quote from Phyllis Chesler writing about her experience becoming a mother, “I need to be left alone,” she writes, “By someone.” A feminist mother’s admission that becoming a mother had flavored her feminist independence….. made it a dependent independence.
Being left alone….. by someone. This is the motion of a living system, of a resilient social nervous system. So, mama gets time alone too. Her someones hold down the fort so she can. she is given space – by someone……
by someone……
Brings me back to the inherent giving and receiving of the marketplace, to the give and take of family life and the hard lesson that it is OK to receive as a mother. That I can build a tribe, a community, a village that supports me to be with and without my family…. and even when I am away, they are a part of that…. They are the fabric of my away-ness, making it possible and making it joyful to return.
This week I am learning that resilient motherhood is not about doing it alone, or perfectly, or even well….. it’s about being ok with receiving, even when I’m giving. Whether its giving as a teacher, wife or mother…..
So, here’s how I am opening up to receiving this week…..
- I am asking for just the right pre-school for Fia
- I am also saying yes to extra baby holding hands.
- I am going to spend one of my “work” mornings doing something creative…..
- I am also going to look for someone to help me with all this computer work that sucks my mama energy and get back in the kitchen which nourishes, grounds, and enlivens me…….
What are you opening up to receive? Leave it in the comments – let us all learn from each other!!!
Until next week’s worry,
Krista
