Hello, long time no blog. I’ve been up to all sorts of stuff in the last couple years. I was working on launching a podcast, though that’s been put on hold. Then, I became pregnant last year and took up (and set back down) a part-time job. I gave birth in late October 2024 to my daughter and since then I’ve been adapting to my new life as a mother! So much has happened, but for over a year now I’ve wanted to share my experience of healing my wounded femininity, especially as it relates to becoming a mother. This journey has been one of the most transformative experiences in my life and I think it would be helpful to speak on it and my philosophy around motherhood.
Even though a great deal of pregnancies are unplanned, most people who become parents generally knew they wanted to have children at some point. I did not start out like that. Throughout my adolescence and young adulthood, I loathed the idea of having children and held a serious phobia of giving birth. I had countless repeating nightmares about stillbirth and used to wish I had been born a man so I wouldn’t even have to deal with the possibility of getting pregnant. I felt uncomfortable around babies and children because I didn’t know how to interact with them. I also struggled a lot with hormonal imbalances and irregular cycles, which only made me resent being a woman even more. Now I’m a mother, I am absolutely in love with my daughter, and I feel more healthful, peaceful, and secure than at any other point in my life. What happened?
From Childfree to Wanting to Mother Three
I would say the biggest shift started to happen after I went into intensive therapy to address my childhood trauma. I ended up there after a couple profound psychedelic experiences left me both enlightened and shattered by my confrontations with many suppressed emotions and memories. In therapy I learned how to identify my emotions, fully feel them in my body, and take action to address my underlying needs. Hypnotherapy played a large role in connecting with my inner child and coming to know her and how she felt during my early life. Once I remembered what it was like to be a child and go through what I went through from a child’s perspective, I started finding it easy to interact with babies and children. I began enjoying their presence. This also helped address the intensely negative internalized narrative I had held towards my feminine instincts.
Even before therapy, I had been reframing my attitudes around femininity and womanhood away from the suppressive, traumatizing, and isolating way I had been raised by my parents. My father’s emotional abuse left me insecure, perfectionistic, and aggressively controlling. My mother’s emotional abandonment left me with no positive template for femininity – I had to create one from scratch. I started with Lucy Pearce’s Moon Time, which gave me an empowering framework for understanding my menstrual cycle and the power my body holds because I am a woman and not in spite of it. Jungian psychology also provided me with a plethora of literature to explore, such as She by Robert A Johnson and Motherhood by Lisa Marchiano of This Jungian Life. I experienced a significant improvement in my hormonal health after going to therapy and adopting a positive perspective on womanhood. I still struggled with ambivalence towards becoming a mother though.
Now that I am a mother, the intense fear I used to feel about having children seems silly. I was absolutely tormented by not knowing if I really wanted to have children or not to the point that doubts started to be cast upon my marriage (my husband always wanted children). The ambivalence lasted for a few years until one night I had a spontaneous lucid dream. In this dream I met a spirit guide in the form of a skeleton in a neon technicolor suit and top hat. He started lecturing and chiding me about my apparent lack of conviction. I asked him, “What would make me feel the most spiritually fulfilled?” In response, he handed me a colored pencil drawing of a woman sitting cross-legged with three small children climbing all over her. I asked if this meant I am supposed to have children and he said yes. “That makes me so happy,” I said as I started crying with a smile. I then felt the sensation of being sucked back into my body through some kind of vortex and woke up. From that point on, I committed myself to having children and preparing myself to become a mother. Wouldn’t it be so nice if we all could receive such clear and direct instruction whenever we are feeling confused? That experience taught me that sometimes the only way to deal with ambivalence is to make a choice and follow it through. Once I made my choice, what I needed to do became clear and a strategy began to emerge.
My Parenting Philosophy
I’ve always been driven to act with integrity, which includes taking the ethical impacts of my decisions into serious consideration – one of the consequences of having such a strongly placed Saturn. As I considered my desire for children, I spent a lot of time on childfree forums researching the arguments against having children in order to clarify my values around parenthood. I also carefully considered my knowledge of attachment theory and child development alongside my experience healing my own childhood trauma. My philosophy which emerged from this period of inquiry can be summarized as follows:
It isn’t enough to simply want children, one has to want to parent. It’s easy to fall in love with a romanticized fantasy of what parenthood will be like, leaving one unprepared for the true demands. It is important to want to be present throughout the ugly and challenging aspects of parenting. I found myself often imagining how I would respond to my child’s tantrums, heartbreaks, or transgressions. How would I support my needs through sleep deprivation, housework, and breastfeeding so I can give my children the best version of myself when they are at their worst? How would I respond to my child when they hit or scream how much they hate me? When I considered these scenarios, I found myself feeling satisfied at the idea of being able to give my potential children what they need from me. It felt rewarding to imagine how I would navigate challenges that would surely trigger my traumas and had triggered my own parents into lashing out. That helped affirm to me that I indeed wanted to be a parent, not simply have a child.
Another aspect of parenthood I had to consider was the impact it would have on my marriage. As of now, my husband and I have been together for 10 years. We went through significant challenges as a couple that could have easily ended in divorce, but we always end up choosing to work on ourselves. My husband has always wanted children and over 10 years we had many discussions about what kind of family we would like to be. I still felt unsure at times about having children, so I identified what I needed from my husband and our relationship in order to feel secure and confident about bringing a new life into the world. The ability to maintain a single-income household was one of the criteria. Improving our communication and the way we show up for each other in our day-to-day lives was another. In the end, I am glad we waited 10 years before having children. In that time we ironed out many issues that I didn’t want to model to our children, achieved a stable financial position, and got on the same page about parenting strategies and wanting to homeschool.
Ultimately, I never want my children to feel like I resent them or that they are a burden like I was made to feel in my childhood. That means I had to come to a place where I actively desired to let go of the aspects of my life that have to be set aside to make space for them – a willing sacrifice, which is an essential component to transcending the ego. In vedic astrology, I was taught about the concepts of kama and moksha. Moksha represents the later stages of life where we must prepare for the ultimate letting go: death. Moksha is about release and surrender, which can be liberating or can feel like suffering depending on your attachment to whatever is leaving you. Kama in contrast represents the pursuit of pleasure for pleasure’s sake. It is important to feel and indulge in pleasure or the acquisition of one’s desires, if only so that by the time you reach the end of your lifespan you can let it all go.
Taking this into consideration, I focused on living my day-to-day life according to my own desires and whims in the years leading up to my pregnancy. I had left my job and my husband was very supportive of my leisure, encouraging me to do what I wanted to do with my time without worrying about whether I am doing enough or pleasing others. This is when I launched my business and began attending metaphysical markets. My days were filled with oodles of leisure – basking in my garden, going to the spa, yoga, crocheting, writing, cuddling my dog, ritual baths, camping getaways. I also conquered many fears during this time by putting myself out there and pursuing my passions. About 3 or 4 years into this lifestyle, I started feeling an intense loneliness. There was no family or friends to celebrate the holidays with and every day started to feel the same. There weren’t any big goals to challenge myself that piqued my motivation. I started thinking more and more that I didn’t want to wait another 2-3 years to start a family like I had been planning, and shortly after that is when I got pregnant in early 2024.
I’m going to take a break here, otherwise this post will go on forever. Next is my birth story, which you can continue here.
