This morning I woke at 4am with a baby who wouldn’t sleep, who then pooped, who I then had to settle to sleep. By the time he was back in dreamland, it was 5am, and the voice inside my head whispered to me that I should really take the opportunity to enjoy the free time I had just earned. Yes, I could sleep, but who knows how long that would last? So I decided to take the time to do something for my own nourishment.
I have been feeling physically knackered, lately. My body feels tense. Heavy. My legs feel like lead, two dead weights being dragged around against their will. My shoulders ache and crack. My neck cannot find a comfortable position. My hips feel wonky. And my stomach muscles… I don’t know where they are.
I decided that the best way for me to spend my free time was to do something physical, to release some of this tension. I chose yoga. Very light yoga. Yoga that, before my most recent pregnancy, would have been a walk in the park. Relaxing. I would have sailed through it, holding each posture perfectly, with a sense of ease and confidence that had been built up over years of practice.
Today, I was a beginner again.
It’s difficult, starting over. It requires the deepest level of humility, a true willingness to accept the reality of the moment without judgement, and courage to take the first steps on a new path as yet untravelled. So, when you are faced with starting over in almost every area of your life.. Well, let’s just say, it’s a bit overwhelming.
When you become pregnant for the first time, you know that it is the beginning of something new. It is joyful, magical, and hopeful. It is also the beginning of the complete relinquishing of the control that you believed you had over the most basic aspects of your existence. Your body changes, you go through a life altering physical experience in childbirth, and your entire identity undergoes a disintegration as you use every last bit of your energy making sure that your little human is safe in this crazy world. Your sense of day and night becomes confused. Your relationship with your most significant other changes. Your social landscape changes. Your physical environment changes. Your approach to your career changes. In every aspect of your life, you are transforming. Starting over. Beginning again.
All while exhausted, sleep deprived, in physical recovery after birth, and mentally exhausted by all of the questions and pressure you are under to ‘perform’ as a parent. For your baby to perform. It’s absolutely bonkers.
I realised this morning, that I am truly starting over. I recognised this, intellectually, but I needed to struggle my way through a basic yoga routine to acknowledge it in my bones. I’ve been labouring under the misapprehension that I will somehow, given enough time, go ‘back’ to life after a few years of raising two children. That my body will go ‘back’ to where it was before I had my challenging second pregnancy. That I will go ‘back’ to work. That somehow, life will go ‘back’ to what it was before I had children.
Today, that seems laughable to me. That I could go through such life changing events as pregnancy and childbirth, and honestly believe that the change would be temporary.
Having my children has kicked off a rebirth. Everything is changing. I am regenerating every aspect of my life, from my body finding it’s new balance and presence after the experience of making and nourishing human beings, to my mind relearning how it focuses and attends to it’s own preservation and development, to my soul realigning itself with it’s new role as a teeny, tiny mother shaped dot in the unfathomable enormity that is the universe.
It’s scary. But it’s also magical.
Beginning again is tough, but finding comfort in that space, being able to accept that state of being, is surely the perfect ground for evolving beyond what I was ever could have been before. Even though it feels difficult and I am being challenged beyond what I believe to be my own capabilities, I am hopeful that this process of self – renewal will yield lessons and growth beyond anything I ever imagined possible.
If you’re struggling with the process of beginning again, I am right with you. You’re not alone. You’re part of an interconnected circle, mothers everywhere, starting over, creating the landscape for the next phase of human life on this Earth. Sometimes it feels cripplingly lonely, but hear (or read!) this voice. You’re not alone. And you’ve got this!
