what do i mean by a comeback?

When we ask someone of their journey, on how they became the thing, it’s always told in a linear way: they took A to B to C steps over the course of a decade and arrived at the point where you meet them, in their fully actualized expression. Stateside, in our current culture, so many generations removed from the spiral nature of creation stories, our humanness, it needs this linear path. To conceptualize, to attach to, we need it so we can easily follow it too.

Though if this person were tell you their true story, the one that matters on how they came upon their vision, on how they made it into a reality, they’d need more than a soundbite, they’d need hours, perhaps days, because their story, like all of ours, would weave in and out. It’s not so much two steps forward, two steps back, it’s two steps forward and then ten to the left, and then forward, and then seven to the right, and then back. They’d meet the same point over again, but two years apart, and then again, but seen through a different lens. The story we’re asking for is not one of the mind, but one of the soul, and my journey has been no different.

****

A. A month shy of my thirtieth birthday, my mother died from the autoimmune disease, scleroderma. It was a progressive disease which meant she’d been various degrees of sick for half my life. I had always been my mothers, but never really my own which left me depleted, small in the ways that mattered, and always, always wanting. I was convinced becoming a mother myself would fix my hunger, I’d arrive and I’d be full. But then my mother died and I’d achieved motherhood, I had a two-year-old, Autumn, and a three-month-old, Violet, and nothing was solved nor satiated. My problems only became larger, more amplified. I was in constant pain, both physically and emotionally—what I know now as soul-sick—and though it might seem like hyperbole, it was not, in order to survive, I had to become something I had never been before, I had to become my own.

G. Two years ago, I came across this quote by Steven Kessler in his book, The 5 Personality Patterns, “Suffering is only a mechanism for learning. And as soon as we are able, we can let it go and begin to learn through love and joy.” But where does the pain and suffering go? I wondered. What happens to it? Does it actually cease to exist?

D. We co-slept with my babies which meant rounds of musical beds and musical rooms because nothing ever quite fit, ever quite worked, it was the way of motherhood for me, and co-sleeping was no different. I was lying in bed midmorning, the room bathed in the most beautiful natural light. The mattresses were pushed together on the floor which put me below eye-level with the window into the backyard. The girls were at pre-school and I was meant to be sleeping, or taking care of myself in some way. I wasn’t sure how to explain that knowing I would have to pick them up in a couple hours, and knowing it would never be enough time, made it so I couldn’t fully let go, release, rest. Always wired and tired, always waiting for someone to cry out Mamma, needing me, always needing me.

I had just finished reading a newsletter email from Tracy Anderson, fitness creator of the Tracy Anderson Method. It was a Q&A type format with one of her longtime followers who’d recently enrolled in her new streaming service—this was OG streaming and ‘live’ classes were actually a recording of a live class. The woman was speaking a bit on her life and a bit on her fitness journey. It was a smart thing for Tracy to do—expose us to ‘real people’ really using her product and how it positively impacted their lives. As I continued through the short interview, it made me feel the opposite of its intent—more unease followed by emotions that were my constant: overall fatigue and defeat. How are these women doing this? I’d thought. How will I ever have enough energy to actually exercise again? I didn’t know how or when or in what form, but I stared out that window, into the clear blue sky, into a desperate kind of longing, with this undeniable truth that, there had to be more for me than this, there had to be more to this life.

C. In our house in Concord, CA, I was gifted, for my summer birthday, an apricot tree from my aunt, my mother’s sister. It must’ve been the year after my mother died and the apricot tree was planted in the front yard in the same spot a pervious tree had been cut down and turned into mulch. With the girls around me in the living room, I could stand at the big window, in sleep deprivation and overwhelm and deep sorrow and tree-gaze through the drawn blinds. That first fall, the tree was small, but full and healthy. It’s leaves changed from green to yellowish and then began to shed. Because of its size and because of my position, I had the perfect view to witness the leaves, all grace, spiral down and land into a balanced circle around the trunk. How is it so? I’d ask myself. How do they fall like that, from all different heights and angles into a perfect circle around the tree? To me, an act like that seemed otherworldly.

My mother had died, and the leaves were dying and her body had gone back to the earth and the leaves, they too went back to the earth, in a spiral form I’d never been able to see before. In the moment, I hadn’t formed the understanding yet, I was being taught—or rather remembering—a new language, one I had known and had forgotten at some point along the way. I was being instructed through imagery and feeling, in connection. I didn’t realize it, but inside I was spiraling through a necessary death too, I too was going back to the earth. I was also at a new beginning, preparing to be remade into someone I hadn’t yet been before.

H. It was early morning, in the twilight hours, the house asleep, the girls no longer woke until it was time for school. I was in an in-between consciousness state, by then, my mind went there easily, in a visualized meditation, out in our backyard. I created it in my mind, but I felt the experience in my whole being. The sky was blue and expansive, the sky was really one of my spirit guides called Giant of the Sky. I was sitting under his sweet loving embrace, his peaceful presence. The grass was soft, the wildflowers off to the side swayed in the gentle breeze. A small white butterfly, one of those mini delicate ones, flitted past. I tracked it’s flight path and as it did its loopdy-loop-zig-zag dance, the name Motherment spiraled down from the sky, it landed in my mind, my body lit up, my throat and stomach filled with a pulsing heat. Motherment, a name or phrase, or what does it mean? I’d never heard the word before, and then: Motherment, a movement, an embodiment container, guiding mothers back to themselves.

E. Flash: In the ‘New Car’ in the Concord driveway, car camping with Autumn, our second attempt with trying to ween Violet. Reading a young adult romance book on my Nook, finishing, looking up at the ceiling of the car, embraced with a knowing, I want to write a book that makes me feel the way this book made me feel, and my mind immediately following with, But I’m not a storyteller, I was horrible at school, I’m bad at grammar and spelling, I don’t know how to write a novel.

Flash: A month later, in a cabin in Tahoe, alone, restless, scared, making dinner for the family for when they return, needing a distraction, grabbing the mini pencil, the mini notepad, writing the first few sentences of an opening scene to a book I’d never knew I’d wanted to write before, before that moment in the car.

Flash: Two or three months more, scraps of brown paper napkins covered in black ink, sentences I’d scratch while waiting in the car, the only thing that’d take me far away from anxiety.

Flash: Our third attempt at weaning Violet, alone in the house for two nights, the first time in four years, finding the scraps of napkins I’d hidden away and that first piece of paper, opening my computer, typing words onto screen.

Flash: Nine months, the girls would nap or watch computer, I’d type, nine months I grew, I finished something I’d started. These characters, they brought me home, back to myself, to a self I’d been searching for my whole life.

F. December 25, 2015, Tom took the girls on his bicycle to the park and I stayed back. I pulled open my computer, a gift I’d already promised myself, in spite of, because of, the fear, I created an account. Fear, of not trusting myself that I’d commit, I typed in the credit card information, fear, that I’d let something else go to waste and not use the product once I paid for it. I might’ve hovered over the payment bar, and then scrolled back up the page, fear. I did it anyway, I signed up for a month of streaming with Tracy Anderson.

B. I was white-knuckling the steering wheel in what we lovingly referred to as the ‘Old Car’—a thirteen-year-old Honda Accord that’d been a graduation gift to my husband, Tom—with the girls in the back as I drove the literal three minutes, perhaps five if we got stopped at a light, to the preschool down the road. The girls were four and two and I’d been systematically breaking down for a-year-and-a-half, unable to drive by myself in the car without having a panic attack. There wasn’t a quick remedy because it was everything, everything wasn’t working: extreme sleep deprivation from breastfeeding throughout the night and then having 4:30am wake-up calls with the girls, unprocessed grief, pleasing, a lifetime of over giving. The preschool was the first step to recovery, but in order to receive the help I so desperately needed, I had to be well enough to get there. I’d been brought to my knees, but by then it was a familiar place, and so, I crawled.

I. A decade later, I’m on my knees, on the kitchen floor, again. Crying over another heartbreak, again. How many more times can my heart be broken? I asked the Universe, How many more times will I have to say goodbye to someone I love? I can’t go through this again, I pleaded, I can’t. I felt all the pain, I suffered, I was in the suffering. Two years after I read about learning through love and joy and I was still trying to understand how it worked. Show me how to learn this lesson through the lens of joy, I begged, please, show me.

It didn’t occur right in that moment, but my perspective did shift within the hour, the swing happened, bringing the energy back into balance. I heard the words I’d spoken to the other, I saw them replay in my mind, You always held all the power. I was always waiting for you to say this is too much and to walk away. And then immediately after, I’m graced with the knowing, with understanding, everything reorients to, If someone else holds the power it’s because you made a choice to give it to them. If you chose to give it to them, it means you can also choose to take it back.

****

I’m to the part in the story where I can see the meaning behind the message: learning through love and joy does not mean the absence of pain or suffering. In a hard thing, a hurtful moment, the pain is there, the suffering also, and it’s important and necessary to feel it fully—feeling them fully is really the only thing our emotions ask of us. Learning through joy means there is a balance to the pain, that pain is only half the story, and if you were to take in the whole picture, on the other side is joy. Once the pain and suffering are expressed, the energy can be transmuted into anything of your making, and once the energy is changed, you move from victim to creator.

Learning through joy is always solution-solving, interconnected and beneficial to all. It’s a wider lens, a higher view, a more expansive perspective where you can feel, where you can see both sides. It’s the ultimate kind of release because, learning through joy always lovingly lays you down into peace.

Motherment is a course that takes you into the spiral of life, soul time, deep time. It weaves its way through all the bodies and then back again and again and again.

Come, come join me for your own journey back to your many selves.