The Grace of a Woman

Today I have three poems and quotes rattling around in my head. Today has been a day of sadness, fear and once again surrender. This is a little bit raw still…but it helps to write things down.

It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live
or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children. (Oriah)

Last night was a low point of parenting for me. My beautiful boy, never a good sleeper, woke at 4.30am on Monday morning and 3.30am this morning. I was tired, tired after a day of teaching, working, rushing home to tidy, clean and feed my boy, to teach again until 9pm and all on a night of very little sleep. So this morning at 3.30am as my little Cyclone thrashed around, grabbed at me, pulled my hair and refused to go back to sleep I was struggling. At 4.57am, I broke, he was grabbing at me and shouting ‘cuddle, cuddle!’ and I shouted back ‘no! leave me alone!’. And in my own horror at shouting that at him, I ran downstairs and collapsed sobbing on the bathroom floor.

I heard his footsteps coming downstairs and I couldn’t stop sobbing. He stood behind me for a few seconds and he thought I was laughing. So he started to laugh too. So I wiped my face and pretended I was laughing as I drew him in for the cuddle he had been demanding.

Something very beautiful happens to people when their world has fallen apart: a humility, a nobility, a higher intelligence emerges at just the point when our knees hit the floor. (Marianne Williamson)

When I was lying there on the floor. I knew I wasn’t alone. I knew I wasn’t the only mother to ever feel so overwhelmed by it all that she fell to her knees and sobbed. Earlier in the day I had emailed my close girlfriends over in Australia and told them I was struggling a bit with feeling overwhelmed by it all and one of them wrote this ‘The long game is that you are raising an amazing child who will make a difference in the world. The short game is that you are selflessly, singularly, sacrificing for the sake of that little spirit. It takes many moments and it’s fucking hard.’.

Every mother knows this so well, the selflessness, the sacrifice and that yes, it’s fucking hard.

With the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child.
You learn to build your roads

On today because tomorrow’s ground
Is too uncertain for plans, and futures have

A way of falling down in midflight. (Veronica A Shofstall)

This wasn’t the way I thought my life as a parent would be, this wasn’t what I pictured in my head but in some ways it’s even more beautiful, more raw, more real than my dream of the perfectly happy family.

Today I am tired, today I would love to have someone to lean on and today I am teary but tomorrow I know I wont be. I am a pitta fuelled bundle of fire and I can feel the spark lighting back up in my stomach.