The Dance of Motherhood

Blaise is a teenager, today. I know she’s around by the chaotic piles of discarded clothes, scattered breadcrumbs from this fiery modern Gretel. She’s a cyclone of awkward attitude, all elbows and knees, giraffe-like, her mop of titian curls shaved around the ears. Doors slam. Eyes roll, emphasising thick layers of mascara. She lies about how much she’s on the phone, slams the laptop closed when I come in the room. Her shorts are so tiny they’re practically a bikini, her mouth startlingly large in her wide face.

She won’t hold my hand any more, but still comes in for a morning cuddle. It won’t be long before I tuck under arm, and I am a tall woman. She sings everywhere she goes, and makes sculptures from found bits of nature. Shoes rarely grace her huge feet. She knows the names of all the birds, and becomes something fey and silent once we dive into the forest like panting wolves.

Ah, if only.

I feel the river of this timeline sucking me deeper, so tangible it’s a shock to realise I’m in the comforting bustle of Gertrude and Alice bookstore cafe, not floating in some river with her next to me, both of us so cold it’s brutal, and we can’t stop laughing with the sheer insanity of it all. All the adventures we’ve never had, all the futures yet to be. Her choices becoming more autonomous, funnelling her down a path that’s hers and hers alone.

The river is empty of her, I drift alone. She sailed ahead, has long since floated into the embrace of a wise old ocean, leaving me behind. Perhaps she dives with whales, sings to passing ships. Swoops and soars above clutching waves. Perhaps clouds are her wings. Perhaps, perhaps.

There is no merit in perhaps. Her birthday is the only time I indulge in these gentle wanderings, shimmering down possible futures that have bifurcated so many times over the last decade I can’t really track anything except my longing for who she might have been.

Each year at this time I remember birthing her. Bodies remember anniversaries, and winter solstice belongs to Blaise. She is my longest night. I have grown comfortable in the shadows of her, in the dark within dark, my velvet living midnight where the world’s spin is painted on a sky teeming with stars, and the cold face of the moon kisses my face as I gaze up and dream of her.

Mothering is a wonder. Such bloody mysteries nestle in abyssal womb spaces. Infinity sprawls and crawls where the sun never reaches. Woman-born creativity lives old and proud in the dark, deep roots dislodging ancient stories from the underworld, from mythic caverns and lightless streams. Our creativity is of mess and grit and howling need and heart-rending love. We are woven of the oldest stuff, the hot hearts of stars, the ice of eternity. Whether we birth a babe or not, those stories live inside our cells. Grief lives here, for love lost, babes born and stillborn and unborn and neverborn. It’s all part of mothering. Womb wearers are somehow all mothers on the inside.

Today I send my love to mothers who have lost. Whose birthing stories are not of happily ever after. I see you, loves. My shoulder to your shoulder, dear sister, my silence the most loving conversation I can offer, as we wander the world in our snow cloaks, painted with all the colours of loss and the aching terrible beauty of love that stitches each perfect melting fragment into a song of savage grace.

Today I love my teenager never to be, ever more grateful for the joyous gift of her, for all the ways her gift blooms not only inside me, but in sweet fruit dripping honey onto the tongues of those who also hear her music.