Magnetic Maternal
I wanted to be held by a man. Someone who loved me so much that he wanted to create life with me. I wanted to share the moment of that positive pregnancy test with him, in joy and disbelief. I wanted him to bring me hot cocoa and soup and marvel and my shapeshifting. It was a fantasy, but not entirely unrealistic, after all, couples experience this all the time. It took a decade of carefully picking apart the threads of love, partnership, and bearing a child. I could not accept that they might be separate things. Everything about my life had taught me to desire the coming together of two souls to create a third. At the same time everything in my life has also taught me that family happens in a myriad of ways, and love does not equal someone who desires to create that new life with you.
When I love, I love big. Not selflessly or with delusions of grandeur, but big like the way I feel when the ocean is lit up with phosphorescence, or when the songs sung by friends around the campfire make your heart want to burst. Big like rivers and autumn. It took a long time to learn the difference between desiring romance and desiring partnership. It’s embarrassing to talk about wanting a man, wanting a partner, wanting love. It feels like every statement of desire needs to be followed up by a disclaimer: “But I’m fine on my own.” “Oh, but I’m also a strong independent woman.” “Oh, but I’m not co-dependent.” “Oh, but I know I don’t NEED a man.” Need and desire are two very different things. What a perfect paradox of our times to be a woman who is at once longing to be met in love, and at the same time dismantling the patriarchy programming of a woman’s role in society.
It was some time around the 5th year after my miscarriage that I realized I may not meet someone in time to have a family. This is when the unpicking of the threads began in earnest. I was and remain unwilling to compromise on either of my two deepest desires around family: for a child and a partner. I slowly came to the understanding that my time to grow life in my womb was limited, while love of a man was not. I started to research the insemination process. I began to make life decisions around the possibility of being a single mother. I dated. I cried over a broken heart. I moved to a place with more access to friends, family, and community. I doggedly refused to become jaded. I took apart and rebuilt my life piece by piece.
In this 10 year period of dismantling and becoming, I discovered an untruth I have been carrying with me: that I was not deserving of more than one good thing at a time. I created either/or paradigms. I can either be a strong woman or be taken care of by a man. I can either have a career as a musician or have a child. I can either have a child or a man. I can either be a mother or a lover. I can either be magnetic or maternal. You only get one.
It was the bees who started to change this. I was captivated by their ability to surrender so fully to the bliss of the flower, and return with soul purpose to feed the nest. Behind them sat the Melissae, the bee women of ancient Greece, and all the teachings of their lineage. The Melissae is a woman who is fully alive to her eros and with her desire to nurturing life. Magnetic and maternal. One does not beget the other, they are constantly in flow with each other. No sequestered spiritual life for the bee women. They are fully of this world, dripping with the milk of the stars and the blood of the Earth. I owe my courage for conceiving a child on my own to the knowledge that these women existed. They exist. We exist.
What is it that crafts these mythic lives we live? Everywhere we see the day to day struggle of career, loneliness, memories, health, finances. Yet, underneath and swimming around this is the possibility that you are crafted from the same material myths are made of. The stuff that reaches beyond the fantastical and straight into the soul of things: long journeys, transcendent moments, the dark night of the soul, the wise mentors, perseverance beyond the odds. Whatever new story I am writing, I know now there will be at least one essential strand that I pass down to my daughter, and that strand is the red thread of Womanhood. When we look back in time and lift the veil of history written by men, we find a rich sea of women’s spirituality, women’s traditions, and women’s stories. Cultures and traditions that revered the Mother as creator and bringer of life. The creatrix. She who we both come from and return to; the void of creation, the magnetic Earth. She who is both Mother and Lover. She who is full bellied and entirely entwined with her own sexual potency. She who gathers the winter to her breast for the long sleep. She who dances wildly through the desert and gazes quietly into the moon-filled pool.
Perhaps separating the strands of partner and child are less about coping with grief and longing, and more about inviting the night sea memory of reverence for the Sacred Feminine to take center stage for the new little woman that I am carrying from one side of the veil to the other. Perhaps she chose me because I am just wild enough to choose to bring her fourth on my own. I am not striking out alone, but rather sinking into an often unspoken of lineage of women. Women who were not “single mothers”, but mothers within societies, priestesshoods, and tribes where a woman was not dependent on the nuclear family to survive.
As I near the portal of birth, there is a candle burning for the pathenogenic priestesshoods we’ve nearly forgotten about. A candle burning for the womb shamans. A candle burning for the grandmothers midwifing their granddaughters. A candle burning for the pythoness prophetess and her womb utterings. A candle burning for the red tent. A candle burning for the way of the rose.
I do not doubt that my desire is strong enough to weave a family for my daughter that includes a father. I have no say over the timing, but I do know that she chose me now, and I chose her. I chose her during a global pandemic. She chose me when all the hands of community could not hold her as she enters the world. I chose her despite the sometimes insurmountable heartbreak. She chose me because I am alone, not despite it. I chose her because I can, not because I’ve run out of time. She chose me because I am strong and soft. I chose her because I am brave, and because I wanted her more than anything in my life.
I have never felt more in touch with my womanhood.
Together we are the maternal and magnetic, dripping into garden of life.
Photos by Koa Kalish