Saving Grace

I threw out my back after running out of River's room and kicking the wall. Do I tell the chiropractor that?

In the shower, massaging the bruise on my ankle, I see the title for the second book. Down the River: Motherhood as Pilgrimage.

In the juxtaposition between shame and hope, I have a thought. Spirituality in regards to motherhood, or possibly anything, is not about how we maintain our practices in a steady way. It's about how we return after we've fallen.

Every journey takes us where we don't want to go, in a second or an hour or for years at a time. And that's ok. Just on the other side of lost is return.

Motherhood & Resurrection

Yesterday I started the morning off by spilling a toddler potty full of pee down the front of me. Followed that up with phone calls to insurance underwriters, mortgage companies, credit card people, and the tax assessor’s office. Then I dumped hot coffee in my lap.

In between, the girl held tight to my belt loops, whined and screamed, and finally melted down completely because her favorite horse broke his leg (well, she snapped it like a twig, but you understand, tragic).

“Can you reinstate our policy?” with “Excuse me, yes, River, I’ll get a band-aid for the horsey,” with “So we have no car insurance?” with “Alright, alright, be quiet, mommy is trying to talk!” with “Hey, I have ten bills here I need to send out, we have three days to figure it out.” with “Honey, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, mommy hasn’t been paying attention to you. I’m sorry.”

“You my friend?” she asks, tilted head to the sky, to me, pink around the eyes. I wipe tears and kiss her cheek. “You my family?” she continues.

Yes. I am your friend. I am your family. I get down on the ground with her. “You a woman, momma?” Yes, River. I’m a woman.

This is how I stray so far out and this is how I come back. My teacher, she's two.

“I want the hokey pokey!” she demands from the back seat, pink fleece hat surrounds blue pools of light, and straps down under the chin. I turn five to ten times in traffic, all the way to school, just to see that face. As sleep deprived as I am, on my own waterwheel all night, she pulls the light up past all the weariness and, light to light, we go into the day.

Motherhood & Spirituality

When you google 'motherhood and spirituality' very little happens. The trail is not a main thoroughfare, not even a clear pathway. You'll find a few Christian strands that taper into the woods, a random blog that lists these two words in a post, and short references to a mother deity here and there.

All those nights during River’s first year, I googled in the dark, and came up with nothing. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to rest in maternal wisdom. No map to help me find my way.

So I went to bookstores and browsed the shelves. Surely there would be an entire section on Motherhood and Spirituality. Not one book. I searched Amazon and found a few, and had to order on-line. I did more extensive searches under similar keywords, every creative combination I could think of. Every now and then I would find a needle in the haystack.

What sleep-deprived new mother has the time to investigate in this way? And why are spiritual resources so scarce?

At first I was surprised. Then confused. Angry after awhile. And then from its absence, what was not there became a powerful force, blinding in the way that, as a mother, I could feel so disconnected from the primal meaning in the process.

Women birth more than four million babies every year in the United States. Why is there not an abundance of spiritual havens for us?

Why, when in the middle of our lives we perform the closest act of death and resurrection, is there not a center on every corner like Starbucks to welcome our wisdom and hold our heads?

I could ask what that is about. What’s that about? would feel good to say, but I already know what that’s all about – it’s one of the oldest and longest stories on the planet about forgetting.

I'm not interested in the forgetting part anymore. I simply want to provide a welcoming place for women to arrive. So I'm editing my book River's Grace: Navigating the Sacred and Mundane in Motherhood. It's a book of letters to my daughter, River, written during the first year of her life. It's part spiritual memoir with topics, teachings, and blessings. It's a deep-hearted conversation about all the things no one ever told me about mothering - I mean the insane depths and heights of it that we all walk around with.....can you imagine if your mother sat you down and told you the truth of it? The way you tip over edges and come undone and are lifted into spaces of redemption that you had no idea were available in the middle of simple moments. It's about all that, and how to traverse the spiritual aspects in the midst of daily minutia.

I'm also developing a corresponding website RiversGrace that will be a haven for women and mothers (and men, too).
ha·ven: /ˈheɪvən/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunci

1.	a harbor or port.

2.	any place of shelter and safety; refuge; asylum.

–verb (used with object)

3.	to shelter, as in a haven.

Also, I'm developing a workshop series for pregnancy, birthing, and mothering.

Through all these channels I want to reframe motherhood as pilgrimage. Motherhood as initiation. Sadly, our culture has lost that memory, but it's ok because the deeper journey is alive and well, just behind this moment, just inside every other feeling we know.

Join me as I find the form and the space and the clarity to manifest the vision....