If you’re a single mother and you’ve found yourself oscillating between the devoted, perfect parenting pursuit and the path of honoring your innermost wild, adventurer, and creative woman, I feel you.
If you know that your next best pursuit isn’t another man, a busy, mindless job, a dwell of damsel in distress while you repeat the pattern of playing small and submitting your excellence, I feel you.
If you have found yourself at the crux of a new beginning with a hunger and drive not yet socially acceptable, I feel you.
You are not alone. There are women out there just as f*cking tied down, slammed, and royally f*cked in ways just as unimaginable as us, and not in the desired ways. Not in bed. Not in their career. Not in their social life. But in motherhood.
One moment, you’re engulfed in the dreamy, nostalgic-like wonder of motherhood. You just birthed your beautiful baby. You are filled with the aroma of Dreft, a newborn head, and the scent of baby blankets.
Life is filled with cloth diapers, alternative living styles, and indie baby and mama dresses. You build the décor of your home based on the premise of wooden Waldorf toys with a gigantic map of the world pinned on places you will visit together. You endlessly swoon about the idea of your new family being together forever.
This is your world now. Family, mama, papa, baby bears. A pack, a tribe, a whole entity that sticks together.
Until, suddenly, it’s doesn’t.
And colliding equally amongst a million wild flails and triumphs in between the dream that died and the new world you are now subject to, you find yourself at the precipice, overlooking the valley of truths in search and contemplation of your next best pursuit.
You are after the very juice of what makes you spark, come to life, wake up stirred in the morning, and go to bed appeased at night. Core and depth.
Your next best pursuit is you. The changing woman.
Who is she? Who is this new woman? Can she really be the same she was prior—in her reality built upon ambitious family wishes? The family woman, the loving, grounded Mama Bear? Or does she require a new version—an upgrade?
Somewhere within her lies dormant the under-activated and not fully-lived, innocently explorative Maiden, looking to be with her dreams, her wonders, her playfulness once again.
Somewhere out in the reaching distance dwells within her the dirty, dark crone. The hag who knows she didn’t settle for sh*t and stood in her power both fiercely and softly without apology.
Somewhere closer to the surface lies within her the primal earth steward, the caretaker, the nurturer of the Mother.
And somewhere living right on the very edge, beckoning for a breakthrough, is the culmination of all of the women she will never be.
That changing woman is calling. And calling. And calling. And the nectar that drips into the realms of her possibilities is so f*cking daunting.
In her present shining moments of motherhood and life, she is grounded. She is good. She is organized and has it all together. She is likable, agreeable, well known, and in tune with the messiness, the responsibilities, the heaviness, and the realness of motherhood.
And when nobody is looking, she is piercing the veil with her contemplation for another reality, planting seeds of gestation to birth in the portals of new paradigms, ringing with change, innovation, revelation, and expansion.
She is hungry for meaning, depth, richness, cultivation. For something deeper and yummier to devote her life, her energy, and her time to.
She knows that although the birth of her children was magnificent, galvanizing, and psychedelic, deep into the core of her bones, she knows that was only her initiation.
She knows in her heart, her cells, her womb, her skin, and her bones that she was born to birth not only babies but movements, creations, new ancestral patterns, and, inevitably, paradigms.
How do I know her? Because she is me, she is you, and she is the untapped, reawakened savage born to roar within each and every woman out there reclaiming her value, her earthly mission, and her very soul.
She lies glistening through the crevices of the quiet woman, the submissive type, the small one, and the rule-follower of all patriarchal-programmed women in the world. She is found trembling for a delicious f*cking love affair with the universe, once and for all, at the core of single mothers, longing for the return of their dignity, their soul, and their life juice.
Reckoning past the fear of risk.
So how do we get there? You know, those of us itching, craving, yearning for the life that is perennial and never-ending with unencumbered mojo, gratuity, and satisfaction beyond measure?
We unapologetically undo, untether, untangle, and make space for the revealing, rebirthing, reenergizing, reassessing, rejuvenating, reestablishing, reclaiming, and redeeming that is ready to fill us from head to toe.
We unpack the bags that have become too heavy and throw out the extra attire of “responsibilities.”
Do we really have to keep ourselves structured, prim, and prestigious for a world that is not even meeting us a quarter of the way we are showing up?
Do we really have to keep sacrificing our big selves at the altar of normality? You know, everything that is actually soul-sucking and restricting, disguising itself as modest, practical, humble, tolerant, and respectful?
No.
Still, I know with my full body and bones how daunting it is. How frightening it feels to step out of a paradigm in fear of falling and flailing because we have grown to believe that we are incapable of birthing worlds with our imagination, our bellies, our grit, our gore, our “truth” stories, and our warrior’s hearts.
I know how impractical it feels to take one phantom step without seeing the entire staircase and to believe in a world that not many others are living in, looking at, and playing in.
I know how life-threatening it feels to my security, my stability, and my known world to throw into the fire everything that kept me safe. To rid myself of the coping mechanisms, the temporary tools, and the fleeting survival guides I held onto in the times of struggle.
I also know that the world we dream of is not really that far out of reach. Somewhere close by, there are women, just like me, showing up with their heart relentlessly because they see, know, and feel a world that’s waiting for just a few more of us to step their foot into and give it substance for it to actually become “real.”
And that although the fear of truly believing in the unknown and trembling toward the call with nothing but faith, passion, and courage alone feels like a menacing gamble, it ultimately isn’t.
The reclamation.
We must instantly pierce the veil, breaking the mold of society’s standards around marriage. We must deconstruct the ideas that women are only best when served with men. We must be willing to find that place within us that says, “You can do this on your own,” not in a way that diminishes your need for community or village help, but in a way that reclaims your barren feminine soul from the expectation to marry and make yourself worthy in that way.
You must connect with that place deep inside that says, “I have worth, and it has absolutely nothing to do with my relationship to a man, or lack thereof.”
In our reclamation of worth and value outside of the stigma of marriage, we must reclaim what it is to be a woman. In society, our careers, all relationships, the world at large, and, especially, in the expansion that is taking place on the planet today.
We must be willing to engage with ourselves in such a way that we have no other choice but to reckon with our greatness. We absolutely must be able to dive into the well of our being and pull out every indoctrination that was programmed into us. Those pieces that say, “This is how and who a woman should be, and anything outside of this construct is absolutely, absurdly impossible.”
We must set them aflame. They were constructed in a paradigm that didn’t have room for women out of fear, control, and coercion of her power. To hell with those rules. We are way overdue for redeeming our rights.
As we break down the cluster-f*ck of detriments that no longer serve us, we must also include our shadowy, guilt-ridden trip on motherhood. We have got to stop drinking in the belief that we aren’t good mothers if we pursue ourselves. That is not nectar; that is poison.
Somebody out there created the myth that we can only be incredibly loving mothers if we sacrifice ourselves. Meanwhile, our children see the way we undo absolutely every detrimental construct in our lives to make way for an absolutely better, healthier, and more aligned structure. They are wise, primal, and holy, too. They feel us. They know that when we make moves to fill our heart’s desire in the highest and best alignment to the universe, it will catapult us forward with blessings, and will directly impact them.
Children want to see their mothers succeed in the pursuit of their soul, 100 percent.
I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. Anything that even slightly resembles going against the grain includes resistance from our inherited beliefs and through roadblocks from the world around us.
There will be hurdles and challenges.
There will be moments where we drop to our knees and question our ability, our sanity, and whether we truly are guided and provided for by the universe.
We will be met time and time again with the grief of the dreams that failed. With the guilt-ridden burden of whether we are doing it right or doing enough.
We will be met with realities that have never before been known while we doubt and challenge our ability to navigate them. We will arrive at countless dead ends and deal with our own resistance to breakthrough and create a path.
But we don’t stop there.
So, go on. Sign up for that class. Return to school. Buy the ticket. Take the trip. Write the book. Drink the second cup of coffee. Extend your stay. Eat the cake. F*ck the stranger.
If you’re looking for your right away into the passage that is your soul, I’m granting you a temporary trial until you are able to dive deep and reclaim it for yourself,
Here is your VIP pass.
You are allowed to be more than the mama bear you have always known. And while you are reclaiming all of the women you are made up of—those who put on the red heels and dance, those who sink deep into the earth, offering medicine to the world, and those who burst open at the seams and pour their insides out on paper in songs and in creations, you will always return home to be the mama bear, and more.
Because in the long run, you will be creating ripples of sovereignty, liberation, and utter joy as you have just laid the foundation for your children to do the same.
They will say, “My mama followed her heart, built a relationship with the universe, shared her offerings to the world. This dilated my perception. This blew my mind. This was the very remedy that inspired me to be all that I can be, too.”
“I owe it to my mama.”
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