Another Kind Of Mother

Maiden – Mother – Crone.

Tone: Deep contentment with a grandmother smile.

As I enter the crone years of my life – many past griefs are resurfacing in dreams and intrusive thoughts. I call them pebble dreams – because they are smaller now, not like the avalanche of boulder dreams I had as I entered my 40s.

It’s as if those old wounds, mostly processed and held years ago, come to pop in one more time to remind me of the sum of my story so far. Those stones changed the direction of the life I thought I would have.

This morning, a book I was reading asked me this profound question, “What has life entrusted to me?”

I’m going to really marinate on what my answer is – and the first thing that popped into my thoughts was what life didn’t entrust to me that I thought it would.

I am 51. I have never been pregnant. Ever.

For the first 32 years of my life – I thought I wanted 5 kids. A giant gaggle of children all close in age like my mother had.

I thought my career would be wife and mom and maybe mentor to college-age women who wanted to be a wife and mom. It was extreme – and born out of the sheltered religious norms of my childhood communities. I also thought I would marry a man in khaki pants and boots with a business suit and a ranch for us to go to on the weekends.

Peel away the religion – which I do not miss; simply, I never had a child or children of my own. At some point, this became a conscious choice. My ego wanted a child – one that looked like Bill and me – tall with a big forehead and thick hair and probably good at basketball and writing, and a girl, only a girl. That’s how I knew my soul was not here to have a child.

There is both freedom and clarity – and a pang of grief.

Life entrusted me with something entirely different. Something I didn’t know I could or would want when I was a child or young woman. Life entrusted me to be another kind of mother. My love and legacy live in way more family trees than my own. I have mentored thousands of mothers and fathers and born a thousand children and sent them off to live and thrive in the world once they came to maturity, and now I am a grandmother of these.