Today is my first day of my 20th week of pregnancy! If all things were precise, we’re half way through this pregnancy journey. The time has beautifully fallen just about the same week as the Summer Solstice and the Strawberry Capricorn Full Moon - the half way point of the year.
This milestone has brought up a reflection for me — if I am being honest it is one that has come up a few times and I’ve lost my nerve to share about it just as many times. I worry that it will sound like a defensive rant but there is also passion behind it for me and in some ways a stand for the value of my work. Here goes:
I’ve had a few people remark to me that I’m sharing about my pregnancy early — sharing with others and well with you, dear reader. We also shared with our 3-year old son “early” in the process.
In my work, so much of what I share about and support people in is about times of change. The moments in our lives where everything shifts, whether because we ask it to or because it naturally arises.
Often I am supporting people through the maturation process of maiden to mother, mother to queen, queen to crone and all the physiological, emotional and spiritual rites of passage that mark that journey for women. In the clinic that might look like support through menstrual irregularities and pain, pregnancy, postpartum, finding your center in motherhood, menopause or life-altering illness like cancer.
Because change, even when we think it is an all at once experience, is usually a gradual process. There are many signs that point the way and foreshadow the shifts to come when we are able to listen at the subtle levels. That is so much of what practicing Chinese medicine has taught me, that there are many subtle diagnostic cues that can be felt in the pulse, channels, the eyes etc.
I feel that it’s so important to make these changes consciously, that we will never be as we were again so honoring the process and the shift is a true honoring of life and nature.
I share from my own life because I am willing to be my own guinea pig in this work. That’s half the fun for me.
In truth, I’m actually kind of irritated at this social norm of sharing about pregnancy later in the journey. Each mother and family can choose when is right for them to share.
It’s withholding sharing from a position of fear that really gets me. We have created this culture of fear around fertility, pregnancy and postpartum and a lack of support that goes with it. Fear that if there is a loss or something doesn’t go as planned then it will be our own fault and of course disappointing, embarrassing or vulnerable. But that state of mind robs mothers of the support that is needed, especially in the first trimester when morning sickness and fatigue is often at its height.
Not many of us know that pregnancy loss is quite common. If loss were to happen and we keep it to ourselves, it isolates us from the community support we deeply need at that time — to share in the deep grief and reminder that you that you are not alone.
Now not everyone in our community is attuned to how to offer appropriate support - so discernment is important and boundaries even more so. No newly pregnant mother needs to hear about traumatic loss, pregnancies or birth stories. They need our strength and our compassion.
There is a middle ground because culturally we often fall into the trap of isolation and hyper independence and out of community orientation.
A resounding theme I’ve noticed in the clinic around pregnancy and new mothers is learning how to actually ask for and receive help. It’s fascinating that this is such a large part of process when that skill ideally would be in place to receive the help from the beginning. This perpetuates a culture of mothering that is based in perfectionism and ultimately leads to burn out. It’s a societal problem.
It’s a big reason I feel so lit about helping mothers recenter into their own sovereignty and creating a sisterhood of women doing the same thing.
So I want to share more about preparation, which means, I have to contend with my own feelings that when I share my process “early” that I’m being foolish. Now this feeling definitely comes from my own history and wounding because I am often a person who is sharing about things that aren’t part of the mainstream mold (yet).
Nowadays I’m more comfortable with being perceived as foolish or not being understood. But this experience of preparation for second time motherhood is touching on that wound again.
Sometimes this foolishness feels like the energy of Spring and the archetypal Fool from the tarot. The image of unknowingly walking off of a cliff (change) without any knowledge of how they got there. In some tarot decks, the Fool is first in the Major Arcana and in some he is last. This speaks to the nature of this foolish energy — does the fool not see what’s happening or is he so tuned into the tide of growth and change that he knows the only way is to ride the waves without resistance? I love this concept because in many ways the Fool is where we begin and end our journey — unknowing and surrendered.
Usually with these big shifts and even with the preparation, there is no controlling the outcome — the most obvious example being birth. But I do believe that whatever happens, being with the subtle shifts along the way, growing your own connection to yourself, watering the roots of who you are will can lead you to an empowering moment instead of a shocking one. A heroic journey instead of a traumatic memory.
Plus what are we doing here if not to be with our own life?
For me this aspect of walking people through their maturation process, the deeper discovery of who they are, their own soul and their release into deeper freedom IS the point.
So here I am living it out-loud, in public. Stepping into the role of the Fool, which is all part of the archetypal journey to our fullest expression. If we suppress that invitation in the beginning of the process for fear of vulnerability we never get started in our transformation and that’s not a risk I’m willing to take.