I’ve been playing with writing this specific book about the journey of my romantic relationships for about a year now. I imagine it as a prescriptive memoir.
Since I was a kid, I’ve always known that I wanted to write a book. My mother is a writer and it feels like it’s in my genes. It’s just the timing and although the current moment of being pregnant and caring for a toddler, a home and business might not seem to be the most spacious time it is also one of the most activated, creative times, ripe with ideas. So I’m going for it.
I speak to this conundrum of how to balance it all a lot in my work with clients. Particularly, how to balance motherhood and also stay true to your more personal dreams — as a human who is inspired by a lot it is definitely a balance I am in a constant practice of creating.
This particular book idea about romantic relationships through our maidenhood, motherhood, wise woman and (maybe even?) crone years has really stuck around and created this deep ache within me to be expressed. I have been working on it in the little moments by scribbling notes on my phone, writing in the rare quiet mornings and even dreaming about it.
It’s part of the reason I started this Substack! I wanted to start sharing bits of what I’m writing to see what lands, what inspires and what has legs and to keep me accountable, inspired and expressed.
Part of writing this is a desire to heal some of my own feelings around these relationships of the past both the deep love that was there and the loss, mixed in with guilt, shame, anger, joy, pleasure, happiness and disappointment. Writing has always been a way for me to make sense of things and in some ways I feel like this baby in my belly is asking me to acknowledge these threads in my relationships in order to soften and deepen into my own heart even more as a mother and a human.
It also satisfies this summer urge I have for creativity, desire, passion and love through writing about these relationships and bringing them into the present in a healing way.
In my early writing what I’m noticing is just how precious a time our maidenhood is to learn about relationships and love of another and ourselves.
Here’s some of the reflections I shared in the beginning of this writing journey as I wrote about my first big relationship that spanned throughout high school and into college with many revisits, the last being a closure 3 months before I met my husband.
Romance has an air like quality to it — it can move around you like a mist.
With whispers floating by tickling your senses in the absolute delight of a singular focus of attraction. Sometimes it comes like a gust of wind, whisking you away before you know it, transported through gazing into each other’s eyes into the dream land of union.
The mist infuses you with playful giggles that bounce in the air and a belly that gurgles with champagne effervescence and butterflies. There’s some magical influence that carries us away to the stories we’ve absorbed and that here it is for you, your own romance has arrived.
The romance of air is the maiden’s romance.
This whole experience of romance is lived from your head because your don’t yet know the pleasures of the body - just the awakening of excitement and the ache. It’s the anticipation that is felt, the potential.
My first love took me on a real romantic journey, mostly lived out in my head. Deeper more complex embodied love developed over the many years but in the beginning it was the fantasy and the illusion.
This romance was an intoxicating smoke and had I not been so blinded by it who knows how it would have been different.
Ironically, it was the time of my life when I started smoking cigarettes.
It was like I didn’t care, I wanted to be in the cloud of romance and I was ready to sacrifice it all to stay there.
He was what I thought would elevate me into this fantasy. But what I really needed was grounding.
Now I can reflect that the romance of earth, of the body and grounding is in the mother stage of our lives (either the age window or motherhood), the romance of fire is in the queen stage and the romance of water, the crone.
I can’t wait to share more of this journey with you. After I wrote sections on different relationships these poems emerged. Here is the one that I wrote after diving into this first relationship of mine, which I will continue to share about here.
A Poem to My Maiden Self
Place hands on feet. Hands on heart.
Sweet child, you are a child of God
your hands and feet are woven though precious love to touch you to the earth and to experience life.
let your heart shine, let it call to you the ones who can love it
breathe life into your silly, into your explorations, into your carefree days
think of nothing but the sweet pleasures that await you when you tend to the temple of your body, your creativity, your passion
there is only now to care deeply.
your heart and soul is precious, do not give them away to just anyone
allow yourself to be a child and pay no attention to the world that is trying to speed up your growth
this time is just for you.
you deserve the world and the world wants to give it to you.