The wisdom of gestation.

Historically, waiting has never been my strong suit.

I shared ideas and offerings with the world almost as soon as they entered my body. I made huge life decisions on instinct alone. I did not know how to hold things inside of me, to let them marinate, to be with the discomfort of not exactly knowing, so I performed full confidence in the hope that if I shared it with others that would somehow make it more real and true than it felt to me at the time.

More than anything else, pregnancy is teaching me the wisdom of waiting, of letting life take it’s time, and of the intelligence of the slow reveal.

How does this happen? How does one who never could wait before learn to settle into and even be comforted by the pure act of slow growth and waiting for life to be ready?

Gestation, I am learning, is highly intelligent. These nine months are absolutely crucial.

Baby needs all this time to grow enough to survive outside my womb. I need all of this time to both be with the unfolding and prepare for meeting this most awesome responsibility of mothering human life.

To prepare is multi layered and many stepped.

There is physical preparation.

For years before getting pregnant, I prepared my body to hold new life. I focused on nutrition so my womb could become a vital home. I learned a lot about birth. I stopped drinking alcohol. I took rest more seriously than ever. All of that laid the foundation for the physical preparation to give birth and receive new life~painting walls, buying diapers, practicing breath, shoring up my community, continuing to be as responsive as possible to the needs for hunger and rest and movement that my body crave.

There is emotional preparation.

New layers of grief reveal themselves as I reckon with the heartbreak of mothering without the mother who birthed me here in physical form. I say a slow goodbye to the freedom and selfishness that the years of maidenhood afforded me. I relish the years that my partner have had together, just the two of us, knowing that the ease and closeness we have with each other has laid a strong foundation and that parenthood will inevitably require us to shift and change inside of it. I watch the rise of fascism, environmental destruction and genocide in the U.S. and around the world and allow myself to be with the heartbreak and natural fears that arise when so much is unknown about what systems will still be in place as this baby grows.

There is spiritual preparation.

I connect with my ancestors, spiritual support and baby as they flip throughout my womb. I discover and embody my values and boundaries on a deeper level. I ask for and receive help (yes, this is too is spiritual work).

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I look back and marvel at how untrusting of gestation I have been in the past.

In the first iteration of my business when I was guiding people through embodied grief processes, there was a current of stress and fear running through me that is not present now.

The stress was partly financial-we cannot dedicate ourselves creatively or spiritually while we are also struggling to meet basic needs.

The fear was an internal crisis of confidence. Can I make this work? How do I make this work? Even as I held space and witnessed powerful transformation in the people I worked with individually, I continually felt the need to push out new classes, retreats, and groups to get the external validation that I couldn’t give myself.

I didn’t hold my ideas for long before sharing because to hold and actually allow new life to gestate until it’s ready is uncomfortable, incredibly slow and kind of boring.

Ideal gestation is largely boring. There is very little drama. Life grows inside while I eat my morning eggs and toast and I don’t have to do a thing about it.

Expecting myself to do (what I understand to be now) an absolutely unnatural process of quickly turning out new ideas and expecting them to land with others when they had not fully landed in me creates stress, and yes, drama. Drama distracts us.

For lots of good reasons (Trauma, capitalism, individualism, social media fueled distraction etc), many approach gestation and birth and mothering with a nervous system that cannot hold itself and without the support of calm bodies to hold them. Stress and drama are natural outputs of an internal struggle to land, be still and fully feel.

What might have been different in my relationships, in that that business and in my life had I trusted the wisdom of gestation then, I’ll never know. All I can do I can love that version of me and know that she was doing her best.

The maiden is becoming a mother.

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Six months ago you were just a seed. Now you are practicing kicks and twirls and breath. I sit on the rocker where I will be nursing you in a few short months, hand on protruding belly, and feel you pulsing inside of me. I gaze out the window as the sun breaks between the clouds and greet you good morning. Hip flexors and back twinge slightly with the continual stretching of this uterus and the renegotiation of weight. Tummy garbling from morning hunger, I go downstairs to satisfy it. What a miracle we are, baby. Let’s begin the day.

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Whatever/whomever you are gestating right now, however long it takes to reveal itself, may your process be sweet, slow, kind of boring and deeply gratifying,