A Nod from the Ancestors - Resilience and Our Pathways to Healing
Hello,
Just over a decade ago, my mother died two months before my daughter was born. It was a profound threshold. I was grieving in the late stages of pregnancy and of course, despite trying to move on for my new baby, this continued while nursing a newborn. Everyday I walked the tightrope of utter joy and desperate loss, doing my best to manage that, as well as the instability that already comes with motherhood. In my effort to survive that chapter, I realise now that I had in some way closed a part of myself off from my mum.
I was incredibly close to her and I felt angry with her abrupt departure - the need for one's mother (however complex a relationship one might have) is ancient and visceral, and it rears itself in various forms of need, yearning or desire when you become a mother yourself.
She had died in Africa, gone for some months over the winter as my aging parents now did every year. So I couldn't even say goodbye, couldn't fly as I was too late in pregnancy, couldn't take malaria tablets and all the other unbearable things I was told to do to protect me and my unborn child.
