the Bigness of motherhood and the grief of “What if’s”

I (Kaya) wrote this when I got home from a music festival a few months ago, it was such a powerful experience I wanted to get it down on paper, and now I feel ready to share it here with you.

I’m sitting here in this audience, one of hundreds and hundreds. Just another everyday person watching people up on stage who have done really BIG things in their lives. Big, culture influencing, whole lives affecting, people noticing type things.

I’m sitting here with my two children, they’re both half sitting on me, asking everyday things of me and I feel grief.

I’m guessing at the ages of these people on stage and they aren’t much older than me, many others performing here at this festival are younger, and I oh so wish I was somehow up there too.

I don’t even see myself as a musician, I just want to be doing BIG things. I’m also not seeing world fame (although if I’m really honest, even though I feel embarrassed about it, the thought of being famous excites me), what I really want is to be having a bigger impact in the world.

So, I’m comparing my life to theirs, they are successful and have done BIG things. I look over my past 10 years or so as an adult and I’m still dreaming, I’m still wanting that day to come when it feels that at least I am living to my potential, when I feel successful within myself.

As I think about this I judge this whole vein of thought, this longing that's bursting out of me. I have two beautiful children and when I’m honest about it, I feel some resentment that I don’t want to feel towards them.

My daughter came into my life right at the beginning of so much. I was just becoming an adult and was still very much finding myself in the world.

I now realise that this grief I’m feeling, as I’m sitting here in this audience, is oh so linked to that resentment I push down and distract myself from feeling. It’s linked to the common desire to have space on my own and to not be asked ONE. MORE. THING.

I know I am meant to do BIG things and the bulk of my days are currently spent helping my children, cleaning up, doing many, many dishes, ensuring we have enough food, working out how to pay the next bill and say yes to the next passion they have… and working, one small step at a time, into bigger things for us all.

I know that BIG things can be so many different things. It really depends on who's judging the things as to how BIG they are but I do feel I’m not quite doing my BIG things.

I also feel like I’m taking such small steps and I’m walking up a great, big, giant set of stairs. Stairs that take many footsteps to climb, they’re so big I often have to help my children up them (and we often need to climb back down because we dropped something below). 

I am ready for another set of stairs, where the steps are smaller and closer together, where they’re sunnier and we can all take an easy step between them together... Or better yet, I'm ready for us all to fly.

NOW, As I imagine this journey I am taking together with my children (and it is always together with them), I’m feeling gratitude for the BIGness of all the little things we create and share in our lives together…

In the BIGness of their WHOLE lives I have shared with them!

So now I’m sitting in this audience, feeling this gratitude and this grief and this envy and this longing for such BIG things.

Sitting here in this audience, BIG things are going on inside me. My children are cuddling up to me, life blood is flowing from me (which is another factor in this journey of emotions flowing at this particular time).

I now feel a whole other grief.

Grief at the disconnection I often put between my children and I.

As I sit in this BIG audience, I’m crying BIG tears along to the BIG, beautiful music.

I allow myself to feel the grief of possible lost adventures into BIG things in my 20’s. I’m not jumping in so quickly to counter the grief with how big giving birth and raising children is. I’m allowing myself to go there, to wish I didn’t have my children and to imagine I was somewhere else, as big as someone else.

And the amazingly BIG thing is, in allowing that mostly forbidden desire, I really, really feel the BIGness of my life right now as a mother!

I can’t imagine doing anything I have done since they were here without them.

Sitting here in this audience, I feel a doorway open in my heart. It’s been shut for a long time and as it opens, it’s like two different parts of me finally meet and get to know each other.

My BIG Mother love, that part of me that will do anything for my children is meeting and embracing that BIG successful, free (and famous) me who does other BIG things.

Now, I’m pretty sure they’re gonna start working together…

WOW, imagine the BIG things that can come from that!

Can you relate?

Do you ever have similar feelings (even if you do push them down)?

Our invitation for you this week-

is to acknowledge those parts of you that feel resentful, in grief, over it, envious and like you just want to run off and follow your own dreams.

Acknowledge them, allow them to be (because they exist) and notice what happens :-)