I
won’t say that I am not embarrassed talking about being a
stay-at-home mother,
or that I didn’t suffer the effacement, the feminine mystique,
of those who— defined by the work they do, its lack of income
and status— fall outside of the dominant mode of subjectivity
in our culture. I feel especially awkward when I hear of the deep
pain of women who struggled with the separation issues of combining
mothering and work outside the home. One ponders, though, if one
could take one’s babies and toddlers to work or to a daycare
at work, if this was the norm, how different it could be for women
who have children. Be that as it may, there are many sides to the
mother story that each of us weaves out of our own experiences and
which we have just begun in our many voices to tell. There should
be room also for mine.
As I tell
my story, I wonder what this intensive, embodied learning meant?
The route, its rhythms, the way it’s continued its strange
melodies, the places it took me, were unexpected. In the years since
I have many times said that breastfeeding taught me how to meditate.
If the male creator god arrogated the life-giving, reproductive
powers of the female, and of the goddess behind her, then I would
also posit a connection between breastfeeding and the art of meditation.
Having since become a yoga teacher, and having spent many hours
chanting mantras and meditating mainly with other women, I would
say not only that I learnt to find the stillness within, but that
the predominant metaphor for my particular form of spiritual expression,
to turn to another side of this, is that of maternal love, of the
milk of mother love. Mothering took me to the Adi Shakti of the
yoga tradition I studied. She is an incarnation of the Divine Mother,
who has become my particular tutelary spirit, who I turn to for
unconditional acceptance, nourishment, comfort, who I ask to fill
me with trust and strong love in the middle of the night when I
cannot sleep, who I turn to for help when my children are throwing
tantrums, or I am upset. Divine Mother has become my main goddess
energy. While many goddesses come to mind, such as the Babylonian
Ishtar, Greek Gaia and Hera, Christian Mary, Japanese Amaterasu,
Chinese Kwan Yin, Nordic Freya, Indian Kali Ma, as well as present
day Divine Mother incarnations in India, like the Gurus Karunamayi
and Mother Meera, it is Isis, great goddess of ancient Egypt and
of magic, of women in childbirth, of women suckling their young,
of many groups of pagan, Wiccan women throughout the millennia,
who I feel closest to. In my practice as a witch, a priestess, when
I set up a sacred circle and light the votive candles and offer
incantations and prayers to the forces that be, it is always Divine
Mother whom I ultimately call upon, whose unconditional love and
wisdom I ask to channel. What I am exploring through my life experience,
the route I have chosen in a female incarnated form, in this inscribed
and gendered body, is, then, inclusive of earth-based religions,
which are important in their own right, but also moves towards an
embodied spirituality.
It is in
my mothering experiences that I have found unexpected gifts. These
gifts were contained in what flowed through me, somehow the strength
and forbearance gained from offering comfort. Perhaps it was the
self-sacrifice of my dominant self for an underlying maternal consciousness
that indicated an unconditional love and infinite compassion for
the other are possible modes not only of consciousness, but of being—
on good days at least. I know that there are many ways of coming
to this knowledge, that this is only the particular path I took
to interweave body, mind, and soul, to integrally combine multiple
aspects of my/self in a multiple unity that, even in its discontinuous
segments, has a wholeness that is satisfying, is inwardly nourishing.
I think it’s about having the courage to be, in all your moments,
in all the places and people you find yourself in and with, in all
your activities, in all your giving to the world through whatever
you do, and anyway you get to that is fine, is good. Let me close
with an image of the ancient Egyptian goddess, Hathor, the ‘mother
of light,’ whose milk, flowing from her abundant breasts,
creates the stars of the Milky Way, among whom we are nestled on
our creative, living planet of diversity... let the bright blue-green
pearl of our home in the universe rest gently in your consciousness...
in you, gently with sweet warmth and nourishment...
mmo : april 2004
This essay was
originally presented at Mothering, Religion and Spirituality,
the 7th Annual Conference of the Association
for Research on Mothering, Oct. 25, 2003, at York University,
Toronto, Canada. |
Brenda
Clews
is
a writer, artist, dancer, performance poet, yoga instructor and
mother of two teenagers in Vancouver, Canada. She has degrees in
Fine Arts and English from York University.
“I
wrote this piece to express the very real conflicts women experience
when they have children. Even though I was preparing for an academic
career in the 1980s, I opted to stay home because my options for
childcare did not seem to offer a way to put my beliefs in equality
into practice. They, instead, reinforced the divide of a male-dominated
‘important’ work of the workplace and the female-dominated
low status work of the domestic sphere. Childcare was largely done
by women, and there were ‘sub’ classes of women being
created through the childcare system. Hiring another woman to look
after my children, either as a nanny or a daycare worker, was not
going to dent, in any significant way for me, the structure of the
inequality between the sexes. The most radical thing that I could
do, and this, paradoxically, was also the most conservative, was
to approach motherhood as a viable topic for feminist study from
the inside and see what I could gather from my own mothering experiences.” |
