The soft voice of intuition.
I’m terrible at sitting still. There is always something to be tidied up, cooked, picked up, wiped down, written, published, deleted, edited, good lord I could go on. Recently I realized that life has been trying to teach me to slow the f down since my son was born almost ten years ago. This week, my body forced me to listen.
I had my son later than many women bear their firstborns. He came to us a couple months before my 39th birthday, after a chaotic and painful three day labor that resulted in emergent c-section instead of the quiet home birth I’d so carefully planned out. Our postpartum months were crowded with depression and anxiety. The solitude imposed by damp Seattle winters flipped my normal upside down—one minute I was juggling a full time academic job and a freelance journalism career, the next I was a stay a sleep-deprived stay at home mom with aching breasts and a voracious newborn. I’d not signed up for this, but through the haze over those early months I grabbed glimpses of a new flavor of happiness I’d not tasted before: midday snuggles with an adoring fat baby, the permission to sleep when he slept, afternoon adventures on the bus with him tucked into a baby carrier, mug of tea in my hand, slow developments of mom communities, all of us bleary-eyed and questioning whether we knew what we were doing with these tiny humans suddenly placed into our care. It was really very, very cool.
Throughout my son’s first decade of life I’ve changed careers, joined the PTA, stopped drinking alcohol, become a devout baker of sourdough bread, and exchanged my clunky Subaru for a hybrid Kia. I am the opposite of who I thought I’d be at 48 when I look back at my 25 year old self. But every one of these changes is due to an unconsciously honed ability to follow my intuition. If I ever pass along one piece of advice to any mother, it’s this: stop fighting the urge to be productive and listen to what your body is trying to tell you. We’ve been conditioned to be economically productive and in our quest to succeed, we’ve forgotten how to grow parts of our lives that aren’t available on any market.
This year, a slowly evolving autoimmune disease pushed me into a pattern of rest I’m wrestling to get used to. Hard fatigue sets in at the most inconvenient times, my limbs don’t work like they used to, and I need to sit the hell down. I am trying to use these periods of stillness as gifts of time I didn’t think I had. I’ve intended to start a blog on this site for months but I never have time. Well, today I had to cancel a flurry of professional activities and errands because my body can’t handle it. So here I sit, tiny pot of tea and computer on my desk, writing to you on my day off. Thanks for pausing in your own day to read. May your gut lead you on fantastic journeys as you listen to her soft voice at every weird turn.