Hurt people, hurt people.
We all know that it’s true. As mothers, we want our children to grow up happy and healthy. Many of us want to also end cycles that are abusive, or simply unhealthy. We want better for our children than we, ourselves, had. But how do we break the cycles when they are all that we know?
We've all heard it. We've all said it. But most of us don't have any real concept of what it means. We feel isolated, adrift, wishing that we had the support of a village to lean on. We have a mythical village in our heads - a rose colored half-memory of a time when our mothers and grandmothers did the work of mothering in community.
The grandmotherly woman who delivered our Instacart order this afternoon very nearly got punched in the face as a tip.
We don't see mothers, not really. We see the archetypes, we see the Facebook and Instagram feeds, we see the presentations of mothers. We make assumptions based on a few pictures or a few minutes in line at the grocery store. We judge mothers so harshly that it is scary for a mother to step out bravely into the truth of their motherhood journey and be seen. Visibility is a vulnerability, yes, but there is also power in it.
You don't need to 'get your body back' in order to be worthy of desire. The ideas that you grew up with about what is sexy may not have included motherhood. Patriarchy loves a binary and Madonna/Whore is a classic. But you need to know that your level of sexual desire is not wrong, or bad, or selfish, or dirty. You are not a prude or a whore and you are not dried up or washed out. You're just you. Still you. Always you.
When I was a little girl and people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up my first thought was always, ‘happy’. I learned quickly that what they meant by that question was what career was I interested in.
