Aftermath

I feel as though I have just broken the surface after years of being submerged.  I break through like I’ve been holding my breath.  I gulp the air in like I’m starved of it.  It has been long years of floating beneath the break.  Bobbing about in the waves, not landing on shore, not finding my way out to sea.  Just existing with the rising and falling of salt and sand.  Mostly moved about by the waters, mostly surviving.  Who I am is buried in the deep blue.  I am one with the water but at war with it all the same.  With a start, I realize I don’t want to be beneath anymore.  I want to grab hold of something.  So I grab at words like a life raft, to explain the emptiness and fullness my soul has experienced in this ocean landscape of motherhood.  It is all around me, it consumes me, it washes over me and I am underneath it all.

Motherhood has overtaken me, pulled at me like a tide.  It has ripped loose every piece that wasn’t firmly in place.  In beautiful, painful ways it has ravished and renewed me.  As my body beats at the water to get my head about the frothing foam, I catch a glimpse of the me that remains.

I have so many questions. 

My breath catches in my throat.  I don’t recognize myself.  Am I supposed to?  I am suspended between sorrow and courage.   Is this the me I was meant to be or just the me that remains?  Has motherhood remade me or just taken me away?  Like a flood, it has changed everything in its aftermath. Hope rises in my throat, mixed with intense fear. Do I have what it takes to embrace what I’ve lost, who I’ve gained, and what I’ve become? Both the sea and all of me?

 Do you wrestle with who you are now, as a mother? How can you let go of what was, to embrace the joy of motherhood now?