I have arrived. I have arrived at the place where every parent one day imagines being but just can't ever imagine it happening. 

I took a deep breath and imagined that she was doing important releasing and healing and that if I could listen long enough that she would move through this moment, healing whatever was feeling challenging and then most likely, eventually, hopefully, get off the floor and get over it.

I have recently crossed a threshold. A threshold I hadn’t prepared for or been prepared for in any way. A fertility threshold that marks the end of an era, and ushers in the phase that will take me to the end of my days.  

My birth story is the landscape that still lives in me today, even after 48 years of life. It informs what I do with parents. It keeps me accountable to holding space for mothers and their babies of any age to repair and reconnect.

I have found that tenderness is the answer these days.

Tenderness for our children, in all their messiness.

Tenderness for us, in all OUR messiness.

Setting up a system to filter my parenting experiences so I can show up for my child in a way that matches my parenting values and meets the needs of my child.

A system for gaining perspective and tenderness.

So much is underfoot these days. 

Memories of when I have had to be very brave to be a Protector for my child throughout her childhood are fortifying me at every turn as I seek to be brave in this stage of parenting.

In threshold moments like school starting, Ritual can help us step into the unknown and be the emotional rock our children need.

June is my birthday month.

The month my mother gave birth to me, after I came too early for her to have a baby shower.

The month I was whisked away from her right after birth and she couldn’t see me for a day, even though she kept asking to be taken to me.

For those 15 minutes I got to revel in just how beautiful and funny and cute this creature of mine was. I got an opportunity to CELEBRATE FIERCELY just how much she means to me by stopping everything and really being with her.

I have been journeying over the last few years to this moment, which feels like a birthing of sorts. A birthing of ideas which feel so personally relevant to me as a mother, a woman, a human, pulling together the many threads that have been weaving within me and around me throughout my life….

Because of white supremacy and the need to survive, all ties to Native roots and even Mexican-ness have been erased, replaced instead with a Spanish identity. It’s not unique to my family. It is the special sauce of denial for survival that is endemic to the southwest.

So I rode the wave of emotion with her as she went into the darkest place I had seen my baby go through. I felt like I was witnessing a profound healing and I can still sense the electric air in the bedroom that night.

I want to write about joy, about delight, about appreciation. But in order for me to do that, I have to enter into it from the other side, through sorrow.

Today is the beginning. The beginning of focusing on delight.

I know delight is an incongruous word to be throwing around right now. Conspicuous in its out-of-place-ness with the pandemic fear we are all facing.