This Woman’ s Work
Today we had to take our 8ish year old male Husky to an emergency vet appointment. We still are not sure what is wrong with him; it takes him a very long time to get up from a laying down position to standing, he has lost his appetite and limps on different legs, depending on the hour. We throughly checked his limbs and he shows no signs of pain when we massage them. It’s like hi almost can’t feel his limbs. Things started to go down hill for him when he jumped up on the kitchen counter and ate the entire (I mean entire) turkey carcass from Thanksgiving. All the leftover meat and every…single…bone. I know his ‘sister/partner’ helped him along in the eating extravaganza but Thunder most likely, leather belly that he is, scarffed most of it down himself. The Vet seemed to think it may be Valley Fever, a strange fungal sickness in this area that one contracts from dirt and dust of the valley. She didn’t think it was a bone lodged in his intestines causing nerve damage (my uneducated guess). The blood work will come back tomorrow but if it’s negative then we have to knock him out and take some serious X-rays. Sending Thunder healing love…
While I was in the waiting room at the Vet’s I picked up a copy of Working Mother Magazine. I skimmed through it, and came to an article of interest: Working Moms Who Save The World. It interviewed some amazing mothers who have started organizations which protect human rights, safe guard children, labor rights and do all sorts of advocacy in developing countries.
One particular mothers interview caught my eye. Katie Redford has a company called EarthRights International, a human rights advocacy group that is very much international. When her daughter was three she had to do a whirlwind tour of Europe, with no time to arrange for a sitter anywhere, her daughter attended every meeting, went to every boardroom and every press conference, basically she went everywhere her mama went. She noted that in Burma you strap your baby to your back and you go an gather food and are involved in every aspect of their life. She said that is how it is with her kids, how they have been raised: they understand work. I made a mental note that this is very much like the mother-friends I am lucky to have in our very developed country. We wear are babies and cart them around everywhere. I couldn’t imagine a different way.
Then the article went on to say:
In recent years, Katie says, she’s been hearing of more mothers seemingly preoccupied with lavishing 24/7 attention on their kids. “I hear things like “I don’t work because I want my kids to think they are the most imp0rtant things in the world, ” she says. “We are a country of millions who all think they are the center of the universe. My children are loved and they know they are the most important thing to me, but there is a huge world outside.”
Am I keeping/protecting my kids from that world outside?
I have always dreamed that we would not only be strapping our babies on us while we did our daily duties such as shopping and housekeeping and socializing, but that I would be out in the world, babies in tow, writing about the vast earth under our feet and around us. Or maybe we’d be bus and plane trotting around the globe playing positive and uplifting music, all while our kids where right by our sides. Or that I would be working daily in urban gardens, donating my time at housing developments and taking on city-wide street cleaning adventures. And the best part would be that my kids where attached to me, seeing the world from this view. These were things I spent my time doing before I was a mother. Now it seems like our day revolves around preschool and the grocery store. It seems as if my day revolves around keeping sane while I spend every second with kids, or other mothers with kids.
I have given our children my time and choose to stop outside the home business endeavors because we wanted one of us to be the primary caregivers, on call at all times, until the youngest was at least 5. I love not “working” for anyone else and I so appreciate that financially we are able to do it, it was hard the first 3 years, as we were dirt poor, but blessings have been bestowed and the poverty lifted. But I really do want to show my girls the world through their mama’s heart, even if it’s just the world outside their own insular community. I want them to know we are just a speck of dust, a small part of this chaotic wind of life. I want them, at the earliest age possible, to understand that they are indeed a part of one whole universe, a very large one indeed. A universe that their mama wants to get her hands dirty in.
If they could watch me give my time and passion as gifts to the world, witnessing me at what I do best , what I love, I will be teaching them to honor their passions and world work. I know the little things count, like how we treat others and basically how we consciously step each step through life. How each word that spills off the tongue sends a message to the universe and that all in all, the universe thrives off of our positive vibrations. Rationally I know that by just filling each moment with thought and care, no matter what it is I am doing, I am teaching them how to be light beings. But I do so little work outside the house that they are involved in. I want to get out there, be an advocate for positivity and art and change, shouting out love from every pore and watching it paint lives into a techno-color dream. At this point, the only work they really get to see me do is squint in front of a computer, writing and endlessly scouring books on yoga and energy work and right now earth building and bio-diesel conversions. At least with their father they watch him create music, they hear him, they hang out underneath his station in the music studio and feel his life work vibrate at an atomic level of their being. They can get involved in it and be part of the sound, banging on drums and fingering the organ. Writing is isolated. I write best alone. But the living and traveling research could be a blast if I could figure out a way to pull it off.
But I hold back on fulfilling my dreams. Why? Because I have always thought that during these years I should be all about the kids. I wanted to spend every moment actively loving and watching them, taking the time to care for them, having lazy days where they take the lead and I just follow. So my question remains. Do I as a stay-at-homer lavish too energy on my young? Do I let them define my life and should I be defining their with the work that I do? I know that what is best for mama is also best for baby, but what if mama wants to travel the world (with them, of course, none of this is questioning working outside the house without them) and talk to women who have had to endure illegal abortions and write about them? Or talk to women about their homebirths and finally start my book? Or seek out yogis in the mountains who have reversed the effect of age and time and write about them? Or do a tour of orphanages in developing countries and just spend time there, loving and healing each little ones, learning about how all children in some way belong to all mothers and taking some kids home? How does one do things like this with their kids in tow when one cannot even figure out how to take 2 kids out to a meal without having to take numerous deep breathes before making threats of no desert?
I am confident in my parenting. I have always just parented from my heart and the love for my kids is always the deciding factor in decisions. But I question some things, like if my current life that revolve around my youth and if we’d all be a lot happier if we just bought that van we are looking at and toured the US this summer, or purchased that world plane ticket and started off interviewing midwives in Vienna. I hope to find some answers…or at least more questions soon.
