misplaced mama

So I just woke up from a sleep I had with the girls for what seemed like eternity but was only about 1/2 hour.  I think I always fall asleep before them when I am putting them to bed.  Perhaps it’s my rhythmic breath of sleep, or totally soft muscles enveloping them, but they must pass out really soon after I do. Maybe they want to meet up with me in dreamworld and wait for me to be their lead.  I felt a bit sorry for their pops tonight.  He wanted so badly to cuddle with them to slumber and started off doing so, reading them a huge pile of books, telling them stories he made up, singing them songs…but when it was time to close eyes and sleep, Mia comes out of the bedroom, shuffles down the hall in her ridiculously cute flowered mini biker shorts circa 1985 (we have vintage hand me downs) and a homemade wife beater with an iron-on of a photos of her dad performing a club in Hollywood  and her hair an utter and complete rats nest and says, "Mama.  I don’t want dada to put me to sleep.  I only want you.  When you put me to sleep I see spirals."

 How I could I refuse that one.  So Billy got booted and I snuggled in between my girls.  I asked Mia what she meant by seeing spirals when I put her to sleep and she said when my hand dances she sees spirals, just like the spirals the animals showed her when she went camping with us. 

Ok.  Wow.

Two weeks ago I   threw out my back in a pretty bad way when I was horseback riding.  Allow me preface this by saying that I had some immediate family in town and usually right after any of my clan leaves I get physically ill or a part of me fails.  This has been happening for like 5 years* and it wasn’t until I was pregnant with Mia and I became debilitated with a migraine at 4am one night from dehydration and overall stress infestation did I associate my bodies reactions after spending time with my family.  I have a huge, highly (to the point of frantic) energized, slightly controlling, extremely strong, very anxious, generous, maybe a tiny bit judgmental and overbearing because of love, powerful, and utterly draining (to me) family.  I love them dearly, I worship them all, and in essence they are such pure love and kindness, unique and amazingly creative, but spending prolonged periods of time with more than one of them seems to drive me to break down a bit (this is not the blog to analyze all that…I will just say that being born 10 years after the 6th child and being born the dark black sheep in my family causes me a lot of emotional struggle and it is something I must work on).  So while totally enjoying riding horses throughout the desert of Tonto National Forest with my family, my horse bucked me and my back, which is usually ridiculously strong and pliable, just went kaputz.  Out.  Could barely move without wincing in pain.  I was shocked that my body took this on so heavily.  I tried to stretch back to strength but I was making it even worse.

I usually like to take care of my ailments myself.  I don’t like drugs (prescriptions meds) and I don’t do doctors.  Scared of Chiros.   I like yoga and herbs and meditation and usually that gets me by.  Because I am lucky to be blessed with no serious illness that requires much more, those things have been working for me.  But this was something different.  Something was compressed or compounded or broken.  I had to get some help.  My midwife for Sula suggested a chiropractor and energy worker that is right next to her office.  Sounded good since I was at her office asking her for a referral and next door was about the farthest I could travel.

My two hours with this man transformed me.  He did traditional tests to see where I was outta wack, but once he started to ‘work’ on me, he never even touched me.  He used only energy work to align my legs with my hips and to bring back all the ribs that had fallen out of place.  He also did some amazing work on my kidneys which he felt had dropped.  He also cleared my energy field and made it so "clean and shiny and sparkly" it put to shame my mother’s daily windexed windows.  I could literally feel my ribs drop into place while he did this beautiful finger and hand movement above my body.  I think for the first time in decades my body was totally and completely relaxed.  I had to struggle to stay in it and at times I traveled to this really amazing purple circle, hard to explain but it was like I was floating through a big purple cervix. I have been energetically worked on before, but either I was really ready to accept it this time, or this man rocked. Regardless, I am ever so grateful.

He explained to me that energy work and healing is our birthrite.  That we all have the ability to use it.  We just need to feel it and see it, watch it come and go and circulate.  His path ("to Knowhere" says he) started as a child. He was always "hand dancing" playing with energy, using it, moving it, changing it.  Then he grew and moved on to medical school and somehow became a student of a shaman…who taught him the exact same energy work that he did on himself as a child.  While he was telling me this I envisioned Mia lying in bed every night, doing this hand dance above her face in the dark.  Every night I had to bite my tongue from telling her to put her hands down and go to sleep.  I knew inside that I had to honor her sleeping process, even if that meant taking forever for her to pass out while she wiggled and squirmed and played with her hands.  Hearing this healer tell me all this, I realized what she was doing.  Duh.  I am so glad I never said a word. She was doing energy work on herself.  Of course she was.  Why wouldn’t she be?

I talked to him about seeing energy.  I notice it more and more lately. Mostly outside around trees or my kids.  I am beginning to see colors around people, especially children and pregnant women and I can really see colors around people who are sick or depressed. I am drawn to them for some reason, their colors have this hazy, fuzzy hue, not dark or anything like that, just kind of thick.  He told me a little about what he does and suggested I should just start doing it with my kids and myself and my husband. 

So since then, when I lay down the with girls and they are just about to go out, I do my hand dance over them, I clean up their field, I pull out the old stuff and I see the fresh stuff swirl around them.  Apparently Mia has been seeing it too.  Spirals.  I love it.  I mean it, I am so loving this.  I am not exactly bringing up my kids(yet) in the way I always envisioned, except this is part of it…this has always been a big part of it.  To teach them to see and feel the things we don’t talk about in this world.  To understand our bodies as vibrating, humming, watery spaces of energy.  And because of that, because we are not solid mass, we can use ourselves to make beautiful ripples like in the water, to create new space and fill it with the specks and sparks of life we all need to become the beings we have the right to be.  Free.

So while I just fell asleep with the girls, after doing a nice little hand dance, I had this crazy dream about a Goddess, Yemaya.  Once, long ago, I got a bit into reading up on Voodoo (voudin).  This was before kids and marriage but I was hopelessly in love and all I could think about was being a mama to my lover’s kids someday.  At the time I was living in the mountains, close to Lake Tahoe.  I used to hike those winter white covered trails, protected by massive pines; I’d run and yell and cross over half frozen streams and just be in my glory, being alone in the woods. One day I came across a beautiful river.  I had on my most favorite pair of blue topaz earrings.  I had just read about making an offering in the water to Yemaya; Goddess of ripe women, goddess of childbirth, of the moon and the sea and is often called The Mother of Pearl. Yemaya was with child and her womb supposedly broke and when it did it flooded the earth and she gave birth to the first humans.  I took off those earrings and threw them in the water and said to the most beautiful mother goddess inside myself; I am ready.  Here is a gift. Send me a baby. 

In my dream I was reminded of this offering. She dangled some earring in front of my face but these earring weren’t blue topaz they were bronze and pearl shaped like swans.  And then she told me about a road I was going to travel, a long one. Not as easy as I would like to think but better than I could imagine.  And while I was driving it I was suppose to do hand dancing for the ocean.  Like some sort of ocean healing thing.  She didn’t say hand dancing but she made a notion of the sea and of using energy to fix it.  She was very big and bold and her voice was muffled, like we were both under water, and I was a bit scared but not really.  Her skin was dark chocolate brown and she had a fin the color of the sky instead of legs.  I was like, "ok. Sure.  But my kids.  My kids need to play. Not sure where that came from but I said it.   To that she just smiled and said: So do you.

Now this was less scary then the dream I had right around the same time I gave the earring offering to the water. That was when Hecate came to me as an old crone with scraggily hair and a grey wrinkly face and what seemed like fangs and a big sharp staff and told me to get it together and go be with women in birth and be strong because life is hard (but that is another story…if I haven’t told it already).  This dream tonight was still intense like that, but peaceful, I was not petrified, I was stilled.  I could smell the sea.  I could feel her skin; it was slick and wet and rubbery like a sting ray.  I could see the sand in her matted hair and the fire in her eyes.  But her hands…they were like big white clouds.  The moon was full above.  As it almost is right now.  I can see it from where I type this.

I’ll take all this in.  I breathe it out.  I’ll hand dance some more.  I’ll let it go of it but never forget it. I’ll look for that Airstream I so long for so I can get on the road and travel up the coast and help heal that water.  Playing the whole time with my kids.  I love these kinds of dreams.  Or whatever they are.  It’s just proof to me that life is how I always knew it to be.  Guided, protected and simply magical.

Keep spiraling.