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| Goddess With A Seed Like A Wound 2014 (watercolour) |
For the last few weeks, I’ve been confronted with the
terrified face of Motherhood. Not in any traditional sense, though; I am not
having a baby.
I had surgery this week: a permanent sterilization procedure.
At first, I grieved and stewed and brooded over the “loss” of my choice …
which, for me, is (of course) no choice at all. So, I wrote a letter to the
world for the gift I gave to my never-to-be, imaginary children. It is at once
the greatest gift, and the most terrible.
These nightmarish, cruel psychoses will not repeat in my
bloodline!
Even still, the finality of the decision flattens me with
its hardlines and certainty. I wrote a few angry poems to fold away in a secret
capsule I could bury in my back yard, and at which I could go to cry it all
out. My “children” – however spectral in their imagined presence – cannot be.
There’s no way around it. And though they were never REAL, it is still a loss.
This has been difficult for me, because I have no other conscientious,
compassionate choice but to close down my body to the possibility of them. I
have to let go of an idea and a fantasy I held onto for so long. My
medications, my diagnosis, and my advancing age leave no other options.
Something inside me died with that surgery, but if it is a
death I must deal with, then so be it. I thought that if I must trade a child’s
nightmare life for my own emptiness, I accept it.
Then, after several, desperately inked poems about “emptiness”,
I read a passage in a book called Living Zen, by a wonderful chap named
Harvey Daiho Hilbert Roshi. (As an aside, this book is available on Amazon.) In
it, he talks about all form being fundamentally emptiness. He writes about even
the “dharma” (which is kind of the Buddhist word for “truth” or “reality”)
being EMPTY. I’m paraphrasing here, but the idea is that this isn’t a
taking-away. It is not a negative in connotation. It isn’t so much the absence
of something, but the presence of open space where all things are possible.
Emptiness is the space where the multitudinous unfolding of the cosmos
continues into forever. And THAT is what I give to the world by not having
children.
It isn’t the withdrawal of lives that could’ve been lived;
it is a deposit of possibilities. I come away from this thinking of it as a
positive – a gift to our world that invites others to play in the spaces I’ve
opened. I am a Mother in that sense. I am a Mother of Possible Futures; a
Mother of Gracious Space; a Mother of Compassionate Emptiness That Moves
Through All.
I am a Goddess With A Seed Like A Wound.
