November 2022
Nathan is pretty grounded these days and he also loves animals.
I know that's why the horses respond so warmly to him. I think children have a better feel for things until we, so often, tell them that they're wrong and we know better.
Perhaps we shouldn't do that quite so much.
In contrast to Nathan, it'll take me roughly a week to "trust my instincts" with the horses.
Until then they'll pick up my nervousness every time I approach them and will remain equally suspicious of me.
Part of The Accidental Theory: A journey to freedom
Read from the beginning >>
The pregnant horse, who I fondly name "Mammy", approaches me first.
I stroke her neck gently, murmuring to her, feeling as though she identifies with me because she sees Nathan and is curious about him. Her eyes follow his every move as he makes his way around the paddocks, greeting each horse in the same order each day.
After our first touch, she heads to the fence when she sees me approaching her enclosure...
every time we visit.
I feel a kinship with Mammy and her large, round belly.
I loved being pregnant. The way my body changed and my perspective shifted as I transformed from Maiden to Mother. How I finally understood what unconditional love truly is.
Becoming a mother was the most liberating thing I've ever experienced, in many ways. Being able to let go of so much bullsh!t when I realised it wasn't all about me anymore. After the early years of boot camp and, at times, despair that is. [1]
I make a joke about this, you know. I say the standard, "It's not all about me."
But then I add:
"Even though it is."
More existential humour.
I try to be funny about all of this. I reckon if we can't laugh at life, and ourselves, we're all doomed. We're all doomed anyway! 😆 See?
New parents comment all the time about how having a child curtails freedom. But having a child, if you're the kind of parent who puts a child first, is also remarkably liberating mentally and emotionally.
There are many kinds of freedom.
It was when I had my first child, a beautiful daughter, that the "Why I Don't Want To Be a Rock Star" post, that has yet to be properly written, was first born as well. This was when the philosophy behind it began to blossom, along with my early Motherhood, into real understanding.
Suddenly all that bling seemed pointless, ridiculously shallow and foolsgoldishly ©😁 meaningless.
I mean, we all know this anyway right?
But...
when I became a mother
all that think-I'm-clever thinking
in my head
kinda sank deeper
to the center
of my being
and Became
cemented
as "Knowing"
I also never used to have much respect for women, in all honesty.
I was raised in an extremely traditional, patriarchal family and boys were revered around there. The bias was innate and so normalised that I didn't even realize I had it for many years.
Not until I was educated on it back in 2019.
These days the kind of woman I once was is my worst kinda woman. The women who haven't dealt with their mommy issues either. The women who distort their femininity to be accepted by the boys club.
They're the worst in my experience. The worst abusers of women, I mean. Far, far worse than any men I've met with the same unaddressed issues. But these women are cowards as well.
Unable to step into the hard won power of the Feminine, they choose to abandon their gender entirely and to imitate and hide behind the power of those who have it as their birthright...
and so protect themselves and avoid their own fear.
And cowardice is my second least favourite human behaviour.
I think you all know, by now...
that dishonesty is my first.
Yet I also ran around for years sneering slightly at "girly girls."
I had more male friends than female friends because shopping, dressing up and being pretty bored and annoyed me. I used to joke that girls couldn't keep up with my drinking and drugging at parties, or my fitness level and pace on hikes.
And they couldn't.
I also once thought girls were weak, frivolous and superficial. And sure... some of them are these things. But many girls are only these things because they've been well taught that if they don't behave in a particular way they may get hurt.
Delicate, vulnerable, liddle biddy silly flowers aren't threatening.
And pretty flowers are always the ones that get picked.
I also joke, these days, that I need a husband to get out of the hole I've been shoved into. "I need a husband," I say, even though I don't want a "husband" or believe in the institution of marriage anymore.
Patriarchal rubbish. Devised to get a woman who wasn't allowed to learn to read, study or have a career off a family's hands. Her costs of living thus taken care of. Sometimes land accrued or exchanged. And titles and such.
That's all this marriage thing was supposed to be.
A business arrangement.
A business arrangement that, basically, sold a woman into slavery. An exchange of household duties, a warm body and womb for protection, food and shelter. But, somehow, we've been led to believe this is all about "True Love".
Perhaps that's why the divorce rate is so high.
I'm sorry if this isn't very romantic by the way.
I've had the romance beaten out of me by the society I inhabit.
You may think things have changed with all this talk of "feminism" and "gender equality".
Not in my country.
And I know it hasn't in many other parts of the world either. I too was fed a load of utter rubbish about my place in the world being equal somehow. Or about me having some kind of actual power or autonomy over the direction of my own life.
I even believed it for a while.
But try traveling on your own without a car or resources as a single woman in South Africa. Go on. Have a go.
Try navigating your local police station if you're a victim of gender based violence. Or any crime really. Try walking these streets independent of some man's name to call on when you negotiate with people.
Some actual reality will be starkly and blindingly shone straight into your rosy eyeballs. There's no real respect for women in this world yet. Not really.
Not if you know where how to look see.
People often tell me I'm strong these days.
I'm not strong.
I'm actually so gentle it's f*ckin' chronic. I've just had to stop caring so much in order to survive. I've had to toughen up. I've had to stop being "romantic". I've had to stop being "nice".
I've had to "man up".
Nathan used to say I was Starfire in the Teen Titans gang when we used to watch it together. Back when things were different and so was I. He's too old to watch it anymore, sadly. But he still remembers who I used to be not so long ago.
These days Nathan says, "You used to be Starfire but now you're Raven." and we laugh about our journey together.
Even though it's not really funny at all.
Starfire from Teen Titans
Most Cis men want gentle, soft, nurturing, caring, "feminine" women as partners.
Yet barely any of these men like or respect the feminine. Certainly not enough to offer a safe space for us to be who we may instinctively be. It's a hard fact that men may even target us if we do. And that a vast majority does...
if you really want to dig deeper down this particular rabbit hole.
But nobody wants to go down this one, mostly.
It's just too gritty, dark and uncomfortable.
I became a Raven by rote.
I didn't choose it.
I didn't start it.
And I most definitely didn't "ask for it."
But I'm safer as a Raven
Because boys will be boys.
Assumption is the mother...
Some days I still look like Starfire though.
I clean up okay.
Once upon a time I'd get riled if someone treated me as though I'm a bit dim because of my gender and the way I look. These days I only observe. I allow people to judge me and I take the time to figure out who they really are while they do.
It's pretty useful actually.
Other people's assumption and judgement.
Once you accept that other people's judgement of you really has nothing to do with you and everything to do with them.
When you know yourself well enough, to know who you are, so you don't get all hit-up over what other people think of you...
other people's judgement becomes a superpower.
After becoming a mother myself, and subsequently engaging with a wider circle of mothers and powerful women, I now have an inordinate amount of respect for women.
And motherhood specifically.
The personal growth and transformation that a woman experiences if and when she enters this phase is one of the biggest changes in identity and shifts in perspective that a human being experiences in a lifetime.
With what one must abandon to be any good at it, that is.
We like to imagine, nowadays, that a man can replace this figure for a child. We say all parents are equal. Perhaps they are, but they are not all the same.
They don't come up with expressions such as "a mother's love" for no good reason.
But our mothers aren't nurtured and protected, so they aren't able to fully "mother" our children. We've created a culture that despises femininity, gentleness, empathy, compassion and unconditional love.
A Mother's love.
All now seen as weak and foolish. Naive. Ignorant.
Our women are taught to abandon their femininity, to fight and so be independent in a world where we are, by all rights, still "easy targets" because of "the way things are".
And therefore do need protection through no fault of our own.
Because if we do defend ourselves we're ostracized and attacked because we've stepped out of "our place" and aren't "feminine" enough.
We just can't win.
It's a double bind and it's absolutely no wonder so many women have almost, or totally, lost their minds trying to navigate it. There's nothing "wrong" with you, sisters. Society's a liddle bit f*cked up right now. Keep on keeping on. ❤️
And our traumatized mothers, then unable to provide that vital "mothers love" to our boys and girls, are raising generations of traumatized children. And so it goes...
I'm so very tired of fighting to protect myself now. Or for some liddle bit of courtesy, common decency or respect most of the time.
I am a mother...
not a fighter. I won't copyright that one. Feel free to share and use it as you will.
Mammy
She moves slowly and heavily, with the same graceful calm a woman exudes during her final weeks of pregnancy.
Mammy's noble ease reminds me of my own transformation to Mother...
and the miraculous experience of bringing a life into this world.
I remember the home births of my children, on two separate floors of two separate houses. Both of them just around dawn.
I remember the beauty and the violence both of birthing a child naturally.
I remember the solitude of the experience even though a partner and mid-wife were shadows on the periphery.
I remember the world becoming smaller. The Happening a contracting depth of focus as the pain intensified and became almost unbearable the closer she came.
I remember panting and breathing and moving through it. Seeing and hearing nothing around me any longer as I, naked and wet, rocked from side to side to try and find ever more elusive relief.
I remember how he held me so I could squat down low over calmly waiting hands. I never lay down as she came.
I remember the blood, the feces, the sweat
and the smell of the amniotic fluid
tropical and hot.
fetid even -
and none of it was anything other than okay
and exactly how it was meant to be anyway
I remember a small moment of panic
my first time
and I remember the only thing I could do
was to trust myself
and completely let go
at the end
These memories ground and re-empower me in a way that no therapy, skill or exercise ever could.
I am a woman and I am a mother.
How dare he forget this?
But I also know now that this is the why.
The anger towards the man who unconsciously blamed me for the scars of his own childhood and so treated me with such aggression and lack of respect...
shifts into mild indifference and compassion as I remember who I am again.
A dream. An illusion. His own.
As all judgements are in truth.
I've walked through a world of unspoken demands like his my entire life. The expectation of what I should be. The judgement of who I am because I'm a woman.
Because of what a woman "is" to him. Or her
I know it's not me now.
These ongoing; always; unconscious judgements.
And the innate, subtle aggression that follows because people can't see me clearly through their own projection of what a woman was to them once-upon-a-time...
so very long ago.
I understand now.
This is why.
I remember...
It wasn't even me he so desperately wanted
to love him.
It wasn't even me
he was so angry with.
And it isn't my fault.
Picasso
Picasso is immediately my favourite.
The only boy as it turns out.
Picasso is currently the farm hero after breaking out of his paddock the night before we arrived. He took it upon himself to wake the owners in the middle of the night because Sarah had colic, had laid down on the ground and wasn't getting back up.
If Picasso hadn't removed a fence pole with his teeth and headed to the front driveway to alert someone, Sarah may well not have lived through the night.
There are good men in the world, you know.
You only have to find them.
And choose them.
Yes...
there are good men in the world.
And during our stay at the farm I will fall completely in love with this one.
Sarah
The energetic young filly Sarah, who is Nathan's favourite, I avoid for almost our entire stay at the urban farm.
At times Sarah will suddenly take off and buck, ears back; her tail flashing in the dust. I interpret this as meanness and anger. And I give her a wide berth.
My own dream and unconscious bias around female figures.
It's very interesting to begin to observe this, by the way.
And eventually, when you've learned to forgive yourself for being only human...
it's even pretty funny.
As soon as Sarah sees Nathan she approaches the fence and nudges him to stroke her.
She then follows him along the side of the fence as he walks to greet the chickens afterwards each day.
I watch Sarah carefully while Nathan is with her, not convinced she's safe despite Nathan's absolute confidence in her.
I've made a pact with myself to trust Nathan so I don't accidentally pass my own fear on to him anymore. I step back and watch but don't approach her myself.
Initially I interpret her stance, turned ears, sudden movement and feisty-ness as aggression. By the last week, however, I'll remember I've been projecting my own experience, and interpretation of the Now because of it, onto her.
When I'm finally fully grounded again and am able to approach Sarah, as my present self, to greet her without my past reflecting back at me...
she'll nuzzle my side and follow me down the side of the fence too.
And suddenly...
I'll see how peaceful and gentle Sarah is.
The way Nathan's been "seeing" her all along.
Hardened Dreamer
Mother
Peaceful Warrior
Determined Dancer
and Stargazer
still...
Beyond fear is freedom
And there is nothing to be afraid of.
To Life, with Love... and always for Truth!
Nicky Dee
Footnotes
[1]. Intense transformation requires guidance and support or the process can go horribly wrong and traumatize individuals permanently. Yet we abandon our women as soon as they become mothers, thinking it is a "natural" process. It isn't. Not the way it is happening in Western Cultures. We used to live in groups and support this process. Now mothers are left isolated to cope alone. Early motherhood is very challenging and can be inordinately lonely as a woman shifts into a new way of Being. Isolation during stressful times causes trauma (PTSD & C-PTSD) which plays out in the form of mental health disorders reactions.
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