Adjustments

5:30am

Every time I have expressed the fact that I am thinking of moving us out of the Confluence to anyone, the first response is typically - But, it's such a great (beautiful) place.  This is true.  It is the quietest most beautiful and obviously magical place I have ever lived.  I will be very sad when I drive out of here for the last time.  I came here for a dream that now I realize isn't mine to dream.  That's okay.  I've grieved the loss and have been making adjustments that will allow me to pursue the dreams I have always had - the dreams that are mine alone.

I don't know how many times I have had someone say to me that they would love to homestead and live this romanticized version of the Appalachian dream.  The thought of it is so ideal.  So beautiful.  I wanted it too, and that is why we originally moved to this Lost Place, as my Ivy Pearl calls it.  We were going to be property caregivers, travelling artists, and homesteaders.  

As neat as that scenario sounded, it never really happened as I pictured it.  It wasn't long before my husband was deeply involved in making a more cemented career in art and music, while also spending his free time doing both.  Those were his dreams.  I found myself gardening and tending animals mostly alone.  We never got to the point where grocery and department store trips were only a few times monthly.  Then, it became difficult to travel with small children.  Sleeping in a truck bed for days at a time makes for irritable babies and mothers.  John started travelling alone.  After awhile, he opened his tattoo shop in effort to create a more steady income, and we all know that having a business requires an incredible amount of time.  Homesteading alone while mothering three little girls and homeschooling them as well was just too much.  It wasn't at all what I had dreamed.

There isn't a place beautiful enough to trump the necessity to create a day to day life that works for you and brings you joy.  When I chose to live in this lonely holler, I didn't think I'd actually be alone most of the time, meaning away from other adults.  I didn't know that often I'd be literally trapped behind a swollen or frozen creek, unable to get out with my children without much difficulty.  I expected a shared experience.  A dream built by two.  Through no fault of either of us, it just didn't come to be.  The idea was great, but the application wasn't for us to do together.  I realized this year, in part due to the severity with which the Hashimoto's had changed my ability to cope with the emotions and stress I was experiencing, that it was time to make adjustments.  For my well being and vicariously for that of my daughters, we had to change what this dream had actually become.  I've written quite a bit about my inner process on this path here.
  

This summer was spent drawing up a plan for the girls and I.  How could I give them a kind mommy who felt joy, a rich and stable childhood experience, prepare them for independent womanhood, and also give myself a fulfilled life?  I knew it was going to be tricky and look nothing like I had planned our life to be for so long.  This past week, the oldest two of my girls began going to school away from home for the first time.  They are attending a small cottage school on a family farm.  This idea had only been a few months old, but it fell together with ease, and they both enjoyed their first week immensely.  They are very happy about going to school.  Over the last few weeks I have completed freelance writing work, began teaching yoga at Evolation Yoga in Pikeville, and applied for a couple of other interesting work opportunities.  My plan is coming together.  It is intimidating and freeing all at the same time, but it seems to be affirmed by the Universe, and that is all I need to move forward.

Someone who advises me spiritually told me this spring that my spirit is like a penned up wild horse.  I had a hard time believing that at first.  I felt so dull and uninspired.  Once I picked back up the dreams that were personal to me, just as my husband had always pursued his own independent of our marriage, I realized how much I had become stifled by limitations I had put on myself regarding what I thought I had to be as a wife and mother.  I didn't want to fail at homesteading and homeschooling.  I had thought it would be such a joyful life for all of us.  I still think it would have been.  This isn't a grass is greener thing.  As nothing happens in a vaccum, I had to adjust what I allowed for myself to be in order to see my spirit freed.  It has been imperative that I change my definition of what it means for me to be a good mother and drop any guilt associated with what I had always thought it should look like for me.  

Honestly, this whole time, even as I was making these changes, I had felt as if I was failing as a mother.  Not failing or neglecting my daughters, but failing to find everything I needed to be fulfilled by being a mother.  It was as if I was somehow defunct in comparison to women around me who seemed so satisfied in the role.  I've learned motherhood is so very different for all of us.  There isn't one of us doing it - right.  In loving and providing for our children, putting their needs first, and considering our own well being and fulfillment as an essential part of giving them the childhood they deserve, we are each doing it very well.  I read an article on the Brain Child Magazine website that helped me put what I am trying to do for my daughters in perspective, the way I am choosing to do it now.

After all, isn’t this movement away from us and toward independence the central goal of parenting? Isn’t this what sets parenting apart from gardening and cat ownership? That we want our children to leave us? That we don’t want to be number one in their lives forever?

I don’t feel guilty about sending my kid to daycare because he’s happy and his happiness is more important than my ego. I know that this separation is just one small step in his long journey away from reliance on his parents. But it is a step toward something great.
-Aubrey Hirsch, Why I Don't Have Working Mom Guilt

I'm still okay.  I'm still a loving mother.  I am also working very hard at making myself a more emotionally available and present mother.  A mother that is alive and not simply going through the motions.  A mother that has dreams and acknowledges their validity.  I'm a mother who doesn't need permission or approval to seek a varied and colorful life for myself or my daughters.  If we believe we have one go around in this world, then right now is the time to be alive.  I can't wait any longer to grow if I am going to raise bold women capable of growing as individuals and nurturing a planet of sacred situations and souls.  That takes a goddess in the flesh.  That is what we are.  I am a warrior mama.  I'm fighting for my free and wild spirit.  I'm fighting this disease for my health.  I'm fighting the fight for the full expression of all women for the sake of my daughters.  And... I got a faux hawk today in order to mark my realization that I'm a warrior and a rebel at heart... always.