I have just come out of the rain, and something has fallen from it. It takes so many million raindrops to nourish even one sprout of a sapling to be. Some of them must be tears. I sit, now warmed, comfortable, wiggling into a more expanded sense of myself that a body has when it is feeling good. I relax into a cushioned chair at my favorite café. Many memories, many friends, much laughter, breath struck revelations, secret connections, all live here. For I have shared them here, and in their generosity, they remain here today with me, though today I am alone. Alone with other secrets.
I am flush and warmed from an excitement that seems neither mental nor physical, but both. I have just learned that I have become something a full of life, now inexplicably carrying another life to be. Bearing is both a joy and a terror to have this now irreversible pronouncement as someone other than I once knew myself to be, embodied now into someone who both has, and carries a life. It is definitely a secret. I will learn more about it, but no one can tell what it is and what I will become; correction, what we will become. Already, in this early instant, I know parts of this journey will be a secret kept from even myself. The joy and the terror of this combine like a thunderclap for one moment. We are sitting sipping my decaf latte and suddenly remember that even in decaf, a brew of unknown constituents course through my veins, replete with 10 or 15 milligrams of caffeine barely felt, but which I know is now creating unforeseen and unseeable consequences in a life that I carry. I alone carry it, and yet even I cannot fully know what I am putting into it. It is another of the many millions of raindrop-like secrets I will carry, for the both of us, and some of them will be tears.
The moment passes with a new resolve to know and do differently. I fill with warmth that feels so familiar. In mothering, already, I am somehow myself mothered. Nourished by the knowledge that I will mother myself now so well, having such great purpose in the soft resolve of engendering this and more for the secret within us. In this moment now, just what exactly is happening between myself, and this only partly announced, new, secret is already misted into partial obscurity of the many millions of raindrops it will take, some of them not my own. It takes so many raindrops, to nourish even one life, and some of them are tears. I have enlisted to be there for all of them now.
The entire world is just this: a humid steamy tropical rainforest, so full of moisture, it is as if the raindrops are suspended in air, the raindrops below them are holding them up in a fluid vertical traffic jam. There are more than enough raindrops for an entire forest of new life. It is as if there is an internal tingle generating clouds of deep mothering from all that my life has arisen from. I can feel all the smiles, laughs and secrets that I thought belonged to the café’s memory. Suddenly, now they well within me, willing to accompany me on this journey to the someone else I now am.
There is no way to resolve all this mystery, terror and fullness without referencing all the mothered moments that fell upon me, like millions and millions of raindrops. I know very well, that, for my mother, some of them were tears. Drops that fell like an endless English summer, or maybe more like the Hebrides, or Cape Breton, with so much wind and chill, throughout the course of our lifetime.
How are we so well warmed by a cold wet wind anyway? If you have stood there, in the challenge of a bracing gale, you can feel the verve of everything. I think of my own mother again, and I can really touch the warmth. My entire life, I have never understood her, and now, in this moment so sudden, I seem to think I understand her completely. In this moment I am my mother; no, I am a sliver of my mother. Perhaps the sliver she didn’t want, perhaps the sliver she tossed with all her strength, like a javelin, away, hitting some well visioned bullseye, very far in the distance. In this moment, like a magnet, I fly both of us back to her.