Time As Healer.

My beloved and I were talking about our children last night, and realising that the wonderful thing about middle age is that it's a time when all the missing and apparently broken pieces of our parenting experience begin to come together. It's been a remarkable few months where it seems for me that family growth and unity is accelerating at a greatly increased rate, and problems with my children that several years ago seemed insurmountable, are now dissolving like raindrops into the bigger pool of a whole life experience. What I find interesting here is that I wasn't actually able to do very much to solve the issues.

My early experience of mothering was about being the nurturer, the caretaker, the teacher, the one who made it all happen. I believed that I was indispensable and so entirely responsible for my children eventually becoming good people, I lost part of myself in the process. I failed to pay enough attention to my own health and happiness. When a series of life traumas and injustices resulted in a long period of separation from several of my children. I had no choice but to learn to be with me in a way that up until then I'd avoided. The control freak in me was forced to let go control. I became powerless for a while, but only in so far as my physicality was involved. The loving communication continued and with that the knowledge that I would only come through this period by trusting - blindly for the most part, in the unseen presence of what some would call God or a higher power, or what I've come to call the Universal Mother - a kind of personification of the loving perfection of an ordered Universe of which we are all a part.

It takes time - a long time for very difficult situations to work themselves out, but when we let go and allow the things beyond our control to evolve in their own way - we start to see the emerging bigger picture, and it's possible for heartbreak to become peace, troubled adolescents to become wise and compassionate adults, and our own battered mother hearts to take comfort from the knowledge that when we do the best we can - no matter how inadequate that may sometimes appear- the process of life and time will work out the details.

Holding On and Letting Go.

I don't usually watch the Silent Witness series on BBC TV - it's just not something I've got into and therefore know nothing about the characters etc. However, last night having switched on the box in that interlude between to tired to be up and too early to go to bed, I settled for watching most of an episode.

The subject material was harrowing and probably deeply distressing for any woman who's either been subjected to violent coercion or had a baby taken away for any reason. Whether by legal, state endorsed authority or a violent, criminal power is probably immaterial, because for whatever reason there is something intrinsic to all human understanding that to separate a mother from her child is a terrible thing. Maybe the most   heart rending act of all?

Yet, there was a kind of redemption story in this tale of forced separation and adoption, in the choice made by the birth mother when watching her small daughter for the first time; The decision to let go, to walk away in the knowledge that her child was happy, loved and deserving of an uncomplicated childhood. It's a choice that once made can cost a woman everything - I read so many stories of grief and rage from women who feel as though their mother hearts have been ripped out. I've been there too. 

Redemption comes from understanding that a true mother is not necessarily the woman who gives birth, or the woman who raises a child; She's the one who can open her heart wide enough, in an act of such trust of the Universal Mother that the needs and rights of a child come before anything else in her world. Sometimes this will mean fighting tooth and nail for her relationship with her child and sometimes it will require enough love to let go, and this goes for birth mothers and adoptive mothers alike.

Every situation is unique, everyone of us has a different story. There are no formulas here. But I believe that if we are courageous enough to listen to that Universal Mother heart beating alongside of our own, it's possible to begin the transformation of our grief and pain into love and - yes - even a measure of peace.