Today is not a day for reflection; it is a day for contemplation, because it is good to remind myself that I do sometimes enjoy motherhood. Like right now, when I am here, enjoying the writing and I ear laughter downstairs and lots of “Daddy, daddy!”. The best feeling in the world for now is hearing they are happy but still feeling free. Not ideal probably for them, but luckily I have chosen for them the best daddy in the world. Well I have chosen for myself the best partner in the world as I couldn’t know what kind of father he would turn out to be. I could go on and on about how blessed I am with their father, but it is another matter.

I am so not good at engaging with my children, the moment they want a piece of me I freeze, but I do enjoy looking at them, like this morning when they were looking for their Easter eggs.

Actually, let’s pause for a second; as life just sent me a glimpse of wisdom in the middle of this writing. My middle one, my only boy, our most beautiful mistake as we called him when he came down this morning and his face lit up at the sight of all the chocolate, just came up to steal my phone, and I engaged. And since it was on my mind I reflected on it. Yeah OK, I know it is not a day for reflection, but it’s my default program! As I engaged with him through tickle and fighting I realised that this is my only memory of ever enjoying my father. I loved him to bits, still do and that is just from those moments of fighting that would make me scream with delight.

I have created a new game, it is the Mamagarou game. It very conveniently happens once a month and the rest of the time I feel much desired as the kids keep asking me “when is the next full moon?”. I have two days until the next full moon, and for the first time I am quite looking forward to it. It is funny how much I feel like a child learning to be a good mum.

So I am learning to engage, through my boy because I feel a good mum to him. What I love about him is that I am not his number one parent, his dad is, so he is the one that fucks up, all I do is bonus. I do think it is also easier with him because it is a raw relationship, there is no identification with the mother/daughter relationship I had; and my mum never had a boy so it is a new territory. My mum never had another girl either so our last one has got it easier too. She has come off the radar; And number 1, Dear poor number one has inherited the package, the all package that came from being the single child of my frustrated Mum. A frustrated daughter, frustrated by the arrival of another daughter just while she was due to be at her cutest and get lots of HOO and HAA! A frustrated wife, frustrated by a husband that was so larger than life that he spent as much life away from the frustrated home, until he too became frustrated. A frustrated mother because all she got was me, never a second chance, oh yes a glimpse of a second chance that never made it passed her fallopian tube and nearly killed her on the way. And even as a grandmother she felt shited when despite an ectopic pregnancy of my own which denied her any more children I went on and had 3, blowing off her excuse for not having more children.

So that’s the context poor number 1 came into. Of course I had no idea of the context, to me like to everyone else, motherhood was that amazing thing that is going to make you feel loved for ever and experience unconditional love. No wonder my poor mum felt shited and of course poor me inherited that trait and passed it on. And I could have gone on like that, never realising I was fucking things up, never reflecting on motherhood if it wasn’t for my most beautiful mistake. Life sent me a bombshell in the shape of that baby boy and my life imploded. I kept comparing the 2, loving the baby, feeling guilty for poor number 1. Creating a poorer and poorer number 1, hating myself for it, hating her for making me hate myself: a complete shamble! It was a blast at the time. Now that I can reflect on it I can see how it was a blessing in disguise. It made me look into my own childhood, trying to fix things up. And OMG did I fixed things up since, a lots of things, but the hardest thing to fix is the “poor me syndrome” I inflected onto my precious number one. When we say number ones make the way for the next ones to come, that is particularly true for her. One day maybe I will tell the story of what she has been through having me as a learning mum with no solid role model. But now when I look at what we’ve conquered as mother and daughter, really as a team because I did try really hard and I still do but she weathered the storm, sending me signals, bending low, very low, but never breaking. I love her for that, but it is a love that comes at a price and she deserves big credit for it, for putting up with it from such a young age. And watching her siblings having it so easy! Now we are nearly there, there is still patches, all my fault of course but I have given her a magic sentence to get me out of my why-should-you-get-some-love-when-all-I-got-was-frustration mode, and it works. She tells me with the very sheepish voice of the little girl trapped by her mum’s temper “I am not feeling your love right now mum”. And it works, it is amazing. It snaps me out of my sadistic mum state and it empowers her because she finally has a way to break through me and get her nice mummy back. It really is magical.

It is weird how she really is my reflective child. I have changed so much just because I couldn’t bear to see myself in her eyes and when she is not here like today I am so much more relax as a mum. I am the good mum of 2 with her boy and girl in contemplation mode. I love it, it is like a vacation in blessed motherhood land. It is always borrowed time because that is not the way it is meant to be, but it gives me an idea of what I am aiming for because I am determined to give her as much freedom to be herself that I give to the other 2. But as long as I will see myself in her eyes she won’t be free, I will always judge her and burden her. But I look at how much of the burden we have removed and I am confident we will get there.

So apparently I misunderstood something, the people didn’t tell me I had to sacrifice a part of myself but that I had to make sacrifice! Funny, how I completely misinterpreted it. For sure that is a completely different concept, but I wonder if the outcome isn’t the same at the end. The more sacrifice you make, the more you put other people before yourself, the more you lose piece of yourself or lose sight of who you are. Now I understand that the work of a lifetime is to understand who we really are. I had a feeling some very confident people knew exactly who they are, that is just the way they were bought up, but no, they might have just been bought up to be confident, but not to fully embrace who they are. How to distinguish someone really embracing themselves from someone projecting the end result without the contempt? Well, that is where depth comes into the picture. That depth thing has really been puzzling me lately. How some people have depth and how some have surfaces? I live in a world of surfaces and lately I have found myself loosing myself in depth, just because I find the surface shallow! I come back up from time to time, but always find a way to dive back in. Depth is dangerous, it is dark and attractive, and you can get lost in it or love it so much that you never want to come back to «your» reality. I think this time I have dived deep and I am struggling to keep my head above water, but I am trying really hard and most of all I am bringing back some bribes of the new reality and constructing a new life that fits better to the new me. And that is where it is so hard. How to change your reality without altering everyone else’s reality in the family? That is why people make sacrifice, not to rock the boat too hard for others. Fuck it, I don’t do plain sailing, I do deep diving, so I don’t care! But it’s OK, as long as I love them, they’ll be OK. And I do love them, all of them, all in a different ways, that is for sure, but I am still looking in each one of them for the best. And that is what it is to love someone right? If you hate someone you just see the bad in them, but if you love someone you just see the good. You are a mirror to who they are. If you show them the flaws, they are fucked; if you show them their beauty they’ll thrive. 

Actually thinking about it, I am at risk of bringing up shallow children because all I can see is their physical beauty, I don’t bring much depth out of them. That’s weird. Maybe if I deep dive in them I see my childhood and everything I disliked about it, I see that I am doing the same. No wonder I am not sure to like motherhood, my kids are sending me the image of the mum I had, or that I think I had would be accurate. I have to reinvent the mum I want to be, a mum who loves being a mum and who sees it in her kids’ eyes. That is a master task. How on earth am I going to do that? And the time is counted, childhood doesn’t last forever and I have already fucked quite a bit up! So can I pick up directly where I want to be or do I need to learn every step how to be a good mother? Something tells me that it’s a surface job. No more depthL That will me my incentive. No more depth until I see a beautiful mum into the eyes of each of my kids… I was tempted to cut corners by saying 2 out of 3, but that would be leaving one out and I know which one, the one that needs it most. So that’s my deal: No more going under until you’ve sorted yourself as a mother:-)

Good Luck!

Definitivement une tendance a variable irreguliere… How does it translate in English? See graph for details!

This is the BIG question, my big question. It’s a funny question, which maybe shouldn’t be asked since that, if the answer is NO, I would have a choice between sacrifying a part of myself or leaving my family. The latest is obviously not an option, since that too would mean sacrifying a part of myself. This is why most people’s answer is that “you have to sacrifice a part of yourself!”. So basically the only way you can avoid sacrifying yourself is to enjoy Motherhood. The more you LOVE it the better it gets, the better we get! I see now why on a spiritual level Motherhood is important, we are not just perpetuating the race, we are contribuating to make it better. Now that makes much more sense to me and it is a much more liberating approach than the one when I felt we were cheated into motherhood but that once we were there, embracing the big illusion, we realised it is one big Lie! And as Bruce Muzik said, we cannot lie to ourselves and be free. So now that I know, at least that it isn’t a big Lie, that there is something deeply meaningful behind it, the next question is “How close/far am I from Loving it!”

That should be my new employee’s name! In the army of people apparently leaving in my head, I have just uncovered a new very useful one. He is Felix Fixit. Felix just likes to fix things, everything, whether it’s knitting or living, he just wants to fixit, everything and everyone! he’s not done a bad job on me actually because I have not always given much credit to the army of helpers up there, but lately I am becoming much better, And I wouldn’t be surprise that I got a bit of help from Felix. I mean I have been in pretty bad states, but Felix Fixit has always found a way or a thought to get me out of trouble’s hands. No matter how much I love trouble, Felix Fixit always came and rescued me from his evil ways! Trouble and his cousin Despair were my best companion for as far as I can remember. They were like a metal shutter and I couldn’t see past them, but Felix Fixit pulled the curtain and now I see better.

And now here I am again, calling him to the rescue to show me how to reconcile motherhood and true happiness. And the one tools he gives me: a blog… and what can I win if he can fix this one: another baby! Right now I have no faith in him. There is no way I am having another baby in this small flat with no prospect of a better future. Life is great as it is. Bring a number 4 in the equation and I am fucked, we are fucked! But it’s OK, ‘cause Felix Fixit has a plan. I can feel it! Since I know he is here and playing in my team, I must say I feel in a better place. I know he’s at work right now, I know his game; I have seen it all before… I can start to recognise the layout, the fittings, the work at play. It is very familiar and the more he’s been living there the more I got to know him and now I recognise his presence. He feeds on creativity and freedom, not on motherhood and devotion unfortunately, but may be this time he is here to show me the 4 are not so incompatible after all. For the first time I think I trust him. Well for the first time I know he is here! Before that I think I just called him luck, so I didn’t give him much power. Just a nice push here and there, to feel like I am on track, but not this time. This time I don’t just want to feel on track, I want him to show me the way. I have no idea how he’s going to manage that “tour de force”, to reconcile my 20’s and my 30’s, but if he pulls it off, it would be my 40’s best present… From myself to myself! Never better served than by the self as we say “chez moi!”

Must go I have a visitor… A real one:-)