Lisa for Real - exploring & embracing fierce femininity

Election Reflection

November 8, 2020 by Lisa Leave a Comment

Today’s news has been something I have been waiting for, hoping for, with bated breath. For five days, I have held my nostrils and lips tightly as webpages for ballot counts reloaded and as message applications showed my friends’ thoughts in progress.

Waiting for the presidential election results has been like watching a pot of water boil. At the start, there is no activity. The flame is bright, lit, vibrant, urging that lukewarm water to boil. But no matter how strong that flame is, how excited it is, how much it wants the water to boil, the water does nothing. I was one of the millions of flickers of flame wishing, coaxing that water to boil. An update of each state’s blue vote fanned the flame inciting even more coaxing.

When watching water boil, the first bubble, just like the announcement of the first official blue state, is exciting, momentous, but without much significance. It disappears as quickly as it appears, taunting us that the end is not quite as near as we hoped. But, as the states were tracked, finalized and announced, you could feel momentum growing. By Friday, we were at that point in the boiling where you could see bubbles forming at the base of the kettle and gradually appearing more quickly.

Today, Saturday, November 7, 2020 at 11:30PM, the bubbles finally came to a rolling boil. Today, the country let out a collective roar just as the kettle whistled.

That resounding roar was as much for victory as it was of relief. Tears fell and chests heaved, mimicking the surging and swirling of water and bubbles when there is a boil. It was all a release. A letting go of what we did not realize we were holding onto. A dropping of shoulders, an unclenching of jaws and an unfurling of fists that have been on high alert for four years. A release of four years’ of emotions with no discharge and no completion cycle – doubt, hopelessness, sadness, anger, disbelief, grief, despair, and so on. A systemwide realization that we will no longer be subjected to misogyny, discrimination, racism, bullying, lying, and abuse at the hands of the highest office in our country.

Today, the country released a deep sigh with an eye looking forward to, a heart open to and a soul willing to do the work for hope, unity and love.

Inspiration: Not that all elections aren’t significant, but this one is on a whole other level. The past four years, basic human decency and empathy have been dismissed. It has been apparent that a lot of people feel the same way as the current president. It has been depressing and has caused some to sink deeper into despair and caused some to take action. Today’s results mean that the future top down leadership will not be praising and self-servingly perpetuating white supremacy, misogyny, and discrimination. They signify a shift from the current toxic environment.

I was part of a text chain of friends tracking the presidential election. The image of watching a pot boil came to me as we were discussing the results in real time. I love writing through my experience as a way of processing and capturing the sensations that I feel. I did not want to wait to capture how I feel now and I looked to expand on that analogy into this post. When things are good, we can get complacent. One of my intentions in writing this is to remember how it felt – the contrast in experience of feeling hopelessness and then feeling hope. I know that this will serve me in continuing my activism and in not forgetting.

Today is significant

September 14, 2020 by Lisa Leave a Comment

Today is significant.

It is the last time that I will be a year postpartum. I will never be able to experience again much of what has happened in the last 366 days. (Through modern science, we can replicate a lot of things but childbirth is not one of them.) I have tried to archive every memory of this past year in technicolor detail but I have already forgotten more than I can remember.

It is no wonder our youngest children always remain babies in our eyes – because we want to hold onto that feeling, always. That feeling when their tiny hand first grasped our finger. That feeling when we saw their first smile. When we received that first drooly kiss. When we saw their first steps. And so on.

The final firsts. How incredibly bittersweet they are.

They are a reminder that motherhood is a constant barrage of beginnings and endings. At a pace unmatched by any other wonderment of our lives. Highlighted with intense highs and lows as joyfulness and sadness gleefully tag each other in and out as they please.

As I mourn and celebrate this final first, I also examine this re-emergence from postpartum.

Today feels very different from the other two times.

Today is significant.

Through a biological lens, this current life stage I am in are my fertile years with puberty and menopause as the bookends. And long ago, this life stage would have been filled with lots of babies. This is the time of life when Woman embodies the power of Creation.

My body, having already returned to its cycles, is overflowing with intense, creative energy, but I have no desire to add to my brood.

Instead, I feel that energy driving me to write again, to coach again, to create projects again. Redirecting my focus to bringing about the change I want to see in the world.

Just as I am clearing my bookshelf of my pregnancy and birthing books for new material, I feel my heart, body and mind re-calibrating, shifting and shimmying about to make room for my next creations and projects.

As I hold white-knuckled onto that first year of postpartum, I also feel propelled forward to a different kind of potential. Such is motherhood, a barrage of beginnings and endings.

Today is significant.

It is the start of the rest of my motherhood.

Inspiration: Every significant moment and milestone of this past year has had an echo sometimes whispering, sometimes SHOUTING, “Savor this because it’s the last time!” Today’s echo is the loudest and one filled with incredible sadness. But at the same time, I feel a need to, an urgency to, create. To create for good, for change, for me and for my family. And so here I am, one foot trying to stand firm in the land of postpartum and the other foot trying to make marks on the rest of the world.

Kindergarten Graduation in the Time of COVID

June 17, 2020 by Lisa Leave a Comment

Yesterday, I was a mom to a kindergartener.

Today, I am a mom to a first grader.

Just.like.that.

No pomp. No circumstance. No big party with her classmates with treats and hugs from her teachers. No end-of-year clean up to bring the experience of filling the room with her creations and laughter full circle.

Instead, we received her belongings, worksheets, and artwork in a black garbage bag.

Instead, there was a final Zoom class with 20 classmates. Twenty six year olds individually voicing their mix of feelings about kindergarten ending.

As the children bravely and innocently shared, tears fell.

I mourned.

I mourned for the moments that my daughter doesn’t know she missed. I mourned this “new normal” that has replaced inperson connections with abrupt electronic contactless transactions. I mourned that no proper goodbye exists during this time.

As a lump in my throat and a tightness in my chest grew, the sadness flowed.

My emotions were not only of the moment but bottled up over the past three months of quarantine. Fermenting and bubbling under the surface while I scrambled to keep it together as employee, wife, daughter, sister, friend, neighbor, teacher, and mom.

I mourned the robust and engaging lessons my daughter would have had instead of my husband and I playing teacher. I mourned her friendships that never got a chance to truly blossom. I mourned all of the what-if’s.

I mourned the inability for me to change any of it.

Change.

I realize, above all, I am mourning that everything is changing. The changing that is inevitable because our children do nothing but grow and change and we have no control over it. After six years of constant change, I am again reminded that I will be battling these emotions for all of motherhood – in times of COVID or not.

I will mourn again and again the change from old normal to new normal.

After these emotions flow, I will be ready to embrace the change.

I will be ready to embrace being a mother to a first grader.

Inspiration: This exact moment in time of quarantine is a tough one. I have competing emotions and emotional priorities. While the world is uniting and dividing around Black Lives Matter, our individual lives continue. Just as our lives continued as the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the world. My daughter graduating from kindergarten is not a small milestone and while I have wanted to focus on advocacy work and writing, these emotions bubbled up and I had to share.

What is wild?

August 27, 2018 by Lisa Leave a Comment

Wild is the hum of Mother Earth. Generations of chanting, dancing, laughter, and sorrow that she has absorbed into her core and has become the surround sound vibration we feel when we are in nature. The vibration supports us and reverberates through our feet into our souls.

Those who have lost touch with the peace of Mother Earth express their wild recklessly, dangerously, ferociously. They gnaw and thrash as they try to work their way back to Mother Earth’s bosom, fighting back the injustices they feel they have suffered without cause. They use their violence, hateful words, and close-minded arguments to tune out or drown out Mother Earth’s hum, refusing to hear it, refusing its support and love.

Wild also appears in those of us working our way back to Mother Earth, to our feminine, to our power. But the journey is not about provocation, about harm or fighting or force. Our wild focuses on tuning into that earthly hum. Tuning into that rhythm of the Great Mother and seeing how the rhythm of our hearts fits into hers.

Inspiration: This piece was written as a response to a prompt in Jeanette LeBlanc’s course, 30 Questions To Bring You Closer To Your Wild Heart that asked me to answer the question – What is Wild?

I journaled regularly from fourth grade into the latter years of high school but for the following 13 years, my writing was exclusively academic or professional. I realized in 2015, my Year of Self Identity, that I wanted to find “my voice.” I came across Jeanette’s course and initially recommended it to a friend who was looking to work on her writing. While she didn’t join the course, I realized I would personally benefit from it and decided to embark on its 30 day journey.

I wish I could say I completed all 30 days of Jeanette’s course but I didn’t…even after taking it three times. But what did happen was a fire ignited in me to write again. For the first time, I felt like *I* was writing but at the same time, I wasn’t. Jeanette’s prompts go deep into the soul and lure words to appear on screen in a sequence I cannot fully attribute to myself. I actually came across this blog post in a text file on my desktop. I was not quite sure who wrote it, thinking perhaps I saved it after coming across it online somewhere. But I was very surprised to learn it was my writing and while I am proud, I’m also enchanted with what I am able to write when the muse flows through me.

He is Real and He is Mine – A Bond is Born

December 28, 2017 by Lisa Leave a Comment

Nine days postpartum, I shed my first tears for my son. And I finally felt like his mother.

As I looked down to see his peaceful sleeping face resting on my chest, I came to the sudden realization that he was real and he was mine and he was here to stay.

I became overcome with throat choking, stomach clenching, tear inducing emotion.

Overcome with all that had happened over the past 14 months. Back to back miscarriages, multiple scares during the pregnancy, and extra ultrasounds and blood draws made it a roller coaster of a journey. I had questioned many times whether I would ever hold him, and now here was this beautiful soul.

Overcome with perfection in my chubby baby. In the hustle and bustle of becoming a family of four, I had not had the time to really take him all in. His complete purity. His brand new skin and toes and nose and smell. His infinite potential.

Overcome with the lessons I had learned and will learn from him. His patience and ability to go with the flow had already astounded me. I could tell he had an old soul who came here with a purpose. (My secret nickname for him is little Buddha.)

Overcome with the possibility that this is my last baby. I had been in a bit of denial about this but it really hit me that I may never have another baby, never have another sacred fourth trimester. I wanted to squeeze every drop of infant goodness during our time together but also scared that I won’t do enough and not have any more opportunities to enjoy those first days again.

This overcome of emotions is pure love. It is the rawness of motherhood. The foundation of a lifelong relationship. A wave that rushes in, nearly knocking you off your feet, taking your breath away with its beauty. No matter how it feels for the mother, it is this love that fuels during those restless nights and challenging times.

A bond between mother and baby is as individual as a snowflake or a sunrise. With my rainbow baby, it took a little longer to realize and feel it – perhaps because of my previous losses or the fact that I had a demanding toddler to take care of as well. But I’m so glad that it came.

I’d love to hear – do you have an exact moment where you felt that first bond with your child(ren)?

Inspiration: I decided to write about this moment because it took place so strongly and unexpectedly.

The birth and first days postpartum with my son were very different than with my daughter. With my daughter, we had a long delivery and then were able to savor our first 48 hours together at the hospital. My husband and I didn’t tell anyone we went to the hospital to deliver her and did not have any visitors until my mom came to help out when we got home two days later.

With my son, everything was a little rushed (birth story to come soon!). I labored at home for quite a while. I ended up being 7 cm dilated by the time I went to the hospital. Delivery came only ~3.5 hours after getting to the hospital. We only stayed 24 hours after the delivery because we wanted to get home to our daughter who had spent her first night ever without me. And those 24 hours were jam-packed with tests and paperwork while trying to get acquainted with our little guy. My husband and I enjoyed a few hours total of just being the three of us but in the back of my mind and underlying many of our conversations was our daughter at home. We wondered how she slept, how she was at daycare, how she ate, etc. It was like another half of my heart and brain were somewhere else.

Leaving the hospital with my son, I didn’t feel the same as with my daughter. I was there for half the time and both my husband and I felt that the care was not as good as our first birth. The nurses did not offer to wheelchair me down like they did last time which really left a sour taste in my mouth. Additionally, I felt rushed and anxious to get home to see the new big sister.

Three and a half years ago, as I was waiting for my husband in the hospital lobby with my daughter all wrapped up in her cocoon of a swaddle, I sat down in a chair and stared down at this miniature bundle and tears fell down my cheeks onto her little body. I couldn’t hold back the intense release of emotions from the past 48 hours and I was overwhelmed with the love I felt for her. I felt like a mother – her mother – right then and there.

As I waited in the lobby this time around, I stared down at my son a little disappointed not to feel the same way. When this moment of finally feeling like his mother came at home 9 days postpartum, I felt compelled to capture it.

Thank you!

Pin It on Pinterest

Like what you are reading?

You have Successfully Subscribed!