I Missed the Sun by Sue Westwind

          Back before age forty became the new thirty, I hovered at its edge hoping to have a child. Often I’d meet a first-time, 40-year-old mother who assured me her pregnancy was a piece o’ cake. We were not crones yet; we were “queens.” Not to worry: procreate on.

          Why was I so sure my first would be a boy? Why did I even want a boy? I’d been a feminist since the Second Wave began: I should affirm girls by intentions to birth a girl. And I would—after the boy was about three. I had this all figured out.

Yet during the “trying” stage, this thing about the son became an obsession. Was it precognition?  Did I desire to see my husband reflected back to us, a bit too taken with my responsibility to provide immortality?  Was some buried, patriarchal nonsense about the higher value of males flooding my psyche? Or did I secretly believe I could raise an enlightened male? Mostly I pushed the tiresome questions aside and longed for he whose middle name would be Mabon: the One Who Will Come.

          I often wonder if an answer would have materialized had I not lost four fetuses in a row. Miscarriage. Yes, I missed carrying. And the first time happened shortly after winter solstice, two weeks into the New Year.  As each day squeezed in a few more minutes of light, my darkness grew deeper. There were no new beginnings in this house.

Spring was a joke, as I kept losing babies--and friends. Few could sustain contact with such repeated grief. Or was it me, isolating myself? A person didn’t (read: shouldn’t) talk about miscarriage. When they did, the reassurances were glowing. Everyone knew someone who’d lost a pregnancy, begun the adoption procedure and then, happily, re-conceived and carried to term. But through each subsequent death, I quickly gave up thoughts of a son, let alone felt the sun. A hope tinged with desperation battled an ever-sharper dread, carving up the days of waiting, waiting. Just give me a baby, Goddess!

The body mystic

          Now sixteen years after that first loss, I’m struck by the multiples of four. Four miscarriages; age forty-four when I finally became a mother, four of us in the family now. Four: the number of stability, foundation. Maybe I really do have a strong enough base now to look back—and move on.

After navigating the adoption maze, once serendipitously through friends, the other time arduously in a foreign country, I held first one infant then another in my arms. Both were mine and my husband’s to raise. Girls! Quickly it faded that I’d ever focused on the son.

Our road to parenting is fast eclipsed by the immediacy of a child’s development. Gratefully forgotten is the fight for what others appear so easily to pop out of their uteruses. You forget that these engaging, imported little people aren’t your “own blood.”  My wish was to grow through immersing in the maternal experience, not to extend my family line. And I still hold to all that.

          There’s just one thing.

          When the girls were small I read about an adoptive mother who was overcome, a decade after the fact, by the deep grief of missing out on a biological child. Ha! I scorned. That will never be me. My girls are the Two Who Were Destined to Come. I knew that as much as I knew my own name. The girls and my destiny were linked. So what if they couldn’t make it into a body that looked like me?

          Trouble is, the girls are growing into a body I recognize, having once been there. As ‘tweeners, they are sprouting the Mother’s signs of puberty.

So this is why the delayed grief appears!

          It wasn’t mourning the son. It was aching regret to have missed the exploding super-nova of Now, an initiation into the body mystic: giving birth. Plus the many sunny days of breastfeeding in the light of bonding and health. For a woman who’s not been there and was so willing to go—and for a Goddess woman--the uneasy sense of missing one of the major women’s mysteries has cropped up in me as my girls develop bodies that could someday do what I could not.

Again, I am plagued by questions.

A priestess under par?

          And I hesitate to spill them here, not wanting to offend another “infertile,” adoptive mother. We are so often overlooked, pitied, marginalized for not having had the birth experience. Our children too reap sadness for being “torn” from their “natural” mother’s womb and put up for adoption, for not getting to eat first and fully from the generous nipple. A part of me feels like a traitor for what I’m about to say. But I’m willing to wager its common, if suffered in silence, ground.

          Even in my women’s spirituality group I’ve rarely spoken of this. The silence that follows is hard on us all. I know these sisters care about me. But what can they reply? Instead I wear an observer’s smile during their passionate discussions about Lamaze and midwifery—supportive, but on that cellular level where they share a bond, clueless.

          Yet here is the central question that remains, after twenty-plus years as a participant and priestess of the Earth. How can I represent the Divine Mother if I’ve missed out on this essential blood-mystery, the act of giving birth?

Of course the question is not rational! Furthermore, it’s hardly fair.

          Because I would never call into question the qualifications of a priestess who chose not to bear children. I would never refuse sacred rites or counsel, let alone maternal energy, from anyone, male or female, who chose to incarnate the Mother. So I go deeper, trying to translate what this seemingly “hard on myself” message is really about.

Luckily, this murky work unfolds without affecting how I feel about my daughters. They are my daughters. They were the spirits who would have come through had this womb been working, period. We are family, and I have no regrets about that.

Gifts from outside the gate

          I knocked at the door of the Mother’s temple, prepared myself to enter her most secret and divine passage, and was turned away. While I rationally acknowledge the (still unknown) medical reason I couldn’t hold onto a pregnancy while other 40-somethings come through with flying colors, the disappointment stuns like any great loss.

Sadly, the fallout is to feel left out of a key sisterhood. I wasn’t welcomed into a circle of mothers the way baby showers prepare the way for most. Support groups served those with primary infertility problems, not miscarriage, or stillbirth experiences far more heart-breaking than what I’d been through. Even now, there is a look that steals over people’s faces when they find out my kids are adopted. So this is it—purely culturally induced? Nothing more than a sense of being locked out of the clubhouse?

Perhaps. Because although the Mother didn’t share Her most integral, body-spirit mystery, I still feel Her embrace. Did She really exclude me, or point out another path? Steer me here to transform my loss of the sun into deeper appreciation of my world? To be a more mindful guide for my girls’ next stage of female life? Maybe I had to revisit all this so that they can forge ahead without mom’s unspoken, unnamed reticence and dread.

At the core, the obstacle is shame: whether from my culture or from my body failing me, it matters not. This shame is as ancient as the word “barren,” carrying so much baggage beyond a contemporary construct meant to keep women barefoot and pregnant. But I’m calling shame for what it is: useless. And what a fitting season for some full-scale banishing work.

The Hag knows best

The winter solstice is my new year. I love dreaming to the depths in this dark time preceding the birth of the sun. In the pause between Samhain and Yule we can learn from the shadow the Hag shows best, knowing the holy infant sun grows ready to turn back the night.

Just so, parenting pre-teens in my mid-fifties, already post-menopausal, plenty of gray hair and bones that need tending…a woman who waits as long as I did for children will live this combo of Mother and Crone. Today as November freezes its She, the Winter Hag, who midwives insight I hope to nurture into wisdom’s rays. Its She who spurs release of that pointless shame, She who assures that daughters will do just fine raised by one who blends both crone and queen. One whose womb never got to hold them, but whose heart embraced them on the day we met.

So this new year will represent an overdue welcome into the circle of mothers: fully present at the sacred changes of her daughters’ body-selves, an honorary initiate of the nine-month journey, one who’s stopped looking over her shoulder for someone to yell, “Fraud!”  After the solstice, how fitting:  I turn to preparations for my daughters’ birthdays, both celebrated in early winter. Maybe as the light gains in January, reminding me of how I once missed the sun’s son, I’ll finally release four souls carried in mind all these years. I can see them now: wraiths spinning among the leafless oaks, free at last.

Sue Westwind lives and writes in rural northeast Kansas. Read her blog at www.thenutrientpath.wordpress.com