I am learning about photography. I like walking around our neighborhood with the munchkins and exploring the beauty that we have access to. This is one of my most amazing captures so far.

A beautiful thing is emerging. The congregation is really being born! I am so overjoyed with all the ways the Fertility Abundance Garden is expanding. The exchanges in Fertile Majesties this week have been soooooo amazing! I love the depth of intimacy and sharing that is happening. 

Seed creation is going through another radical transformation. I am asking myself what comes when I don’t push, when I just feel for the offerings that are meant to go along with the seed. I love what is coming forth. I love the integration of understanding and practice. I realize now why this next seed has “taken so long.” It has needed to steep and simmer. 

It’s as if each season of the Garden has prepared me for the softening needed to activate a more generative and expansive seed creation process. In April when the first Garden began, I couldn’t have imagined where we are now. This Garden season is the one that is transforming this process from a month-long program to a way of life.

I’ve been listening to soft music all week. I’ve had no migraines. I’m finding more and more ways to flow with the unpredictable rhythms of munchkin life. We’re reading about dinosaurs and komodo dragons and lion seals. My baby boy is weeks away from his first birthday. He is walking and saying his siblings’ names. The weather has changed and the colors outside are signaling that a new year is around the bend. 

What will 2021 birth? I am fully open to all its miracles. 2020 has undone the lingering parts of me that doubted my brilliance and majesty as a creator. I feel for the love that is surrounding me and all of us. There is so much more to come, this Love says. I feel for it in my prayers, in my dance, when I’m cooking, when I’m taking the rare shower, when I’m breastfeeding one and then two children, when I’m considering the materials “God uses to hold us all together” with Bloom, and when Wonder is fascinated at the realization of the life cycle of butterflies. “Everything starts over,” he marvels.

I am reading (well, listening on Audible, but also sometimes reading along with the ebook) The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak, brought into my life by a lovely creator in the Garden. Each chapter, each passage is a meditation on love, on spirit, on god, on everything. Especially when I don’t feel like making dinner with a baby on my back or with a baby pulling every pot out of the cabinets, playing this story softens the moment and fills the process with more joy.

I started this entry hours ago when some munchkins were still sleeping. Now I’m getting Revvy to sleep for his first nap of the day (it’s so sweet when they nap more than once in a day...and I know in time he’ll move on to just one nap...and then to no naps!). Smooth, melodic music from Ayub Ogada, a Kenyan artist I just came across, is playing. The big munchkins are bouncing around downstairs. Their father is preparing for capoeira class. I’m in the Garden and excited for our Movement Lab in a few hours. Life is blessed.

This post was originally an entry in the Creators Shared Diary during the Fall 2020 season. Learn more about the Fertility Abundance Garden here.

download love is the way

Just like a tree is nourished by its many roots and the soil that holds everything in place, every story we tell can begin in many places and is shaped by the words we choose to piece it all together.

The Fertility Abundance Garden is teaching me so much about finding soft, gentle ways into our deepest, most intimate fertility narratives. Opening up and becoming more receptive to the internal dialogues we have with ourselves and each other as creators is one way we transform and reimagine our relationships with fertility and creativity. Being able to access and articulate what we truly feel and how we want to create is vital to sustaining flow and nurturing wellness as a creator. 

Just like the soil has to be soft before we can dig out the weeds without damaging the roots of the plant we want to save, so too do the language and lens with which we talk about our fertility stories determine how much we are able to unearth and lovingly witness about what we have been through and what we hope for our futures. 

There is a way to journey into some of our darkest, most hidden places without causing more harm or trauma to ourselves. Many times a story can be so layered and tangled in knots that just thinking about it from a chronological or “just the facts” perspective triggers waves of anxiety or an instinct to shutdown and retreat for self-preservation. This discomfort and distress is exacerbated when the words we use to tell our story are not even our own, but rather the external imprints of conversations other people are having about our stories. 

One of the most critical first steps in the softening of our soil is to ensure that the language we are using is truly our own. We embody more power, and accelerate the healing process in the wake of grief, loss, and heartbreak, when we decide how our stories are told and define what each moment means for ourselves. The truth is, only we can author what has happened in our bodies, and this authoring is every creator’s sacred responsibility, now and always. 

When the soil around whatever grew from our fertility and creativity practices has not yet been softened enough, it’s very difficult—and sometimes even impossible—for new questions, thoughts, and understandings to be received and absorbed. Nurturing a gentler way into our stories means consciously choosing language that centers our power as creators. It also means slowing down to the pace of possibility when processing and unpacking our stories so that the liberating truth of a matter has a chance to take root, emerge, and be seen and experienced in a healthy, soul-restorative way.

Essential to the labors of cultivating and sharing authentic narratives about our birth stories, pregnancies, mothering journeys, fertility practices, relationships with partners and co-creators, passions, creative projects, girlhood-to-womanhood memories, relationships with our mothers and mother figures, dreams and visions—and whatever else we feel called to speak on—is a radical commitment to the truth of whatever it is our bodies, hearts, and minds have lived through. 

The substance of everything we need to say is already alive and pulsing within. When the softening happens, the words flow fluidly and abundantly.

Soft, moist, vibrant soil yields generous, new freedoms when crafting fertility narratives. Inside the expansive world of our fertile soil, we are able to take up more space within our stories. With more ease, we identify the real words and then take great care to organize and situate our words in ways that amplify our realities as creators. 

With each evolution of the telling and the sharing we discover the vastness of our beings and our creations. We remember with love, celebration and gratitude that when the soil is soft we really can bring the most beautiful parts of ourselves and our stories to life.

process & practice: fertility word sprouts

• Find your journal, open up a fresh page on your laptop, start a new email to yourself. Get ready to journal, however you like to do it.

• Think about a critical turning point in your journey as a creator. When did you realize a new truth about your fertility? How did you know that your creativity needed to be expressed in a certain way? Where were you when a piercing clarity awakened you to the life you are living now?

• When you have a memory that rises to the surface, write down what it is with one or two sentences.

• From the following question seeds, choose one that feels most relevant or most resonates: What happened to me? Why is this moment so significant to my story? How do I feel about this moment now? How did I feel about it when it first happened? How did this make me grow? What did this lead me to create?

• Write your selected question seed on your page. Then somewhere else on your page, or posted up somewhere visible to you in your writing space, write down: My story, my words, my truth.

• Take a moment to reread those words aloud or in your mind, My story, my words, my truth. As you repeat the mantra, become more aware of your breath. Deepening the breath and feeling the expansion within, say the mantra internally as you continue to inhale and exhale.

• Return to the space on your page and begin answering with a stream of conscious, free write. Allow all the words to come as the do. Keep writing for at least 5 continuous minutes. Don’t erase, edit, or censor. Just write.

• When you feel like you have generated an amount of content that feels good to you, set it down. Take a few minutes to rest and step away from your writing.

• When you are ready to come back to the process, revisit the mantra for a moment, My story, my words, my truth.

• Read through what you wrote. Soften the impulse to edit or amend and just read.

• Now read it again with your authentic truth lens. Read one sentence (or one line, or one phrase—whatever makes sense for how you wrote it down) at a time. After ever sentence, ask yourself, Is this true? Underline everything that is true.

• Now read through it once more with your feeling lens. Going sentence by sentence, circle all the words that make you feel an expansion in your body, warmth in your fingertips, or a flutter in your belly.

• On a separate page (or underneath what you have written) make a list of all the words you circled. These are your fertility story word sprouts.

• Over the next few days, weeks, or months, revisit your word sprouts. When you are ready to go deeper into writing about this story, pick one of your sprouts to explore.

• Begin writing about the original memory (or another memory if it’s shifted through your writing) from the context of the word sprout and see where your story grows.

• When you need a change or want to experiment with a different beginning to your story, choose a new word sprout or question seed, and then start the process over again.

• Now read through it once more with your feeling lens. Going sentence by sentence, circle all the words that make you feel an expansion in your body, warmth in your fingertips, or a flutter in your belly.

• On a separate page (or underneath what you have written) make a list of all the words you circled. These are your fertility story word sprouts.

• Over the next few days, weeks, or months, revisit your word sprouts. When you are ready to go deeper into writing about this story, pick one of your sprouts to explore.

• Begin writing about the original memory (or another memory if it’s shifted through your writing) from the context of the word sprout and see where your story grows.

• When you need a change or want to experiment with a different beginning to your story, choose a new word sprout or question seed, and then start the process over again.

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Are you ready to activate your superpowers as a creator in the fertility abundance garden? Learn more.

Dreaming motherhood, my first trimester with Bloom.
Photo by Colin A. Danville

The Scene: I am nearing the end of my first trimester with Bloom, my first born. I am holding space at the Community Movement Clinic that I facilitate on Sunday mornings at Joe’s Movement Emporium. Some days, like this one, no one comes to dance with me, and so I spend the time (since I’ve paid to reserve the space and all) playing inside my own creative sanctuary. 

In a few days it will be Valentine’s Day and I will have my first prenatal appointment with my midwife. This is the furthest I’ve ever gotten in a pregnancy, and hour to hour, minute to minute, I vacillate through extreme panic that any moment is my last moment with this baby, and extreme joy that I’m having a baby and that I’ll finally get to meet my child. 

A big part of my sanity strategy is dancing through the constant fears and anxiety that come in waves and make me feel like I might sink beneath the hopes of my mothering dreams before I have a chance to realize them. Inside the dance I am able to temporarily untangle myself from an intricate web of fears, and center my energies into fully believing that being a mother is possible, even for me. 

The movement keeps me present with the reality that in this moment, I am a mother, my baby is alive and growing inside of me. The dance is gracious in this way, in that it doesn’t force me to choose sides. It doesn’t give me ultimatums. I can be a whole person, who is both really really happy and grateful, and also really really scared and on edge. 

But the movement makes it so my fears don’t hold my moments hostage. And the movement gives me room to cultivate more joy for my baby without having to pretend or deny the way my breath is trapped for those few seconds it takes to wipe myself every time I use the bathroom.

In the early weeks of my pregnancy, dance is truly a lifeline. When I dance I access a space of intuition, power, and possibility not readily tangible in everyday moments when my previous fertility traumas clamor for the mic in my mind. The movement rituals I perform everyday keep me afloat in the turbulent waters of my memory. Twisting and bending, spinning and gliding, arching and swaying, I imagine a beautiful future, a beautiful life, with a baby I have no proof will ever make it into this world.

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Are you ready to activate your superpowers as a creator in the fertility abundance garden? Learn more.

///Scene: Binah dances through the labors of a miscarriage/// Check out the Fertile Freedoms Listening Party where Binah creates online performance and storytelling events about her fertility journeys.

We are collecting fertility stories as part of the Fertile Freedoms Movement. Increasing awareness around the diversity of our experiences as creators is a central part of the Fertile Freedoms vision. As we explore, cultivate, and sustain more fertile and creative possibilities for ourselves, sharing our stories with each other is one ways we collectively seed more fertility abundance in our world.

Sometimes we start out responding to one idea, but surrendering to the writing takes us some place different, some place else that we really need to go. Discovering that flow of transparency and honesty in our words can be life-changing. Writing, in this way, becomes one of the most courageous and liberating things we can do when committing to nurturing and sustaining fertility wellness.

The following writing prompts are offered as points of entry to support you in getting deeper into your story. They are inspired by a mashup of fertility and creativity stories. Wording is intentionally soft and nonspecific sometimes to encourage you to interpret (or edit) as needed and write from a voice that makes space for your story to exist in a way that is authentic to you.

1. Write the story of your mother giving birth to you.

2. Write the story of your grandmother giving birth to your mother.

3. Write the story of your grandmother giving birth to your father.

4. Write the story of your great-grandmother giving birth to your grandmother or grandfather.

5. Write about getting your first menses (period).

6. Write the story of your womb. What has she seen? Where has she been? Who/what has she birthed? What has she released?

7. Write about your first sexual experience.

8. Write about a time when you felt so alive, so excited, so passionate about what you were doing or where you were going.

9. Write about your journey to conceive a child.

10. Write about your journey to become a mother.

11. Write a letter to your pre-motherhood self.

12. Write a letter to your little girl self.

13. Write a letter to your mother the night before she gives birth to you.

14. Write a letter to your grandmother the night before she gives birth to you mother.

15. Write about a powerful orgasm.

16. Write about a time you followed your intuition.

17. Write about deciding whether or not to keep your baby.

18. Write about choosing whether or not to be a mother.

19. Write about giving birth to your child/ren. Optional: Write a separate story for each child.

20. Write about deciding whether or not to adopt.

21. Write about your ovulation ritual.

22. Write about how your menstruation cycle has evolved from girlhood, to womanhood, to motherhood.

23. Write about meeting the father/s of your children.

24. Write about the moment of conception.

25. Write about losing a baby.

26. Write about your postpartum journey.

27. What does it mean to be a Creator?

28. What does it mean to be fertile?

29. What does it mean to be a mother?

30. Write about why you want to have a baby.

31. Write about why you want to have more children.

32. When did you first know you were a mother?

33. Write about your relationship with your mother.

34. Write about your relationship with your sister.

35. Write about your relationship with your daughter.

36. Write about your relationship with your grandmother.

37. Write about your relationship/s with your children’s father/s.

38. How does it feel to be pregnant?

39. Write about waiting to see if you are pregnant or not.

40. Write about waiting to go into labor.

41. Write about the eggs in your ovaries. What has their experience been, since they have been with you since your mother was pregnant with you?

42. Write about something you feel very passionate about.

43. Write about someone you love.

44. Write about someone who loves you.

45. Write about your breasts and what they have been through.

46. Write about your vagina and what/who has passed through it.

47. What does it mean to be an artist?

48. What do you create?

49. Write about your postpartum body. 

50. Write about how it feels when you dance naked.

51. Write about who you see when you look in the mirror. 

52. Write about a dance experience that made you feel so alive.

53. Write about something you want to create that is always on your mind.

54. Write about a place you’ve never been to but really want to go.

55. Write about a time you travelled by yourself to a new world.

56. Write about your girlhood.

57. Write about your teenage years.

58. Write a letter to your mother about your fertility.

59. Write a letter to your grandmothers about how it has been being raised by their children, your mother and father.

60. Write a letter to your sister.

61. Write about being everyone’s auntie and having no children of your own.

62. Write about having a hysterectomy.

63. Write about having fibroids.

64. Write about navigating hormonal imbalances.

65. Write about the foods you crave when you’re cycle is on the way.

66. Write about how your children have saved your life.

67. Write about how becoming a mother has changed your life.

ready to share your fertility story?
check out the fertile freedoms storyboard.

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Everything about Mother Nature is abundant, and its infinite variation reminds us that, as a creators, we live inside a majestic and fertile reality of creation in each moment.

Fertility Radiance is the source of our power as creators. Fertility radiance is generated when two essential components of being a creator flow in optimal relation to each other: Fertility Abundance and Liberated Action. 

Just as our breath functions as an eternal call and response, inhale…exhale…inhale…exhale, so too do the primary elements of fertility radiance exist within an interdependent rhythm that evolves over time.  

Fertility abundance is where we all begin. Each one of us is the forward revelation of one of two million possibilities—two million microscopic eggs—forming in our mother’s ovaries while she was becoming fully human in her mother’s, our grandmother’s, womb. As women, we are also born with the same multitude of futures in our wombs like our mothers, and grandmothers, and on and on, and back and back. Our fertility abundance runs deep, and we are keepers and bearers of this holy and wondrous creative power from before we are even born.

Fertility abundance is also a state of profound consciousness, a fully embodied knowing and acceptance of our vast and continuously emerging fertile possibilities. 

Liberated Action is the radically authentic movements, choices, and pathways we live out in the realization of our fertile possibilities. These two elements work together simultaneously and nourish the preservation and expansion of the other. When our fertility abundance is regularly and openly felt, we are more able to take liberated actions that are consistent with our fertility dreamscape. When we act frequently in alignment with our fertility and creativity dreams, we tap into larger and larger reserves of fertility abundance.

When we commit to cultivating fertility radiance in our lives, we choose freedom over fear. We choose honesty over denial. We become more resilient in times of heartbreak, despair and trauma, as we are more adept at taking the liberated actions that most align with our authentic fertility dreamscape. 

Cultivating fertility radiance takes practice and experimentation, as each day we experience perpetual change in our relationships, environments, circumstances, thoughts, and challenges. However every ounce of intentionality that we pour into increasing our fertility radiance is potent and has powerful and immediate effects on our lives. 

Fertility radiance enhances our quality of life and can have many applications in our everyday life. For the novelist who is feeling blocked about where to take her story, enhancing fertility radiance can stimulate exciting new energies in the writing process and bring her novel to life in the way she always imagined it would. 

For the ambitious intern at the firm who feels constantly overlooked and undervalued by the partners, developing a fertility radiance practice can boost her confidence, inspire her to speak more boldly and take up more space at her job. 

For the mother who feels overwhelmed with how to nurture her art while juggling her family’s incessant demands, tuning into her fertility radiance can help her learn to center her creative powers and talents so that she can integrate her mothering labors and artistic dreams with more ease and delight. 

Nature thrives, producing unique and beautiful elements every second of every day with exquisite detail, design, and function, because of the Creator’s supercharged fertility radiance.

For the woman who has already lost a baby but feels deeply in her spirit that her child is waiting to come through her, cultivating fertility radiance can activate the intuition that will guide her through all she needs to do to prepare her body, heart, and mind for conceiving a life again.

However we access and apply our fertility radiance, it illuminates and amplifies the truest desires of our soul. Choosing to nurture our fertility radiance is the first part of realizing sustained fertility wellness. 

No matter all we have been through before this now, as creators we are constantly birthing and creating new possibilities. The love and care with which we grow all these gardens—ourselves, our babies, our dreams—is sourced by fertility radiance. Keeping our source flowing freely and abundantly is the secret to realizing everlasting fertility.

Are you ready to cultivate more fertility radiance?
Join the Fertile Freedoms Movement

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The pomegranate is an ancient symbol of fertility, its many seeds a representation of the many eggs in our ovaries, of the many possibilities from which we are all born.

Last week I sent individual letters out to almost 100 women that I personally know, inviting them to host a Fertile Freedoms Listening Party. The listening party is an intimate, online, immersive storytelling and performance event where I share my journey of recovering my fertile radiance after a miscarriage. As I was going through the process of sending out each email one by one, I was asking myself, Why are you spending so much time on this? You could just bcc and be done with it.

But I didn’t want to send my very intimate fertility story out as a single, mass message. I wanted to take care of my story, of my words, in a way that only I can. I wanted to think about each woman and each mother I sent my story to. I wanted to remember all the details about her and her life, the conversations and experiences we’ve shared, the intimacies of her fertility stories, family, and dreams.

Each invitation felt like a little gift box I was leaving on her doorstep. I prayed that as they opened my letter they could feel the love I was pouring into this whole exchange. Our fertility is a holy thing, and when we nurture spaces to share our stories with each other we are practicing an ancient and sacred communion as mothers and women. I wanted the power of this process to reach everyone who read my words.

So in tapping into all of these connections, and preparing for the Fertile Freedoms Listening Parties, I thought it would be appropriate to write more specifically about why it’s so important that we share our stories with each other. Of course, there’s way more than 8 reasons why we need to talk about our fertility. But just to get the conversation going, let’s start with these.

#1 To author our own stories about what has happened in our bodies
The words we use to tell our stories have tremendous power over how we experience our fertility. Every word is itself a story, and the memories, emotions, and meanings behind each word support the perpetuation of that story, whether or not it is true in our hearts. Culturally, historically, and economically, our bodies and their stories have been grossly distorted as a part of a systemic need to control what we do with our fertility. Authoring our own narratives gives us control in a way that is not possible when someone else is dictating what is allowed to be said. 

Ultimately, the language we use when unraveling our stories’ layers impacts how we are able to process, heal, and transform the narratives. It is essential that we have autonomy over the words and the ways in which they come together to compose the stories about our fertility. This critical practice of finding and articulating our own words keeps us ever-present with our power, and sustains our courage to make the choices that are most authentic to our fertility dreams. 

#2 To imagine new futures for our fertility dreamscape
Just like our muscles and limbs need room to stretch, our thoughts need space to exist, shift, and evolve. Talking about our fertility gives us the ability to honor what has happened and imagine what else is possible. When speaking openly about our stories, we have a greater capacity to expand on ideas, consider alternatives, and identify the truth of our feelings. Especially for those of us who have ever felt shamed or silenced because of our story, being able to talk freely and transparently about our fertility dreams is one way we reclaim our power and our right to shape the priorities of our fertility dreamscape. 

Everything we are birthing, whether it’s a baby or a creative vision, first needs our permission to be possible. Regular, honest dialogues with ourselves and those who love us give us the necessary time to gain clarity about what we want. These rituals of communication also help us practice trusting ourselves and lead us to feel more confident about the steps we will take to realize our fertility dreams. 

#3 To increase our collective knowledge about fertile possibilities
The more we talk with each other about what’s really going on in our fertility stories, the more knowledge we can collectively access when exploring our individual possibilities. We are all experts about our lives, our bodies, our personal experiences with navigating our fertility. This expertise is sacred and when we practice sharing our stories with other women, we illuminate this deep well of our own knowing that everyone has the ability to cultivate for themselves.

There are so many ways to exchange stories and connect with others who need to hear our stories. As the author of your fertility journey, you get to decide how and when and who you talk to. Every time you open up to share from your truth, you are enriching the soil of our meta-fertility dreamscape. The more possibilities we acknowledge together, the more realities we can all consider when choosing how we want to move forward with our fertility dreams.

#4 To process traumatic moments in our fertility journeys
We need to talk about what has happened to our bodies in the pursuit of our fertility dreams. The practice of putting sound to our feelings, of selecting words for the images playing over and over again in our mind, of organizing the way facts are remembered—all of this is a part of the healing process. We can only begin to imagine those new futures when we have fully acknowledged our past labors. 

Women need to feel safe to revisit the traumatic parts of our fertility stories. We need gentle ears to listen to us and soft places to rest our hearts when we finally get the courage to voice the horrors we have endured and survived. The future of our fertility lives on the other side of what it is we are too afraid to say. Learning how to find our own way into the hardest parts of our stories is another way we access power in bodies and our fertility narratives.  

#5 To stimulate our creativity
Our fertility and our creativity are inextricably linked. Just as suppressing one inhibits the other, amplifying one empowers and expands the other. Talking about our fertility stimulates new thought patterns and reinvigorates energy where there was possibly stagnation or boredom. Discovering a new idea is another way to give birth, and being hyper-present with the many ways we engage our creativity strengthens our receptivity to the possibilities of our fertility. 

Our bodies, our minds, our wombs, our reproductive matter are all the site of constant creation. We are walking, talking creators, at every point of every day. It is a majestic thing to be deeply aware of our magic at all times. Holding onto the possibility of our creative powers enriches and enlivens our fertility dreamscape. We enter every moment more possible than one before it. We greet each opportunity with more passion, curiosity, and optimism, and all this positive energy leads to happier, more fulfilling experiences with our fertility and creativity.

#6 To explore multiple ways to realize our fertility dreams
Fertility and creativity teach us to love multiplicity. Whenever we seek to grow deeper in our creative practice, or get more in tune with our fertility dreams we are presented with an opportunity to look at something from many different perspectives. These labors of bending, twisting, sifting through possibilities strengthen us in a ways that are extremely beneficial when navigating the inevitable unknowns of our fertility dreamscape. 

As we learn to trust ourselves, our dreams, and our intuitive guides, we grow more adept, more flexible, and more receptive to making the most of unexpected openings when they appear. We begin to see and experience our fertile futures more tangibly and less abstractly. More accepting of the infinite variation of how our futures may unfold, we more freely bring our dreams to life. 

#7 To make safe spaces for those who need to talk about their fertility stories
Everyone of us has the power to make a safe space for someone else to tell their story. But first, we have to make our hearts, our minds, our bodies safe places to tell our own stories to ourselves. It takes however long it is going to take, but by practicing loving, gentle kindness towards ourselves throughout the labors of unraveling and untangling our stories, we grow our capacity to be active listeners who can provide safe spaces for others to open up their stories.

When we take radical steps toward vulnerability and transparency, we illuminate the pathways for more mothers and women to shed their own masks and armor. Many of us have learned from girlhood how to close ourselves off for survival, how to protect the sweetest, most delicate parts of our dreams from harsh judgements and violations. Now though, we have to find our way back to the softness where possibility begins. Our fertility dreams are waiting for us there. Creating safe spaces where everyone can share their fertility stories is one way we accelerate our own return to that sweet, loving space of surrender within ourselves.

#8 To seed and nurture a more loving fertility reality for our daughters and granddaughters
Our fertility, our creativity, our lives flourish in a window of opportunity. We know that these moments are for the now, and that we are doing our best to make the most of this now. We also know that the next generations are making their way into their fertile futures too. They are watching us and developing a sense of what will be possible for them by observing what we decide is possible for ourselves. 

The more we experiment with and expand the narratives that shape our fertility dreamscapes, the more seeds we are planting, the more opportunities we are preserving, the more power we are gathering, for those who are responsible for birthing the future of humanity. As it is now, and as it will be then, our labors are sourcing everything and everyone we are birthing. Speaking intentionally, honestly, and lovingly about our fertility has lasting implications for our quality of life, and everything we will create with these lives, for years and years to come.

ARE YOU READY TO CULTIVATE MORE FERTILITY RADIANCE?
JOIN THE FERTILE FREEDOMS MOVEMENT

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Sculptures by Kwame Akoto-Bomfo, Source

When I was growing my daughter in my womb, I was often overcome with visions of a pregnant mother shackled to the bottom of a slave ship. I would see glimpses of this nautical hell, of a massive vessel, transporting hundreds of captured African peoples at a time, sailing somewhere between home and never-going-back-home. The Middle Passage—a system of torturous trade routes zigzagging across the Atlantic Ocean, spanning multiple centuries and coastlines—in all its fullness and mystery, the Middle Passage continues to haunt a significant part of my beginnings as an African-descended mother born in America, and also the beginnings of my own children. This passage, this portal, is where a grand rupture of my ancestral, cultural, and mothering identities took place, and also where alternate, more tangible realities began to initiate and take root. 

Along with these images that came to me when I was pregnant, I would often hear negro spirituals, and be moved to just start singing them. A voice that did not feel like my own would emerge, large and luminous, as if it was made of its own wings, and could carry me back across the relentless tide to the very mother who first uttered these same weathered and bruised tones. I come from such a people, I know. People who sang because the only remaining access to their freedom were the notes erupting from way down deep in their core, pushing up through the throat, and finally emerging from tongue and teeth as these soul-stirring hymns. Lasting long after their physical beings were beaten and discarded, these aural memories retained the truth that even though their bodies be caged, not every part of them was able to be bound. 

The singing would overtake me especially when I was dancing and couldn’t find the right music for the moment on my playlist. Shuffling through hundreds of artists, thousands of songs, and sometimes I still wouldn’t be able to feel a vibe that matched what my body needed. At some point I would stop searching, and just allow the silence—or the chatter and bustle of my munchkins—to be there. As I would just start to move my limbs, my hips, my spine slowly inside that non-musical space, a song would come to me. Sometimes like a moan, sometimes a whisper, sometimes a full on cry—

Swing low, sweet chariot
Coming for to carry me home—

And I wouldn’t question the intensity of the words, or wonder about how they landed in my mouth without having heard or read them in so long. I would just sing, feeling the presence, the magnitude of all those many mothers before me who sang themselves through the darkest of times with these same rhythms, maybe even these same words, sounds that gave them the room to both mourn and to hope. 

Swing low, sweet chariot
Coming for to carry me home—

I sense deeply that somewhere within the etchings of my ancient strands of DNA, these charged melodies reverberate from one of my faraway grand-mothers. If we were to travel across the parallels of time, we would find her there, still singing in this moment, bound on her back, a belly rising defiantly against the forces of violation and devastation. Everyday she comes to the point of no return, and must make the same choice: Will we live or will we die? 

I look over Jordan, what do I see?
Coming for to carry me home—

Just when she thinks she’s endured all she can, she considers the final way out of this despair: the next time she chokes on her vomit she could simply not gasp, and writhe, and fight so hard to clear her throat. She could just lie there and let the airways close once and for all, protecting herself and any futures she holds from any continued miseries. But always she comes back to the baby growing inside of her. She knows she will never see her other children again, separated from them three moons ago when the slave traders ravished her homeland and stole all the people from the interior, transporting them to the coast, handing them over to the strange men with ghost-like skin and no color to their eyes. All this they did in exchange for more gunpowder, to be more successful in causing more destruction to more families who would not hear them coming until it was too late. 

A band of angels, coming after me
Coming for to carry me home—

She aches for them all, says their names one by one so that they can feel the remembrance of their mother, even as she is unable to save them from the sure terrors they have all encountered by now. A grieving mother, the only child she is sure to ever see is the one becoming fully human within the soft wonders of her womb. It is this opportunity to mother again that propels her to choose life every time she could choose death. And in choosing to remain a part of the living world, and offering her labors and her baby into the uncertainties ahead, she continues the succession of biologic matter, the sacred formation of the next mother’s eggs inside of tiny ovaries. These are the radical, loving acts of a distant ancestor mother of mine, making a way for the many futures of her children, and her children’s children’s children, one uterus to another. Her seemingly simple labors protected the possibility of my existence, a single echo of life surviving slave ships and auction blocks, plantations and whipping posts, Jim Crow and sharecropping, lynchings and redlining, water hoses and police dogs, voter suppression and discrimination—surviving all that so that one day a light such as me could expand inside my own mother’s womb.

Swing low, sweet chariot
Coming for to carry me home—

I know that my existence is a precious gift of that long-ago, enslaved mother’s forward fertility, of her courageous labors and those of many more like her. A holy council of unnamed and undocumented mothers, each one of them choosing to birth various components of my potential even though they had no assurances that the future would be any sweeter. 

Swing low, sweet chariot
Coming for to carry me home

I see my fertility choices as a birthing mother in today’s world as so much more vast and privileged than many of my foremothers. It is from this space of immeasurable reverence and gratitude that I anchor my own faith in my fertility dreams. If I am here because countless, enslaved mothers decided that the possibility of my life was worth surviving all their unspeakable horrors, if they were able to access the beauty and majesty of bringing life into the world amidst so much terror and loss, then I too can insist on preserving and supporting the futures of my children and grandchildren through the labors of my own body. I too can rally for the lives of the coming generations that are now more possible because of who I am allowing to come forth through me today. And I too can find eternal threads of opportunity, celebration, and love with which to weave together a bright band of tomorrows for all my babies. 

This has always been the work of the mothers, to see more when there is nothing yet to see, to pour our whole selves into realizing dreams that the future will not promise us. To trust—above all else, and in the midst of whatever turbulence we might be facing—in the abundant blessings of life even if there is no one but us who believes our children should be, must be, born.

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The invisible mother dancing through the storm, about 6 weeks postpartum from a miscarriage. Photo by Colin A. Danville

This was my life in my 20s. I came into the revelation of my motherself when I was 24 years old. I was living at the time in a shared house with too many roommates. I was deeply in love, or so I thought, with a man who I believed was my ideal partner, my soulmate—except for the frequent interludes he spent with the other women he also loved. Still, barely making the rent each month to cover the two rooms we had in the back of the house, I held onto the fact that I was the one he lived with. I told myself that made me special.

Early one Saturday morning in spring, gathered around the large island in our sunlit kitchen, a few of us sat together over bowls of steaming oatmeal or granola and nut milk. One of our roommates announced she was pregnant. I was so happy for her, and also instantly aware of my own desire to give birth to a child. This had not been something that my boyfriend and I had talked about in recent times, mostly because he was so closed to the idea. It was a constant source of disconnect for me in our relationship, but one that I would ignore—like all the other women—for too long a time to come.

In the beginning years of awakening to my motherself, I didn’t know how to place my desires for motherhood inside the very chaotic realities of my love life. There were a string of ill-suited situations before I partnered with the father of my children. What I often felt made my experiences of recurring miscarriage so unique was that I was involved with men who didn’t want to have children (some specifically not with me, some not at all). So the tragedy of the loss was complicated each time by their obvious relief in the premature shedding of my womb.

Once an obstetrician at my follow-up appointment after being in the emergency room said very casually, “This happens. Everything will be okay. You all can just try again.” I remember having no words for her, just more tears. She meant well, I knew, but how could she know that the guy sitting across from us in her examination room had spent everyday of my short pregnancy begging me to get an abortion. Many times my postpartum season after a miscarriage was bizarre and disorienting like this. It was like grieving alongside someone else who is rejoicing that you are dying, as a miscarriage is an actual death taking place inside of your own body. They are joyful because they didn’t want to live with you as you are, they didn’t want to experience you as a mother.

I would struggle to reconcile these emotions. Why am I still here? Even now, all these lifetimes later, all these children later, I revisit the woman I was back then and ask her questions, as gently as I can, to uncover more parts of my process. It has taken me a long time to embrace that stage of my development into motherhood and not cringe at all the memories. Sometimes we don’t like the girl/woman/mother we were in our past, but the real healing comes when we can love and celebrate her anyway, and see her as a vital player in our becoming.

I have taken to identifying myself during the shadowy years of fertility trauma, consecutive losses, troubled relationships, and suppressed longings for motherhood as an Invisible Mother. As a writer, language is so critical to me, and has the power to really create space for our experiences when we don’t see our story reflecting back to us from the world as it is. Just finding or creating a phrase, a word, that can encompass the fullness, or at least some partial reality of our fullness, can go a long way towards feeling whole and sane when unraveling the many layers of heartache and despair. For me, not being seen as a mother by my community, not being able to call myself a mother, despite all the many initiations I’d had in the journey toward motherhood was a whole other form of pain. The invisibility of my losses—they were all in the first trimester and I wasn’t showing—added a further layer of erasure to the whole experience. Not only was there no baby, but there weren’t even any witnesses to my grief. Always, I had to mourn alone.

Sometimes I even wondered if my torment was all in my head. If no one else could see me bleeding, maybe I wasn’t bleeding. But over time, I learned how to make space for my grief, lonely as it was. I realized that the only way for me to come out of my despair was to lift myself up one breath at a time, however long it took. I devised strategies for making it through the raw horrors of the moment: declining invitations to friends’ baby showers, throwing away all loss-stained underwear, zoning out on Netflix until at least the physical labors of losing a baby had subsided. 

Once the contractions were over, another part of the healing would have to commence. I always give my children a name, or rather, I hear a name upon conception or soon thereafter. And so even in times of loss, I have this person, this spirit being, this idea, to communicate with. I learned how an essential part of my healing and recovery was in continuing to dialogue with my baby, even though they had transitioned from their path toward being wholly human. Writing letters to them or about them, speaking to them, drawing or painting pictures for them, dancing with the energies I still felt coursing through my body in the wake of their existence—all of this was a way to honor the realness of my motherhood. I needed to anchor my experience in something that came from me, in something no one could ever erase or deny, even when there’d be no baby coming forth this time, no proof that there had indeed been someone there growing inside of me. 

Our fertility dreams, when we are listening, will continuously lead us to leap into unknowns. Photo by Colin A. Danville

I also developed these ways of coping through recurring losses because in my circle of girlfriends, many of them were having babies for the first time. Try as I might, I could not avoid all their baby showers. I could not suspend our friendships indefinitely while I grieved in silent, hidden spaces. For some of my closest friends I became even more deeply involved in their mother journeys, taking on the labors of being a doula, babysitter, postpartum support person for the family. I thought if I can’t have my own baby right now, at least I can be of service to a mother. At least I can be next to the sacredness of motherhood, even if no one else can see that I too am a mother. 

It’s important that no matter how our families, or partners, or friends, or doctors, or community see us, that we see ourselves. Having lived almost a decade of my life as an invisible mother, I often recognize the tell-tale traits in other closeted invisible mothers. It’s sometimes a matter of survival, of self-preservation. If you’re not surrounded by loving, empathetic people, it can be dangerous to reveal your motherself or your mothering dreams. Sometimes people, even the ones who imagine themselves to be in our corner, can say the meanest, most insensitive things. For many invisible mothers, we are treading thin ice as it is to just function as peacefully and positively as we can. And all the while we’re trying to thread our way back to full faith in our fertility space and our womb space so that we can do the inevitable work of trying again. Any negativity, harsh words, or indifference during this extremely vulnerable time can be devastating, debilitating. 

I say all this to say to any of my Beautiful Invisible Mothers out there reading this post, I SEE YOU! Your fertility is real. Your babies are real. Your mothering dreams are real and deserve to be cherished by those worthy of your love, your fertility magic, your energy. Your story matters. You do not have to gather false strengths. It’s okay if you need to sit your homegirl’s baby shower out this time. Send money, send a card, do something nice for her in your own time after the baby comes. A new mommy will always need a helping hand. You are never obligated to explain your absence to people who don’t have the capacity, or the compassion, to hold your story with care. 

I wish someone had told me they could see me when I was going through my invisible mothering years. I wish someone had simply said, “I’m sorry for your loss.” At the bottom of my grief there was this perpetual ache from being so unnoticed, so unacknowledged, and then also feeling like it wasn’t safe to even ask for support because I couldn’t risk not receiving kindness or empathy. In my mothering practice I have come to understand that the hard parts of our fertility journeys are not just passages of time to get over or brush away or ignore. How we experience them, how we grieve them, how we recover, how we restore our fertile radiance in the eternal postpartum of those faded possibilities impacts the opportunities and realities we are able to access in our forward fertility and future mothering journeys. 

Many times instances of fibroids, irregular cycles, difficulty conceiving, hormonal imbalances can be traced to unresolved traumas that altered the natural flow of our fertility processes. We live in a world that will stress external remedies, countless pills, and costly treatments over the extended time, effort, courage, and emotional stamina it might take to uncover the secrets to healing our hurts from the inside out. In addition to, and possibly even instead of, whatever medical advice we receive, we might need to dance through the totality of our experience. We might need to sit with the pain or confusion for a while and just allow it to be named in our hearts and minds. We might need to write or talk through our story. We might need to uproot our lives from one particular geographical location and open our fertile selves up to discovering what might be born from us in a new place. We might need to end the awful relationship once and for all. We might need to walk away from a relentlessly demanding career or a soul-shattering circumstance that leaves us in constant entanglement with factors, environments, or people that do not serve our fertility dreams. We might need to finally, and confidently, center our fertility, being vigilantly intentional that everything and everyone else we’re pouring our precious labors into is aligned with our deepest, wildest fertility dreams. 

Now I look back at the me of my 20s and I love her, I praise her, I cheer her on through the marathon of loss and heartbreaks. She is the reason I am here today, with my bustling band of munchkins that keep my busy and on the move all day long. Her perseverance, her determination, her faith in her fertility even when no one else could see it or cherish it—all of that is why I get to know myself as a mother in my current reality. Her labors, so many of them unsupported, unseen, and unloved at the time, are the reason I get to be Mommy today.

No matter where we are in the process of our fertility, everything is always connected. Be kind to yourself, Dear Mother of Your Own Making, whoever you are, wherever you are. Your fertility is a continuous practice of possibility. Every moment, every thought, every action, every ovulation, every pregnancy, every missed cycle, every loss, every birth, every labor, every dream, matters. 

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My first round of tandem nursing with the brothers, a newborn Wonder and a toddler Bloom. They are 21 months apart.

Recently I marked my 6 year anniversary of breastfeeding one or more babies daily. My oldest child just completed his sixth turn around the sun. I’ve been in a space of deep reflection, celebration, and amazement at all that has happened in my first years of motherhood. 

As I think back over all my breastfeeding labors, I see so far that nearly two-thirds of my nursing journey—almost 4 years cumulatively—has been spent as a tandem nursing mother. Tandem nursing is defined as nursing two or more children who did not share time in the womb together. I think it’s important to distinguish tandem nursing from simultaneous nursing—which I’m defining as the process of breastfeeding two children at the same time, one on each breast. Also, breastfeeding mothers of multiples share some experiences with tandem nursing moms, but they are also having a very different experience in that they are navigating nurslings who are all the same age. Some moms tandem nurse, but don’t nurse their children simultaneously. In my tandem nursing process I have nursed my children simultaneously, and also had them take turns at the breast. I’ve also tandem nursed while pregnant, tandem nursed through the night, and tandem nursed while pregnant and weaning the older nursling. 

It’s important to make distinctions about all the possibilities of our labors as breastfeeding moms because each choice we make is shaped by many unique and intersecting factors. For one, the “choice” to tandem nurse begins for most of us long before we are actually managing life with two or more little people. My tandem nursing journey evolved as the natural progression from my choice to continue breastfeeding my one-year old son while pregnant. At the time I got pregnant with my second son, my oldest was still primarily breastfeeding, having challenges adjusting to solid foods, and weaning was not at all a possibility or my desire. I was simultaneously nursing a 21-month old and a newborn hours after my second son was born. The transition from nursing one child to two children was extremely seamless, and was a major part of me being able to support my older child’s adjustment to becoming a big brother. 

Pre-tandem nursing for the second time around, breastfeeding Wonder while in labor with Jubilee. Photo by Eleanor Kaufman Khan

I’ve heard many times from other moms who weaned before getting pregnant or while pregnant that they can’t imagine tandem nursing. The assumption is that tandem nursing is much more work and stress on the body. This might be true for some moms and babies. But I found that the labor of weaning, especially weaning while pregnant, was more challenging for me. Weaning presents all sorts of unknowns, as you have to establish new rhythms, new soothing techniques, and new understandings of what foods your baby will substitute instead of your breastmilk. Weaning is an entire labor unto itself, and if you don’t feel you can navigate all that unchartered terrain while pregnant, tandem nursing might just be a much better process for you and your family to prepare for instead. 

Something for moms to keep in mind when nursing while pregnant and also tandem nursing an infant and toddler—Colostrum is a laxative for everybody! Colostrum poop in a newborn is simple and sweet. Colostrum moving through a toddler’s system—get ready for the funk! Of course everyone is different, but I noticed when my milk started changing to colostrum during second trimester my toddler went through a week or two of extremely pungent, runny, explosive diapers. Not to worry, it doesn’t last forever, and it might not happen with your toddler. But for my little folks it did. Also the funky diapers returned for the nursing toddler the first few weeks of baby brother or baby sister’s life, but as their system adjusted to the shifting landscape of my postpartum breastmilk, their poop diapers went back to normal. 

The early postpartum period is intense for every mom. One of the first challenges I remember with my early tandem nursing journey is the difficulty of physically managing a bigger, stronger, heavier toddler on my still very-raw postpartum body. Your older child is used to being on mommy a certain way, and might not understand that they can’t just jump on mommy or be so rough with her body while it’s healing. Also, depending on how old the older sibling is, they might not understand at first how to be gentle with the newborn when simultaneously nursing. When my second son was born he was definitely whacked in the head a few times by his big brother who was trying to figure out why there was all of the sudden someone else nursing beside him. 

When my daughter was born, my nursing toddler was even older—and stronger— than his brother had been when he was born. In the first few weeks of her life it was very difficult for me to manage simultaneous nursing, and I had to have another family member be with my toddler so that they could hold him or keep him busy until I could finish nursing his baby sister. I had assumed I could nurse brother and sister simultaneously like I had done for the boys, but I was physically in a lot more pain during the early days of postpartum, and I just couldn’t manage two children on me at the same time until baby sister was a few weeks old. 

One of the things I love most about tandem nursing a newborn and a toddler is that tandem nursing naturally supports a very strong milk supply in the beginning of postpartum, and an optimal flow without feeling overfull or getting engorged. The older nursling, being so well-practiced and efficient at emptying the breast, makes it easier for the newborn to learn to latch on because my breasts don’t ever get too full or too hard. Also, I haven’t leaked milk since the first months of nursing my first son, because all my other newborns have been tandem nursing and there’s generally no excess milk I have to worry about leaking through my clothes.  

A typical breastfeeding morning with Jubilee and Wonder. As a co-sleeping mama, the munchkins generally have a “preferred side,” but I do my best to make sure the youngest one especially nurses evenly on both sides. Some moms exclusively tandem nurse each child from the same breast each time.

One concern I’ve heard is that an older child will “drink all the milk” for the newborn. But our brains are so intelligent and our bodies so magical. Every time we bring baby to the breast, the brain is able to determine who is latched on from the information exchange facilitated through baby’s saliva. As long as mom and newborn are supported in being able to nurse on demand, the brain will get plenty of signals to keep making enough milk for the newborn. And when the toddler nurses the brain will understand from his or her saliva that this child is eating solid foods and is much more mature and doesn’t need the same composition of milk. Some moms who tandem nurse keep each child on their own breast exclusively. Sometimes if they pump from each breast, the milk from the breast the toddler nurses from will look radically different from the milk coming from the side the newborn nurses from. All this to say—-the toddler will not take away the newborn’s milk! There’s plenty for everyone!

I also deeply appreciate tandem nursing for the way it assists with the transitions of siblinghood. It’s a lot for the youngest child to suddenly be bumped up to big sister or big brother, and the emotional reassurance that being able to still breastfeed provides is so welcome and amazing. I know that all of my children have adjusted to becoming older siblings so well because their breastfeeding process was not interrupted or ended because of the birth of a new child.

The tandem nursing process and all of these choices are different for every mom, for every pregnancy, for every baby, for every family. Many of us don’t know how we’ll be as mothers or what we’ll do until we’re in the moment. I didn’t set out to nurse everyday for the past six years, but that’s what has made sense for me, my children and our family flow. I imagine things would have looked differently had I not been the primary caregiver for all of my children, or had I had more hands-on support with my children. But I learned early on that in addition to all the health benefits of breastfeeding for my children, breastfeeding saved me and my family time, energy, money, and resources. The more children I have and the more time I spend cultivating our breastfeeding practice, the more grateful I am that I’ve poured so much of my labors into our breastfeeding journey. In my family breastfeeding is a way of life, and tandem nursing is an essential part of what makes breastfeeding sustainable and fulfilling for all of us.

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If motherhood is slowing us down, we might find we finally have the time to do what it is we really love with this one, precious life that we get to call our own. The decelerated pace that motherhood brings is honestly a gift that most of us have been told not to open. The more we allow motherhood to take up its full space in our lives, the more access we have to the abundant, transformational, and lovely realities of being a mother.

We live in a speed-addicted, “snap-back” obsessed, do-it-for-the-selfie culture. As many of our families and communities have forgotten how to tenderly love and care for its mothers, we are often left to fend for our rights to mother slowly all by ourselves.

The pressure to go faster and faster, to grind, grind, grind right along with the machine, no matter the costs to our still bleeding bodies, to recover the totality of our shattered selves in the first, blurry weeks of postpartum so that we can get back to the race—a race designed to intentionally exclude mothers— this pressure is haunting. When left unchecked, it obstructs our receptivity to our intuition at the most critical moments of our lives.

Lurking like a pestering mob, this pervasive pressure takes up residence inside every salvaged breath when we’re supposedly having time to ourselves, but are really worrying evermore about our productivity. It robs us of the gentle beauty that is most attainable when our motherhood is not trapped inside a sprint to the imaginary finish line. It blocks us from understanding how our dreams, passions, and creativity are vitally connected to our happiness, to our survival. It keeps us convinced that motherhood itself—and not the profit-driven systems exploiting our labors at every turn—is the real problem.

The truth is, going slowly saves us most of the time. It prevents us from causing more harm, from colliding with someone or something else, from acting on inauthentic, externally-motivated impulses, from making irreversible mistakes, from tearing ourselves apart in ways that can never be mended. Take your time, is something we hear again and again as children, the value of really becoming familiar with all parts of a thing being emphasized from early on. But the immense and constantly evolving labor that is motherhood, but birthing a whole, entire human being, but raising little brilliant people with every part of your soul, but navigating uninspired, unimaginative, sterile, cold—and at times extremely hostile—spaces that are purposely inaccessible to mothers and families, but figuring all this out without adequate support systems or tangible, generational wisdom, but sustaining our children’s physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual wellness, but centering ourselves and our sanity inside of everything else we hope for our families— is supposed to just happen? Just like that?

As mothering artists, we use our art and creative practices all the time to disrupt narratives and patterns of oppression that deny our humanity. Slowing down as a mother is an act of resistance to centuries-old, systemic erasures, and a radical form of personal and communal liberation. By slowing down, we are saying that our labor, our work as mothers, is real and deserving of the time it takes us to find a peaceful rhythm within our motherhood. We are insisting that our children are worthy of whatever time, resources, and spaces it takes to honor their needs, to support their growth, to encourage their passions, to nurture their freedoms and the sensitivity to use that freedom conscientiously. We are expanding our capacity to be meaningfully engaged with the many dimensions of our hearts, our visions, our fertility, our wild imaginations, our deeply magical and creative selves.

Going slowly makes motherhood sweeter, because we have more opportunities to experience the fullness of our labors. Sure, plenty of days are loaded with dizzying chaos, and it might feel at times as if our children are growing through stages in the blink of an eye. But when we are free to shape our time, to determine the intention and application of our seconds, of our minutes, of our hours, of our days, then our moments truly become our own. It is this ability to choose what we’re doing with our moments that brings more sweetness, and loveliness, and bliss to our lives. In this way we are able to really savor motherhood, and give more mothers room to do the same.