My Fertility Sustains Me: Living in the majesty of my embodied bounty
/// multitudinous mothering entity /// A mother who moves through the world and navigates spaces while attached to or in close, physical proximity of her children. Italicized words expanded on in the Glossary.
My Fertility Sustains Me: Living in the majesty of my embodied bounty
by Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy
What sustains you?
My fertility sustains me is a core scripture of my life and a powerful light that nourishes our discoveries inside the Fertility Abundance Garden. For many years I was searching for language, authentic language, to disentangle my narrative from the disillusion that my fertility superpowers were a burden, were something I should fear, or limit, or suppress. As I came into the conscious revelation of my motherself, I was both fascinated and horrified by the dominant themes perpetuated by generational stories in my family, religious teachings in the black Baptist church where I spent a much of my formative years, and the hardened ways of a world driven by capitalist machines. I felt wholly different in my experience of my fertility, and it took me time, experimentation, movement, and journeying to find my real words, to find my true way.
My fertility sustains me means that the very thing I was conditioned to be afraid of as a girlchild is my greatest source of power, sustenance, and expansion. I can heal myself, water myself, restore myself, feed myself and my family, build my enterprises, birth my babies, serve the mamas in my village, and pour into all my creations with my fertility. It astounds me, and is also just as sadly unsurprising, that this abundant life force was once something that I was supposed to actively deny because of the “danger” of becoming a mother too soon, and the associated hardships that come from mothering alone in a society that has spent centuries, millennia, forgetting how to love its mothers and care for its children.
“I felt wholly different in my experience of my fertility, and it took me time, experimentation, movement, and journeying to find my real words, to find my true way.”
What keeps your waters fluid and regenerative?
My first reclamations of my fertility began in college. I didn’t consciously know I was doing this, but when I look back I see I did everything I could to stay soft, supple, and connected to my fertile energies. I remember my once-beloved advisor loosing her whole mind because I was late with a rough draft of my thesis. (Let the record show, I was then—and am often now—the queen of last minute paper-writing brilliance.) So I was totally unprepared for her to go off on me when the due date for the final thesis was over 6 weeks away. I remember sitting across from her as she transformed from my usually cool and collected professor into a shrieking, raging heap of fire because she felt my lateness was going to tarnish her tenure track. More baffled than terrified, I just stared at the spectacle. “But I still have time,” I kept saying in my mind.
Walking back across campus I decided right then and there that this bachelors degree would be the end of my illustrious sojourns through academia. No more applications, placement exams, internships, scholarships, pressures to be the best. No more climbing up the ladder of excellence that had been set before me ever since the first Honor Roll accolades and Principal’s List awards ceremonies were proffered as the sole way to achieve anything worthy in this life. All thoughts of grad school and any other advanced degrees disintegrated with each footfall on the wide open green lawn. My professor’s outburst shattered something, freed something. I just kept repeating over and over to myself, “I will never become that way.”
Two months later when I presented my thesis—and received High Honors— for my research, my advisor had tears in her eyes. She had really been worried all that time that I would “fail” and make her look bad. What a waste of energy, I silently mused. Still, I graciously accepted her hug of congratulations in front of my parents and the other professors on my review committee. And then I never saw or spoke to her again.
“My first reclamations of my fertility began in college. I didn’t consciously know I was doing this, but when I look back I see I did everything I could to stay soft, supple, and connected to my fertile energies.”
What brings you joy, always?
What my 21 year old self couldn’t articulate fully at the time, but that I’ve come to understand nearly 2 decades later, is that my fertility requires a liberated ecosystem to thrive. The compression and control mechanisms of certain institutions, corporations, and spaces are harmful to my existence, the very source of my livelihood, my fertility. The grind culture of hyper-capitalism, the artificial acceleration of academia, the constant messaging to sacrifice your intuition for the sake of someone else’s validation—all of this would literally suck me dry, if I surrendered my body, heart, and soul to its mandates. Much like the story of our very universe, I have been on a long-winding, beautifully chaotic, messily magical, materially unstable, heart-stretching, soul-expanding adventure to preserve the vitality and majesty of my fertility ever since I realized that my life was calling me in a different direction. True sustenance is a continuous journey, and I’m ever-evolving.
I can trace every bounty, every blessing in my now moments to this devotion of centering and living from within my fertility majesty. The stories I share, the women that gather, the babies I birth, the joy I bring, the healing I make space for, the freedom my children have, the language I create, the innovation I nurture, the clients I attract, the businesses I tend to, the characters I dream up, the writings that flow from my fingers, the dances that spin my body through space, the communions, and prayers, and visions that come more frequently these days, the sermons emerging—all of this is sourced and sustained by my radiant, holy, abundant fertility. It is why I say Yes to my fertility, always. It is why I know what I know. It it is how I navigate the fluctuations, the unknowns, the miracles, the heartaches, the surprises.
My fertility sustains me is my truth, wholly and abundantly so. What is your truth? What keeps your way open and bright, your waters fluid and regenerative? What nourishes you, and fortifies you when you’re moving through difficult and uncertain times? What brings you joy, always? Start there, and discover your blissful, infinite, embodied bounty.
“Much like the story of our very universe, I have been on a long-winding, beautifully chaotic, messily magical, materially unstable, heart-stretching, soul-expanding adventure to preserve the vitality and majesty of my fertility ever since I realized that my life was calling me in a different direction. True sustenance is a continuous journey, and I’m ever-evolving.”
