This Is A Sanctuary For Mothers
Hello Radiant One! Welcome to Seed & Spark: Journal of the Fertility Abundance Garden. Thank you for being here and witnessing our labors to share our sacred stories. Our stories are our wealth and in the Garden we are discovering the bounty of our stories and how to apply that wealth to the cultivation of our abundance. The Fertility Abundance Garden is a congregation for creators, a sanctuary for mothers, and a dreamscape for sacred storytellers. To learn more about the Garden or to join as a creator, please visit the Fertility Abundance Garden Welcome Center. If someone forwarded this post to you and you want to receive your own, subscribe to Seed & Spark and receive the Fertile Friday love note every week that highlights new shares in the journal. So much life, labor, and love goes into creating and sustaining the Garden and everything we share. The Garden is sustained by the kindness and generosity of creators and supporters. If any part of our magical world touches your heart and nourishes your being as a creator, please do pour into our Giving Well or join a Sustainability Circle today. If you are already contributing to our bounty, THANK YOU FOR THE LOVE!
This is a sanctuary for mothers
Mattering and visibilizing* the long labors of mothers, seen and unseen
Waiting for nap time, Multitudinous self portrait, Fall 2018 | As a full presence mother, I am with my children all the time. This means my body is often attached/nourishing/moving in tandem with other bodies. This continuous proximity of my body to my children’s bodies creates a multitudinous—”including a multitude of individuals”—reality through which I see myself and experience my own body.
By mother mother binahkaye joy
The Fertility Abundance Garden is a sanctuary for mothers. I often share with creators that I created the Garden because when I was an invisible mother, and very much needed such a place, I didn’t have a Garden. In the years before the world celebrated me as a visible mother—a baby in my belly, at my breast, in my arms, at my feet—I labored painfully and silently, grieving successive protostar births alone with no one close to me to be excited about or mourn the lives that could have been, with no one to witness my courage in trying again and again to bring a baby into the world.
In those long and lonely winters of the heart, I yearned for a soft, gentle space to be seen as a mother. More than a decade before I would have the language, my innermost dreams were seeding the magical realm that would one day be the Fertility Abundance Garden. At that point in my evolution I hadn’t yet accessed the space to dream out loud. I held it all inside, partly out of fear that sharing my precious thing would bring more shame and encounters of erasure. But also because the dream of such a place was my deeply longed for warmth, my internal sanctuary of visibility. The dream of the Garden was the one space in my life where I was seen, where I could practice seeing myself as mother.
* Language Reimagined, see definitions for mattering + visibilizing below
Have you recently or previously joined the Garden?
Welcome home, Beautiful Creator! If you feel the Yes in your heart and you’re ready to experience more engagement in the Garden, connect with other amazing creators, attend our live gatherings, and access the magic of the Creators Portal, please visit the Sanctuary to complete the process for joining the Creators Circle. In the Sanctuary you can confirm or reconfirm conscious participation. If you are joining the Garden for the first time, visit the Fertility Abundance Garden Welcome Center to begin your journey. Thank you for being here!
Mother Zora Neale Hurston says “there are years that ask questions, and years that answer.” Well my asking years were more like begging years. I was pleading with someone, anyone, to see me. I prayed to all the gods I knew for confirmation that I wasn’t crazy for wanting, needing to be a mother. I heard nothing back, felt nothing. I surrendered my still bleeding body to the rough saltwaters of Ft. Lauderdale where I went through the gestures of healing myself. My bare feet on the ground, I implored the tiny patch of earth behind my mother’s house, where I buried the elemental remnants of my once forming baby, to give me a glimpse of comfort.
I laid very still on the examination table, listening in vain for a reassurance that never came from the kind lab technician probing my interiors. I wished for the eager, young resident at the hospital ordering all the tests to deliver me from my anguish, but 8 hours and a thousand uninsured dollars later they still couldn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know before I had walked into the ER.
On a packed metro car, I sobbed all the way home during the rush hour commute, bizarrely angered that I’d had the good sense to bring pads—just in case (just in case this spotting increases…)— with me to a lunch meeting. I had to present my movement facilitation program for healing, of all things, for a workshop series. Mercifully tucked into the window seat, I gripped the takeout bag with the mahi mahi burger leftovers that I hadn’t even tasted, retreating as best I could behind the veil of my tears.
I once beat the shit out of tree trunk that had done nothing to me, because I was tired of crying, and the tree was there, so sturdy and strong. It looked like it could hold the pain on my behalf. With each thwack of the stick I knew it wasn’t helping me feel any better, but being an invisible mother had taught me that there are days when pretending is the softest way through a hard time. The illusion of relief is better than nothing at all, right?
Do you or a mama you love have a protostar birth story?
In January 2022 the Protostar Birth Story Creation Lab opens. Learn more and request an invitation to the Lab here.
When I ran away to Trinidad I folded myself into the people who welcomed me with loving arms. I was escaping what seemed like the curse of America, of Washington, DC in particular where all my babies had yet been unborn. The sun, the trees, the air, the mangoes, the sea, the 2,200 miles between me and a relationship that was dead long before the three years it took to end it— all of this aided in the restoration of my fertility. Every moment of newness, and exploration, and breath brought me back to my motherself and dreams to be a mother.
I packed light but brought all my secrets with me to Trinidad. I secretly longed for someone to witness me in my grieving and recovering, but was still too afraid to ask for what I needed. No one questioned me about why else I was there. They were gracious in that way. They left me to the dance—which was the overstory of why I was there. And the dance left me to my healing. I was and still am so grateful for their gentle love. I didn’t even know my way into the words back then anyway.
The weight of what I once called loss was compounded by the violence of invisibility. No one even knows I’m a mother. It deeply saddened and perplexed me the the people around me could not understand what was so real to me.
Dance and writing were my primary creative spaces in those times, and they still are now. I created community within myself by dancing through my labors, allowing my unordered movements to witness the transformations of my early birthing and post-birthing inner landscape, life-altering changes that were imperceptible to others. How can you give birth and nobody see you? This was the question that would haunt me, and inspire me, for years to come.
When I felt I did have words to capture my story I poured them onto the open, unlined, unassuming pages of my journals. I also discovered a few nearly-autobiographical characters in short stories that gave me space to matter the tangled pieces of my invisible mother labors. I would place the protagonist inside her own protostar birth, but craft an alternate narrative of support for the mother as an experiment in my own healing. I would imagine her being loved instead, wondering longingly, daringly, if being witnessed in your griefs, in your hopes, made the journey of being and becoming a mother softer in any way.
“...the dream of such a place was my deeply longed for warmth, my internal sanctuary of visibility. The dream of the Garden was the one space in my life where I was seen, where I could see myself as a mother.”
Desperation, despair, grief, heartache, anger and sorrow—these are powerful forces that bring us into urgent integration with our majesty as creators. If we are ready, if we are listening, if we stay with the truth of what we’re feeling, our spirit will reveal what we have sensed within, but that we have perhaps been too scared, too paralyzed, too unmattered to call forth.
For me, those years of asking to be seen as a mother delivered me into a life’s work of creating portals of visibility for myself and other mothers. It took me by surprise that visible motherhood was still fraught with moments of extreme invisibility, but I didn’t have to start over as a new mommy with learning how to see myself. My seasons as an invisible mother rooted my motherself to the continuous responsibility of affirming myself to myself. It also gave me the sensitivity, insights, and confidence in my practice to continue growing and developing spaces for all mothers to be seen. This is how the Garden came to be.
“I would imagine her being loved instead, wondering longingly, daringly, if being witnessed in your griefs, in your hopes, made the journey of being and becoming a mother softer in any way.”
In the Garden we consciously practice seeing each creator for who she says she is. We lovingly witness the mothers, and the women who labor as mothers, who may or may not be recognized or honored as such in the outside world. We know that before we can communicate our sacred stories to anyone, we have to first be able to admit them to ourselves. But how do you recover a way into your authentic story of who you are after trauma, erasure, or the silencing of your experiences? In the Garden we take great care to support creators who are feeling into the reclamation of their voices, their bodies, their lives. Mothers, who give so much of their life energies over to the sustenance of others, are at the center of this reclamation labor. When all the mothers are cared for, then the world can begin to feel what peace is.
In my years navigating as an invisible mother and discovering how to become my own sacred witness for my dreams, I learned how healing and essential it was to hold loving space for mothers who are laboring intensely through the pre-visibility seasons of motherhood. The Garden is a radical experiment in disrupting systems of invisibility and choosing to see mothers and their labors as holy. We boldly re/direct our heart-centered presence towards loving mothers well. In devoting ourselves to ourselves, we create expansive communities of possibility where mothers can always be seen, held, nourished, and celebrated.
This sanctuary is for mothers who feel the Yes in their heart. If you or a mother you love is seeking a space where mothers are cherished and loved, the Garden is a heart pulsing for humanity’s remembrance of itself, is a womb holding sacred space for humanity’s recreation of itself. We are here laboring through our own complicated origin stories, surrendering to our messy becomings, and creating more room in the world for us to be as we feel to be. In the Garden there is more light for mothers to see themselves, more oxygen for mothers to breathe in the now of themselves, more space in the circle for mothers who are finding their way home to this sistership, to this love.
“The Garden is a radical experiment in disrupting systems of invisibility and choosing to see mothers and their labors as holy. We boldly re/direct our heart-centered presence towards loving mothers well. In devoting ourselves to ourselves, we create expansive communities of possibility where mothers can always be seen, held, nourished, and celebrated. ”
who lovingly witnesses your sacred labors?
Ask a question + share your story with us. The Fertility Abundance Garden is a congregation for creators, a sanctuary for mothers, a dreamscape for sacred storytellers. To learn more and to join the Garden, visit the Fertility Abundance Garden Welcome Center.
Are you feeling inspired to share the love?
Thank you for witnessing our sacred labors in the Garden. If any part of this love nourished your being as a creator, please pour into our Giving Well. If there is someone you think would appreciate communing with this post or other shares inside Seed & Spark, please share and post this link with your lovelies and wherever else your spirit moves you. Thank you for being here!
