This love called life
Spin
Inside the Creation Stories of Dancing Mother
This love called life
by Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy
Today is my birthday. I hugged my mother and kissed her cheek and thanked her for birthing me. She surprised us this morning with gourmet donuts, and the munchkins were thrilled. My mother said that since I hadn’t technically been born until later in the morning, I couldn’t yet enjoy the donuts. She brought us two dozen and she was initially going to leave them all with us. But then she picked out one for herself when I reminded her that my birthday is also her birthgiving day celebration too: the birth of her second child, the blessing of her first daughter.
Just before my mother arrived the munchkins and I were in our garden checking on the soil of our newly planted turnip seeds, and clearing the area around our mystery squash whose prickly, yellow-green stems stretch gloriously every day, its wide, velvety leaves making more and more shade for the young buds below. With the baby tied on my back, I tugged at weeds and got moist dirt under my nails. The morning sun was bright and warming the slight coolness in the air, a sure sign that fall is soon come.
We talked about how slowly things grow, how change isn’t always obvious from day to day, but that something alive is always in motion. We noticed little details on our plants, things you can only see if you’re really looking. We asked questions about what might be happening under the ground, in the deep, dark places that are invisible to us, where an ancient and intelligent pressure builds causing seeds to finally, and courageously, burst forth.
Another turn around the sun, I am grateful. A dear friend I grew up with became an ancestor this year. She was the age I am now. Everything in my field feels precious and immediate. Growing older, further, longer, wider—it is a mighty labor, this love called life. Right now I am being with all the life that so much loving has brought me. The messy, delicate and intense tangles of making a life with the co-creator, and the raucous laughter that spontaneously erupts on really hard days when we collaboratively remember that other time everything was falling apart and we survived. The dizzying, constant and widely varying needs of five people who were all somehow born of my one body. The tender, bold dreams I have been so diligently cultivating that are ready to be known beyond my journals, and outside of epic voice notes. This is how this whole swirl of my life feels right now: full and dense, buzzing and magical.
I am breathing and dancing and aging, but in a sweet, unhurried flow. My growth is mostly soft and happening in quiet ways. I am a little over a year from birthing my 5th earthside baby, I am firmly rooted in this land called “early 40s,” and the grays gradually growing in place of the black hair on my recently shaved head sparkle in the light. My children enjoy counting and pointing them out to me whenever they can. When I dance for a long time to music I love, or to the delicious silence in the black of night, I feel the memories in my muscles and bones differently the next day. I cannot stay up all night inside my creations and be alert for mommy labors and the wild circus of my day with the munchkins—though I set these fabulous intentions for the midnight hours at least once a week. With each breath, I witness the shifts. I embrace (for the most part) the new rhythms of my now. It is heavy work, it is holy work.
As the days leading up to my birthday went by, there wasn’t any grand anticipation or big adventure I was looking forward to. In my private thoughts I came back to the same, simple wish often, “I want peace.” I want enough food in the house so no one is asking me for snacks. I want to lay down when the baby sleeps. I want everyone to get along, to be kind, to be helpful. I want to feel like the squeeze we’ve been navigating for many years will loosen and soften a bit, and more miracles will slip through in the spaces created by our dreams, our prayers, our gratitudes. I want to take a big leap and invite everyone to my show, MOTHER BRINGS HERSELF BACK TO LIFE. I want to commune with the mothers and my starseeds, and dance with my children and myself. I want to find a pretty dress at the thrift store that is super comfortable, that I can nurse in while wearing the baby, and that has deep mama-pockets for keys, my phone, and the aforementioned snacks.
When my mother was leaving to go on about her day, she brought us, one by one—me and all of the munchkins—into her heart and gave us each a kiss. “Wow,” she beamed and told my children, “6 people came from my labor of giving birth all those years ago!” Every birthday is a chance to marvel at the majesties of creation. It is a time to center the multitude of moments that came together to make me—the young hearts that fell in and out of love, the daring moves that took people on boats and planes and trains, the mysteries that left wide, gaping holes in the story, silent, black holes have since inspired me to imagine the truths for myself. It’s all mine, after all. This is the life I have and I am celebrating the gift that is me. I am curious, more now than ever before. I am open to what more there is, to where I grow from here.
