We've Normalized Misery
I'd like you to fail the assignment our culture gives mothers.
I was once really good at lying to myself. I was eerily gifted at using my cognition – my left brain, my logical reasoning – to override the signals from my soul.
Until I collapsed. Crashed. Until the entire “picture perfect” life I had built at the ripe age of 26 came crashing down around me.
It didn’t really crash. It was incinerated by the inferno of my intuition.
That was a decade ago. And ever since, I can’t wear a mask. I can’t exist out of coherence.
I’ve realized that I never could, even when I thought I had sufficiently ignored the stirrings of my heart, my body listened.
I was fraught with “mystery” autoimmune illnesses, strange symptoms that evaded the expertise of functional medicine doctors and naturopaths but somehow made perfect sense to psychics and seers.
I was born to seek truth. Not for the satisfaction of my ego, but for the collective.
I was the kid who questioned the status quo, the “rules” in school that landed as dehumanizing and oppressive (like not being able to go to the bathroom when you had to pee just because the teacher wanted to abuse their power).
I was born allergic to bullshit, a few of my friends like to say. And I was. Even my own.
After the roaring fire that burned my carefully crafted life down in my late 20s, I made a vow to myself. I promised that if I ever felt the creeping sensation of incoherence crawl into my consciousness, I’d stop.
I’d sit still. I’d listen. And then I’d act accordingly, in alignment with the path in service of my soul’s deepest desires. Even if it was uncomfortable. Even if it meant thrusting myself into the abyss trusting that somehow I’d be caught by loving arms.
Four years later I found myself on the edge of incoherence, two months postpartum with my first baby. My girl. My sweet baby girl.
I was emerging from maternity leave working for a global nonprofit – the career I’d spent ten years in service of – and I was wilting.
Like the orchid I am, I tried to adjust my soil. More inputs, better sunlight. Fresher water.
But none of it mattered. Because I was troubleshooting with my head instead of my heart.
“Ah, this is just a transitionary time” virtually every single human in my life said with equal parts patronizing preaching and in recognition of their former selves.
“It’ll hurt, but you’ll get used to being away from her eventually” a coworker offered on a conference call.
I felt my stomach turn. Their pain was buried in platitudes.
Except I never “got used” to being separate from the tiny, vulnerable mammal that just spent nearly ten months inside of my body.
I got enraged, instead. A fury fueled by injustice coursed through my body like a wildfire ripping through the brush.
And I let it burn. I let it do what wildfires do.
They cleanse. They clarify.
When the smoke settled, I could see the message my heart was screaming, previously drowned out by the narrative nagging me about “the safe path” and “my 401K”.
We’ve normalized misery.
The realization hit me like a Mack truck.
It was as though every new mother I encountered had accepted misery as an inevitable part of motherhood.
I’m not talking about the type of misery that comes from a tight passage, a portal, a transformation, but the type of misery that leaves stickiness in your soul. Density.
The type that drags you down so far into the depths of despair that you begin to wonder what you’re doing here and why.
You look around — at the perfection of your new baby, at the miracle of existence, at their impossibly small fingers holding your own — and you fail to compute the assignment given from our culture:
Don’t get too attached.
Maybe you try on the advice alongside your new postpartum jeans. Maybe you try to shrink, to shrivel, to fit in.
But you can’t. Because you weren’t designed to get back, bounce back, and live as though you didn’t just become a mother. As though you didn’t just have a baby.
So your heart starts hurting. But no one sees the ache. Assuming you’re too soft, too weak, “too attached” you ignore the pain in your chest.
Until maybe you can’t anymore.
Until the fear of stagnation outweighs the promise of safety. Of security. The illusion of control, of certainty.
Until one morning, drenched in sunlight, snuggled in bed with your baby, you arrive at the same realization I once did:
We’ve normalized misery.
And then, if you’re anything like me, you climb out of your bed and into an entirely new consciousness. It is as though you can finally see.
You can see through the lens of your heart.
You can feel truth in your body. Coherence in your soul.
And once you feel truth, there’s no going back.
Truth doesn’t let you cling, climb, crawl into a cave of dissonance or ignorance.
It requires that you open. That you act in accordance.
So you do.
You tell your boss you won’t be working from the office anymore.
You reduce your hours. You take out a loan.
You start a side hustle until you can stay home and be with your babies exactly as much as you desire.
You don’t “get used” to separation. Or misery.
You get used to connection. To yourself and to your baby.
Connection to all of life, to the Great Mystery, to the magic, the possibility, the pulse of electricity running through all that is.
You get supercharged.
Alive.
You start actually living. In alignment. From your heart, not your head.
Misery is normalized because centuries of conquest and patriarchal capitalism have disconnected us from our hearts, convincing us that our worth — the quality of our life, our happiness — is predicated on our productivity, on performance, when it’s actually predicated on our coherence.
On our ability to sit with discomfort, change, thresholds, and initiations and move in the direction of love. In the direction of our heart.
You aren’t asking for too much by desiring to be with your baby. By daring to let motherhood change you.
The story of suffering isn’t yours to share. It doesn’t belong to you. It never did.
Let the story die, alongside the status quo. Alongside the parts of you trying to protect you, but actually keeping you stuck.
Let the fire burn.
You’ll be so glad you did.
P.S. Want to go further? The Integrative Infant Sleep Practitioner Program. Sacred Sleep. Cuddle Crew. Three doorways for you to walk through with me, all available here. So much love to you all. Here’s to your rising.