Death & Rebirth: The Quiet Process of Becoming Someone New

A season is ending. My life is shifting. And for the first time in a long time, I’m letting myself breathe.

I am in the process of bringing my final breastfeeding journey to completion.  

I am in the process of bringing many of my mentoring partnerships to completion. 

I am in the process of settling my smallest baby into a family daycare and having 3 days to be in my life without children for 4-5 hours - for the first time in 6 years. 

I am in the process of completely changing the way I relate to health, stress and genuine wellness (as opposed to ticking ‘wellness’ boxes).  

I am in the process of changing the way I earn money and offer my work.  

I am in the process of finding my place in the world without some core people in it that helped me feel like I knew where and how I existed.

Everything ends, my sweet flowers of Where The Wilde Things Are.  Everything.  Or at least, the present iteration of everything - even that which is permanent morphs and changes and evolves.  

I’m aware that this sounds a touch fatalistic, but I have spent 12 months watching life around me (and within me) deteriorate and die.  I have watched the leaves on the branches of my life turn brown, shrivel up and drop to the floor of the earth, only to be crunched beneath my shoes.  I have watched the tiniest shoots of new life emerge from branches, trying to coax enough nourishment and vitality forward to bloom into fully formed life, but falling short again and again and again.  

Life is confronting like this - to see all that has served as a raft be washed down the river with a huge swell - because here I am treading, treading, treading.  I am well versed by now, in the process of waiting out the deterioration, of patiently allowing life to reorder, of letting myself let go and reach for the known as well as the unfamiliar.  It’s not new, this process - it is the devil I know.  

I’ve never quite arrived at the place in my life where I have realised that my baby making years are behind me.  I have held onto the nurturance that comes with breastfeeding as the reminder that I am not yet done here.  Though now that it has started to bring itself to completion, I am confronted with the very real awareness that this season is bringing itself to completion too.  It is here, in fact.  I am no longer a breastfeeding mother, I am no longer the only person who can put my youngest daughter down to sleep, I am no longer dictated by sleep schedules and I no longer work in inconceivably small pockets of time - who am I without these old and ill-fitting truths adorning my identity?  Who am I without being at the end of my own very long to-do list?  Who do I become now that I can have my needs met?  

The last year of my life has been a series of inconvenient pain, unexpected grief and exhausting commitments that I truly haven’t had time for.  I have tucked my pain neatly into the archives of my brain, filed under “things to deal with later”.  And Later has arrived.  Later is now and Later isn’t waiting anymore.  It has made itself known in no uncertain terms and for the first time in a year, I am listening - I have to listen. 

The grief of my passed friend and Uncle have come rapping at the door - process me, feel me, grieve me, hear me.  And so I must. I am.  The necessity and sadness of letting this season go have clawed at me - it’s not working. Stop avoiding me.  Stop looking the other way.  Face me!  The suppression of my needs and the constant delay of having them met has compounded and sucked harder and stronger on my reserves, leeching vitality from my already-dry well.  

The broken sleep, the solo parenting, the inadequate nourishment, the loss and grief, the identities that have crunched beneath my feet, the inability to work more than 6-7 hours a week with mounting financial pressure and a family of 5 to feed and clothe and nurture - hi.  Here we are.  No longer able to avoid the toll it has left on me.  We can pay now or we can pay later, but we will always pay the toll. 

For the 7th month in a row, I have woken with an overwhelming sense of dread.  An unfamiliar feeling that has sat on the fringe of my understanding, barely relatable and almost intangibly distant from my inherently optimistic and positive nature.  And yet, here it was, waiting for me on the other side of my eyelids, like a crotchety old teacher handing me my bleak and bleaker assignments for the day.  The parts of my day that I typically have looked forward to were overshadowed by jobs and tasks and responsibilities - these were my walls, and they were caving in.  My usual optimism was spliced right through the centre with dread and foreboding, because each day was the same; too big for my bandwidth.  I’ve been aware of my thoughts more than ever, which I assumed would mean that I was completely in control of how I met them.

I am not my thoughts.

This is not reality. 

This is tiredness talking. 

I get to choose how I do this.  

I can do hard things. 

I am so lucky. 

My family is amazing. 

I have so much to get up for.

Only to be interrupted like a scratch on the turntables by a reality that had me feeling the opposite. I started to hyper fixate on the lunchboxes I had to make, the food I needed to cook, the outfits I needed to get onto my children somehow, the competing needs of impatient tugs at my legs and 6-year-old discussions about finding our place in the world when we desperately want to belong.  Behind my awake but closed eyelids, I watched my day play out like a movie; my phone would flash non-stop as client messages started rolling through, my ears would be ringing from three little girls cartwheeling and handstanding through my kitchen, the to-do list was lengthened every day and tasks were seldom, if ever, ticked off.  My emails were overflowing, my DMs were basically ignored, and my text messages were filled with a bunch of well meaning “reminders” and question marks for messages I hadn’t yet responded to.  I would imagine the school pick up, the snack plates, the dinner prep, the dinner clean up, the bedtime routine and the 17 minutes that were left for me at the end of the day that I was too tired to participate in.  And I hadn’t even opened my eyes yet.  

The depressive emotions and borderline apathy that accompanied my morning coffee was foreign.  It felt so unfamiliar and separate to me that it felt more like a companion than a part of me - something that sat next to me, rather than within me.  It is not to say that I didn’t look at my children with overwhelming love, or that I didn’t enjoy many aspects of life, or that some of my relationships didn’t deepen and expand beyond measure, it is simply that I haven’t had the bandwidth to drink it in.  I haven’t had the internal resources to drink in the beauty, and let it quench my thirsty soul.  

Where I have usually run to work and creativity as my saviour in these times, I haven’t had the space to do so. 

Where I have usually run to solitude, I have had children in tow. 

Where I have usually run to support, I have felt lost in where that actually is. 

All that was left was to face it and sit in it.  

I have spent much of the last year terrified of myself.  Terrified of the dark places my mind can go.  Terrified of the way I disconnect from my people when life is hard, rather than reaching out.  Terrified of the way I can imagine events that haven’t happened yet and feel overwhelming emotions about them.  Terrified of the contrast that can be felt in a day (or an hour).  Terrified that I - me! - can feel this way.  

Alas, I do.  Or at least, I did.  

I have felt the burden of knowing that I have not been meeting the needs of my twin girls because I am constantly (and willingly) required to feed and nurture my youngest babe.  So even when my husband is available, it is not him they want.  It is me.  I am their mother, and it is me they most want to feel nurturing from right now.  I have carried my heavy body and my tired eyes everywhere this past year, and have stumbled into moments of vitality, but it hasn’t stuck.  We drove past our local wildlife sanctuary last week, and for the 20th consecutive week in a row, they pleaded for me to take them.  “Please mum.  I just want to spend the day with you”, they begged.  

It wasn’t what they said, it was what they didn’t say.  They didn’t say that they’ve had enough of sacrificing their needs, or that missing me constantly was having a huge impact, or that all they wanted was a back rub and a hair tickle before bed, or that they wanted 10 minutes to tell me about the crab they found at school, but it’s what they meant, and it’s what I heard.  But children don’t always say “I miss you” - they lash out, break down, explode, melt down - just like I do when my safe haven is occupied.  Just like I have been doing when all of life has felt too much for me to handle.

It was this moment that served as the impetus to wean my darling girl off breastfeeding, and allow myself to receive support not only emotionally, but in the practical everyday care of my family, so that I could give my big girls what they have been craving for almost 2 years (and therefore soothing my swollen mama heart, too).  It is not as simple as the process of feeding becoming “inconvenient” or “a bit frustrating”, it is the fact that with the rising needs of my daughters, mine don’t stop existing either.  We had a plethora of needs as a family and so few of them were being met.  Beyond the zoomed in reality of my almost-2-year-old loving the boob, there are two other children who miss me, and there are the broader ramifications on my mental health and general vitality that have been the cost I have paid for not being able to have support with the raising, nurturing and caring for my girls for well over two years.  

This decision to wean can sound kind of inconsequential to those that aren’t in this season, or haven’t felt the ache in their chest that comes with ending this chapter of growing and feeding their children - I am aware.  And it is not just the very uncomfortable process of weaning the love of your life off something that provides so much connection, nourishment and bonding that is the major challenge here (though, of course, it is a challenge).  It is that my entire life has been wrapped around this action for 2 years and I have no idea how to exist when we are not yoked.  And, most importantly, I take my final step out of maidenhood by closing the doors on this era of making and nourishing babies, and that feels like a world I don’t even understand.  What lives beyond the threshold?

It is for all these reasons that I also decided to enrol Luka in a family daycare.  I made this choice because not choosing myself has delivered me to the dark and cold altar of dread, and this martyrdom is fuel to my apathetic fire.  My time solely at home with babies has come to an end and I haven’t thought about arriving at this moment since I first got pregnant 7 years ago - what happens now?  One entire 7-year cycle of seeing and relating to life from within the gooey centre of motherhood - so who do I become when I am alone with no one’s needs to consider other than my own?  What do I pour myself into?  

Everything ends.  It feels impossible to remember this when we’re caught in the thick of unyielding and difficult times.  It is hard to remember that change is the only guarantee and that the pendulum always swings again.  I have reminded myself of this over the last year - ride it out, ride it out, ride it out.  There was a part of me that knew that everything would change and I would breathe again, but there was a more dominant part of me that was acutely aware of all the ways I was drowning in my life, too.  ‘Would the pendulum swing again?  Maybe it won’t this time’, I’d think.  

But it always does.  

Alongside responsibility, resilience, patience, and creative solutions and decisions, life changes and things end.  Everything ends. At the very least, life as we know it evolves.  

Times of transition arrive at everyone’s doorstep.  I’m hesitant to call them “death and rebirth” cycles (although they definitely fucking feel like it) because, ultimately, they are simply the inevitable ebbs and flows of life as a human.  Things that work now, won’t work forever.  This knowing has been my solace for the last 12 months, because I have walked through life with a metaphorical blindfold on, consciously aware that part of me desperately wanted to run straight back into the arms of what has worked previously and revive it, but the wiser part of me knew I needed to bring the kindling and set it alight, and see what new life emerged from the rubble.  

I was speaking to a close friend of mine about this time of transition and the feelings of apathy and dread that have served as my side-kicks lately, and she replied,  “You will not be able to fathom how you have managed so much for so long when you get space”.  My eyes welled with tears for the truth in her words that struck me right in the gut, and they were the buds of new life that sprung from the remains of the past. 

Everything ends. 

Lives are cut short, half lived or rinsed for all their nectar. 

Relationships change and some don’t make it, and some get better. 

Friendships fade, grow, deepen or abruptly end. 

Seasons change before we even realise we need to grieve their ending, and new ones begin that we didn’t see coming. 

Hardships come to completion and new beginnings emerge from their remains. 

High flying chapters eventually fade out and our next humbling human assignment begins.  

Life changes in the blink of an eye without warning, and this is the human experience.  Over the last year of my life, I’ve watched many of the people around me grow, and win, and exhale deeply, and with deep humility for my own vastly different experience, I’ve celebrated them.  I’ve also held frustration, impatience and envy, as my life and accompanying identity fell from my body like petals on a wilting flower.  There is nothing left, I thought.  It’s all ending.

Which begs the question; What is beginning in its place?

As the final pieces fall away from life as I know it, I’ve been gathering anticipation, enthusiasm, decisiveness and sharp perception for my next cycle - a keen sign that the pendulum will, indeed, swing again …. soon.  As the scales start to tip and the dread eases in favour of anticipation, I’m eager to encourage the mounting weight on the scales, so I’m seeking: 

What else needs to die? 

What is stagnant? 

What is overgrown? 

What doesn’t work? 

What needs encouragement to end? 

And, what can I breathe life into? 

What needs encouragement to begin? 

What can I take from my apathy and use as intel?

What has the last 12 months revealed to me?

It has been too long since I chose myself.  It has been too long since I have felt the regulation of quality time alone.  It has been too long since I have felt a harmony between workload and time available to complete it.  It has been too long since I have connected with my husband in a way that deepens a marriage.  It has been too long. 

It is from these reflections that I’ve made choices that support bringing this cycle to completion:

I started working with a nutritionist to address some core hormonal imbalances that are affecting my moods and emotions (and skin and energy levels).

I have made tough yet necessary decisions to wean my littlest daughter and start her in family daycare. 

I am taking a hiatus on 1:1 mentoring, outside of just 4 core clients.

I have hired a cleaner again.

I have divested energy from relationships that don’t feed me, and invested in ones that feel like home. 

I have created a schedule with days that are wide open for writing, movement, replenishment and connection - the world is my oyster. 

And, beautifully, wonderfully, magnificently, dread is dissolving from the other side of my eyelids. 

Coming back to life, 

Brit x