The Mother Well: Stirring the Inner Waters
from burned out and numb to nourished and alive
Mothers are heroic.
Although our work is catastrophically undervalued, we do about 2/3s of the world’s work. Much of it is invisible to those around us, unpaid, and unending. And as a population, we hold very little wealth for our efforts.
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Mothers are constantly holding, tending, planning, worrying, looking forward and backward at the same time— time-bending, juggling, expanding, and contracting to meet the needs of those around us, especially our children.
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This leads to burnout. And, we also hold all of the ancestral burnout of our mothers and grandmothers, in our DNA, in our bodies.
Burnout leads to both the act of numbing and the feeling of numbness.
Numbness is defined as a lack of sensation. Meaning we cannot feel touch or movement in the same ways as we usually are able.
Numbness is primarily caused by damage to the nerves— those messengers of sensation.
Numbness is usually perceived as a physical occurrence. Yet, we also experience emotional or psychic numbness, often also a result of trauma, and resulting in a parallel yet different collapse of the nervous system.
These are real, valid, and common experiences of mothers in our culture.