I was going to move on to the book I referred to at the end of the last post, Healing the Shame That Binds You by John Bradshaw, because I am SO EXCITED to look closer at my shame. (Yes, that statement holds the bite of sarcasm. I hate looking at my shame.) However, I ended up standing on the threshold of one of the chapter "doors" of Sue Monk Kidd's book Traveling with Pomegranates. I will come back to the shame thing.
Sue hones in on the loss, and the importance of grieving this loss, that comes along with turning 50, entering menopause, letting go of your femininity as you have known it, and releasing the relationship you have had with your daughter now that she is an adult, so that it can be what it is. While I am not grieving the loss of a change in relationship with a daughter, I am grieving the loss of not having a daughter and of reaching the age of sealing the "womb" to that possibility. By sealing the womb, I mean the adoption womb, as well as the literal uterine womb. This is also about letting go of the shame and self-contempt I have carried for not having had a child. (Hello John Bradshaw, your time is coming!!!)
Letting go of the shame and loss of not having a child is just one of the many things I need to grieve over. I have pushed this grief away to the detriment of my health. As I stand in Sue's chapter five doorway, I cling to her words about the significance of grief.
"Of course, I should let myself grieve. To deny the grief is to squander a
transforming and radiant possibility. Everything in me knows this."
I am just beginning to know this. I read on, writing my process down in my journal as I go. Sue voices my questions as I grieve the losses of my literal dormant womb....
"What now? What will be born in me now?"
And then she welcomes me over the threshold of the doorway I stand in, beckoning me to birth and create out of my innate experience. Not her's. Not anyone else's. This is the best of birthing.
"The pomegranate is the myth symbolizes both death and life. When Persephone
ate the seeds Hades gave her in the underworld, she ensured her return to it,
initiating what impresses me now as an astonishing process: dying, and being
reborn. The secret of fertility.
Maybe it is a feminine thing, I don't know---but whenever I've managed to
find new consciousness and renewals of my work, my relationships, and myself,
it has been by going down into what seemed like a holy dark. It has come
through a deep metabolizing of my experience and moments of metaphoric dying.
The old cycle: life, death, rebirth."
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