The Transformative Journey of Motherhood: From Fighting to Loving
As I have shared in previous posts, motherhood completely changed my priorities and perhaps even my values. I went from being a super driven (probably Type A) overachiever, who thrived in mostly male-dominated fields, and took pride in being strong and competitive... to being a nurturing mother who wants to spread love throughout the world. Don’t get me wrong, I have always wanted to "do good," help others, and contribute to making the world a better place. But my way to go about it was different. I wanted to "fight" for a better world, for example, and now I want to infuse the world with love to make it better.
It happened slowly, but a few years ago I shocked myself when, sitting around the Christmas tree, I thought to myself, "If I could make one wish this Christmas, if I could ask for one gift for my daughter, it would be love."
In the past, I would have chosen strength. I would have asked for my daughter to be brave and strong.
Yet at that time, I found myself thinking, "Who cares whether she’s strong or not. Instead, I want her to know how to love and to be loved unconditionally throughout her life."
It sounds cheesy, I know. If I had heard myself talking like this six years ago, I would have probably rolled my eyes and argued that being strong is important, that fighting is important to achieve justice, a better world, or even our survival as a species. And perhaps it is, but so is loving. I think there is too much fighting in the world already, and I think more love is needed. Moreover, fighting now seems to me like using band-aids, not really addressing the root cause of the wound.
My hypothesis is that all this fighting is rooted in fear. Us human beings live in constant fear of most everything. For example, we are afraid of things that are new or different, so we may end up putting up walls and hurting others to "protect" ourselves. We are afraid of not being enough, so we may try to change ourselves or to make others feel smaller so that we don’t feel less than them. We are afraid of not having enough, so we consume much more than we need; this overconsumption can lead to all sorts of problems, including climate change and environmental depletion. We are afraid of missing out on things, so we end up thinking anxiously about the past or the future instead of enjoying the present. This all happens both at an individual level and at a collective level (if we think about wars, for example, they are driven by the collective fear of not having or not being enough).
When I became a mother and this amazingly nurturing side of me, which I didn’t know existed, emerged, I embarked on a journey of self-discovery. I realized many of my efforts had been driven by fear; specifically, fear of the unraveling of the world. And through different readings, workshops, and activities, including a systemic constellation group, I understood that I needed to shift my drive, and act from love instead of fear... to not focus too much on the negative, but on the positive around us. I also understood that I can’t be both a "warrior" and a "builder" at the same time. So, in a way, I decided to stop "fighting" for a better planet or a just society, and to start building it through love.
It seems to me that in order to really heal our wounds we need to support our younger generations in learning to love and to be loved unconditionally, to nurture, to be more empathetic, to be grateful, to be authentic, to know we are all interconnected, to trust their intuition, and to let love, not fear, guide their path.