WolfMothering: Learning to Love and to Be Free

Women who learn to love are the greatest threat to the patriarchal status quo.

Originally published on 13 Moons Magazine, please go subscribe and support female writers!

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“Women who learn to love are the greatest threat to the patriarchal status quo.” – Bell Hooks

This is not where I thought I’d be at forty-one, not living the typical life of my peers, without the prized trophies of love, as a mother and a wife. If you had asked me in my 20s, I wasn’t precisely confident in any goals, in particular – I was on a cross-country journey of shedding and discovery, and almost everything was up for inspection. Even so, when I envisioned my future life I didn’t imagine being twice divorced and living alone with my dog, back home in Michigan.

This is a story about midwiving myself at midlife and rewriting my narratives about love, relationship, motherhood, and contribution. It is a story about waking up in the morning with hope after all the dreams are dead.

I was raised in a divorced home by a single mother of three. Conflict was always present between my parents with almost no attention paid to how that affected us girls. To be fair, the culture at large was ignorant of how parenting practices could create attachment wounds that affected adulthood. I had few consistent, positive elder-male relationships. I never really witnessed a healthy partnership dynamic as a child or young adult. 

So, as I grew up I studied love through the ‘successful’ relationships and families I encountered. I became almost obsessed with finding people in love who were genuinely close, and I gravitated toward friends with harmonious families. I remember being in their homes, feeling something different in the field, something other than heartache, and it felt acutely safe to me.   

I read books, observed human dynamics around me, and eventually experimented with love relationships myself. As I studied, I attempted to learn how connection and love work. I felt pretty strongly then that I didn’t want to repeat the errors of my parents. I sensed that would probably shatter me and was very careful not to accidentally start a family. It was a phase of deconditioning. 

After a few decades of relationship research, a goal finally emerged. It caught me breathless and unaware, as if a chorus arose in my biology one morning saying, “Hey, you’re running out of time!” I realized I did want to have a family of my own. I felt a lonely panic in my heart, living in a traditionless culture, with no sacred elders or rites of passage into this next phase. I knew I wanted to do it differently, but I still didn’t really know how to avoid the pain and contempt I saw so many people living with. 

I knew I didn’t want to raise children the way I had been raised, in an ongoing conflict. I spent a lot of time and resources working to heal my family-of-origin attachment trauma. I studied birth and trained as a birth and postpartum doula, to learn all I could about avoiding the traumas that happen to women in our medicalized birth culture. I learned about acute childhood trauma, and early childhood attachment, and even did a series of sessions in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy to disentangle wounds from love. I mothered the little ones in me who were betrayed, in a way no one else would, or could. I approached myself with committed and inclusive love. I was practicing.

This brought me full circle, healing my own wounds in order to become a present, loving mother. I wanted to have the resources to retain a sense of freedom. I wanted to raise a child in a family that became a beacon of love for the community, one I never had. I wanted to disrupt the toxic unconscious patriarchal parenting culture with my example. I always pictured I’d be breaking generational cycles through the way I mothered. 

I set out to find a partner, one who had a stable family, who could co-create a place where I would find love and freedom. I thought this design would protect me from all the future pain of the world, and we could raise our family consciously together. Looking back, I see how much intense pressure I put on myself, and thus my relationships. 

Until very recently, I evaluated every partner through the lens of: Future Husband and Father. I married two men who I thought met this criteria. Eventually, both of those marriages failed. I chose men who ultimately couldn’t meet me in the deep unraveling work I was doing. Feeling alone on the path to conscious parenthood was what led me to leave each time. I simply could not put myself in that situation, the ultimate moment of vulnerability as a mother with a newborn. If I was to do this, I must have a solid, committed partner by my side.

Both times I fought that realization. I rode past the point at which my body knew the race was over because I desperately wanted this dream of family life to be actualized. Eventually, disruption and chaos would always intervene. No matter how much I pushed for it, there was always a cosmic unpredictability that steered me away from motherhood. In a way, I was saved from reliving the pain my own mother endured. 

Growing up I was aware she was struggling, unassisted for the most part in the care of three small girls. In an attempt to provide a better life for us, she was forced to give more than she could. Raising us took everything she had, and it nearly broke her. As the eldest daughter, I inherited a sense of responsibility for my sisters. I ached to ease the toll it took on all of us, and of course, I couldn’t.

In my marriages, I was being held back by a force more honest than myself.  I knew I was being guided, but the efforts took a toll on my heart and my sense of hope. I took a long hiatus from my search after a decade of trying. After both relationships failed I had a lot of data to reflect upon. Yet, there was still that urgent ache inside me. I tried a few more times, half-heartedly, and after my last break up, I declared out loud to friends and family that I was done looking, that this was my last attempt. I suffered not just from the heartbreak of love lost, but also from being perpetually stalled out in the transition phase, trying to force something out of me. 

I’ve had to surrender, to trust that this was perhaps not my path, and let that dream die. I still feel this dying creature in me every day, in the after-pangs when I watch my younger sisters raise their children. When I hear stories of everyday people who found love and were able to keep it. When I am with women who are in ‘the motherhood club’, and I have little to say.

There has been much grief. I have grieved the things I may never know. 

1. I may never know life bursting into being within my own body. 

2. I may never know the annihilation and creation at once, that is birth.

3. I may never know the look of awe on my partner’s face on our birthing day.

4. I may never know the miracle of my body producing everything needed to sustain life.

5. I may never know the bone-depleting exhaustion of parenting an infant and thus the depths of my commitment.

6. I may never know the mother instincts that kick in when seeing my child nearly injured.

7. I may never know what it’s like to be challenged to my limits by a being sent to evolve me.

I may never know that love.

In the Sumerian myth of Innana, Queen of Heaven and Earth, she passes through seven gates into the underworld, where she seeks to know her deepest truth. At each gate, she faces a wound and must give up something of herself to continue. My process of descent has been a similar one, a reckoning of who and what I am, if not mother, if not that. 

The phase I am in now is one of journeying into these underworld places inside me. Through the unraveling, I can learn from my own soul what this has all been for, and what it’s becoming. During the pandemic, in the heart of my descent, I received a dream in my sleep that changed my life and gave me direction:

There is a thrilling sense of belonging and unfuckwithableness residing within me, that hasn’t been felt until this moment. Running between two she-wolves, I sense a sincere connection that feels like home. This is what I’ve been searching for.

My body doesn’t have a form of its own. It is luminescent, ethereal. I sense two beings flanking me. They are running fast. I feel lovingly pushed to my limits, yet, also, sheltered.

As my perceptions sharpen, I can sense their innate beauty, each with four weathered, dusty paws, gliding over the grasses in unison, rhythmically bounding along the Earth. I have no body of my own, but I feel theirs, the whipping wind in their whiskers, the warm blood in their veins, their coarse fur billowing. 

The landscape is bathed in a low golden hue. A shimmering harvest moon lights up the tips of the grasses. We run through fields that seem to stretch on infinitely. The rolling hills naturally receive the power of dense claws with each bound forward. 

We soar on nimbly, sharing this interconnected ‘she-hood’. We lope in giant sweeping patterns, past small bushes where rabbits scatter, but the wolves are not interested in hunting tonight.

I progressively observe the horizon darkening over a forest edge in the distance. I feel a threshold approach, a place of no return. A very old fear of the dark, of the unknown rises within me.

Memories of abandonment and betrayal revisit me. Feelings of worthlessness, immobility, and confusion flood me. My presence stumbles.

The she-wolves speak telepathically.

“Do not fear; we will not leave you. You have important work to do. You must go, and dance something to life.”

I soften. What choice do I have? I no longer want to carry these decaying burdens. To be truly free, I have to lay them down to compost in the arms of the Earth. So, I surrender and allow myself to flow across the threshold … into the woods.

And now I am inside the forest, in a clearing in the trees, around a large bonfire. I am in my physical body once more, ‘alone’ but not really. I sense the she-wolves inside me. I feel their presence. My aura feels whole, and I am unafraid.

A drumbeat echoes from the woods. On the very edge of the firelight surrounding me, gentle beings rise in the forest. Many wolves, but other non-human beings as well — animals, plants, rocks, angels, galactic beings, are all there for me, holding space for something.

My body begins to move to a drumbeat. I feel carried and held by it. I drop into the rhythm, aware of the vibration in my bones, my womb.

I am here to dance something to life. 

I was shown in this dream that I already embody Mother, in the essence of how I walk this earth, and that I am true, dancing with purpose. I felt the deepest sense of belonging and realized I had been trying to conjure up a family because I thought I lacked that. My dream showed me that I have it all inside me already, and I can mother in other ways. I finally got the imprint I needed to let go, and I became WolfMother.

I’m adjusting my expectations, and as a result, I’m changing as a woman, in midlife. I’m changing the way I approach love and mothering. I am changing the way I allow them to approach me. 

Sometimes I am terrified. I don’t have many maps, so I am learning the cartography of love as I go. 

I’m reckoning with what this means, what Love means, without the pretense of forever. I am learning to love without the other having to become my future husband, my co-parent, or my protector. I’m exploring love with emotional reciprocity and commitment to the mystery, rather than from lust or possession. I’m open to how love can affirm a feeling of already belonging. 

I’m redefining mothering too. I’m exploring ways I can use this mothering energy to care for and nurture the she-wolves and wolf cubs in my pack. I absolutely LOVE being an Auntie, to my own niece and nephews, and to the children of my friends. There is nobility in that aspect of mothering, too. In fact, I believe it’s essential for the collective to have beings like me present, resourced, and able to provide additional love and guidance. It helps me to heal the wound of that presence missing in my own life. 

This is going to be a decade of pure, agenda-less love. I want to love and bond simply for the sake of being alive and celebrating the beauty of each moment. Like children. Like wolf pups. 

My joy was stolen and I felt weighed down after so many years of seeking love out of a sense of need and responsibility, implied in every Disney movie and TV sitcom. I have no idea what this could manifest into, returning to authentic hopefulness and love, but I am satisfied. To me, shirking toxic love narratives is generational healing in the making. 

Under the full moon, I am howling a new song. I am inspired as I acknowledge how I have nurtured love in myself through an unbelievable series of experiences. How I have been midwifed by mystery too, all along. I tend to the bud of new hope. I am Inanna on her ascent, knowing I am resilient after facing a number of deaths, being shaken to my core, and now willing to have chaos come fuck with me. 

I walk softly yet confidently with the codes I now carry. I participate in healing generational cycles, and awakening the sacred consciousness of the collective, through a commitment to undomesticated love. I celebrate the blessings of my unconventional life. I embrace all the other ways I can love, if not that one.

I am here for a love 

that delivers me 

the pleasures of 

running wild, free

together in a moonlit field

grasses tipped with gold

puffs of breath steaming 

whiskers tingling with dew

with our belonging 

to the mystery

and to each other

unquestioned.