Motherhood as a Catalyst

He is fifteen now. White trainers. Music that's his to enjoy. Entirely, beautifully his own person. And still, in this moment, he tilts his head to mine and we feel it - the closeness we have built across fifteen years of deep connection.

My other boy, 16 (off camera) the same, his history is woven in these trees and he feels calmed to be there, and it is active love to honour this for his mama.

I had my boys at twenty-three. Which is, objectively, not something I'd recommend! But for the particular broken, barely-held-together woman I was, it was the most precise and necessary thing that could have happened.

I was not okay. The woman who became their mother was carrying grief so wretched it had become part of her bones. Fear she couldn't locate the edges of. She had survived things and she was still surviving. And she was also, without any preparation for it, desperately, madly in love with two tiny people who had arrived and looked at her as though she was the whole world.

That gaze.

I couldn't let them down. Something in me that had been very quiet for a very long time stood up and said: *you will go into the undergrowth. You will find what is there. You will not pass this on.*

So I did.

I became an earth mama so naturally. It was the easiest thing to love them and lean into something so wild and natural.

And I healed. Not in a straight line and so often clawing at something solid to stand on. The mud underfoot. The beech trees. I found my way back through the earth because it was the only thing vast enough to hold and transmute what I was carrying.

Now I have a fifteen year old and a sixteen year old! Close to me still in ways I knew we would be in those early years when I was doing so much healing on my knees between school runs.

My other boy is 16, out of shot. He comes to Avebury with me and though, like his brother, he wouldn't choose it, somehow the roots of the sister trees offer calm, all that magic woven through all the times we have been here together. And their love is so big for me that they offer me the magic and connection.

This is everything I ever wanted for them.

Not to shape them in my image but to love them so completely that they could become fully their own. While also having that same capacity for love for others.

Becoming their mother broke me open into healing. It handed me a reason bigger than my fear and said: *now.* It led me to the land, to my own cycle, to my own becoming. It is the origin story of everything I now do and everything I now know.

I am so, immensely grateful