Today, motherhood is kicking my arse

Oh, there are a million thoughts colonising my brain today! I want to write lyrical and deeply insightful prose about the end of the year and the trouble with resolutions. I want to make grand, beautiful, world encompassing plans. I want to offer insight into this most recent Cancer full moon and the watery depths it conjured. But I cannot. I am spent.

Today, motherhood is kicking my arse.

So instead I am seeking counsel from myself, from things I have collected in the past to sooth my weary soul. 

There are two.

One is this most insightful article published in the New Yorker in 2010 entitled All Joy and No Fun - Why Parents Hate Parenting. It is so good and so helpful. If you are feeling bone weary and sort of MIA from yourself because of the awesome task of being a parent then I recommend this.

The other is this. A poem by Mary Oliver that so powerfully brings me back to myself. I've included it as a video as well in case, like me, you are too tired to read it for yourself!

When Death Comes

When death comes
 like the hungry bear in autumn;
 when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

 to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
 when death comes
 like the measle-pox:

 when death comes
 like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

 I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering
 what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

 And therefore I look upon everything
 as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
 and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
 and I consider eternity as another possibility,

 and I think of each life as a flower, as common
 as a field daisy, and as singular,

 and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
 tending, as all music does, toward silence,

 and each body a lion of courage, and something
 precious to the earth.

 When it's over, I want to say: all my life
 I was a bride married to amazement.
 I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

 When it's over, I don't want to wonder
 if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
 I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
 or full of argument.

 I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

-- Mary Oliver