Mother's Time: Where it all grows from here
Spin
Inside the Creation Stories of Dancing Mother
Mother's Time: Where it all grows from here
by Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy
It’s nighttime, approaching midnight. Mother is at 100%, as her mother would say—all 5 children in the bed. It’s her residency time: She dances, she writes, she dreams, she creates. She is so tired but she is so inspired to begin. It’s taken everything to get here, to this breathable space and moment. They have left the place called home, and are starting life over in another world. It’s just been a few weeks of being in their new house, with all 7 of them forming their new rhythms all at once. It’s a lot, for everyone, and for Mother especially, who holds everyone’s dreams and hopes in her heart. At night she can finally do a real assessment of how she feels, of how well, or not so well, she’s moving through each transition.
This time found as one day quietly turns into another feels vast and lush to Mother. Here the minutes tick by more slowly, and the hours stretch long and wide like her arms when she is reaching both out to the either side, her fingers curling and flexing, tickling the invisible edges of her aura. There is a special kind of softness accessible in these late night hours, a softness that is generous and gracious with Mother, who has poured out so much of her body, her brilliance, her breaths to everyone else, and who is daring to tend to her own garden of dreams. And she does this tending with the understanding that creations born in the dark, formless, and uncertain universe—the one that exists between when she gets the kids to bed and when she falls asleep herself—that creations made in such an ephemeral place may or may not become something whole and tangible and meaningful in the world’s eyes. And still, she must create.
Mother Mother breathes and imagines all the creations that. are on the horizon in her field of possibility.
Mother is also recovering from a mild concussion gifted to her by her toddler, who crashed into her earlier when Mother was on her back with her legs in the air and lifting her head toward her knees. The collision caused Mother to slam her head to the floor. It hurt so bad, brought tears to Mother’s eyes. She just lay there for a few minutes, stunned by the force of the littlest person in the family and the added recovery work for another unintended injury.
This same toddler is now mostly asleep and at the breast while Mother starts the drafting labors and experimental writing processes for this book that has been on her heart for so long now. Her mother would insist she go to bed herself at this point, but there’s something here for her. She can feel it. If she gives herself over to the swift and subtle currents of creation, something beautiful and miraculous can emerge from this text. And the lavender tea she sips on and Rumbo Tumba’s Cordillera Latiendo playing steadily in her right ear are her gentle assists to stay awake, at least for a little while, to get some etchings of her story on a page.
She doesn’t know where it all grows from here, but she is curious. And she’s created a system of engagement with her movement and writing practice that she thinks can carry and sustain her through the long labors of piecing this narrative together. There are so many more books stirring in her field of possibility. She has to start somewhere.
Mother Mother tastes the space with her feet, writing these new moments into her bone and marrow.
About Mother’S Time
Mother’s Time is a collection of metanarrative essays that Mother Mother writes alongside the writing moments for the larger book project, an experimental, archival text and story garden about Wildseed and its first decade of evolution as her family learning lab. The metanarrative is a lifting of the veil, an offering of nakedness and visibility, and a parallel, textual documentary to capture the usually unseen moments of when, and how, and where Mother Mother’s stories find their way into words and onto a page.
Become a member of Curious Seeds
Curious Seeds is a story building space for parents raising learners in the wild, lush, freedom of life as it is. This is a soft-time circle for parents deepening into their family’s stories of learning and systems of creation. Curious Seeds is for those who are realizing that their stories can help them document their learning practices, and also seed new possibilities for themselves and their communities.
Read Mother Mother’s Wildseed Stories
