Inspiration for your Motherhood
For me, one of the most defining moments of the birth of my son (of all the possible moments that can occur in a 44 hour time span), was the moment my midwife placed the perfectly pink glistening baby on my chest. It was the moment that all of the downward pressure of his body on my insides had magically disappeared. It was the moment that the sounds in the room, the voices around me and even the air itself seemed to join together into a beautiful symphony of angels. It was the moment my eyes first scanned the shape of that squirmy, ever-kicking child I had been falling in love with and nurturing inside of me for the past 9 months. It was the moment I first held my child in my arms, and it was the first moment in my life that, I feel, I had any sense of my own mortality.
“Wait!” I hear you question, my kind reader, “Did you say mortality??”
Yes. The truth is, as monumental as is the moment of a child’s birth, this moment for me contained an element of Kierkegaard-esque reflection about life and death that heighten ‘the high’ that is THAT moment. Why I had chosen that moment in my life to truly come to grips with the concept of my own death is something I can only assume. Was it a moment of cosmic-shift as a living creature entered this crazy world? Was it just a moment full of raging and shifting hormones and energy? Could this be the quickest onset of postpartum depression ever known to woman-kind??
I’ll never know.
Yet, as you can imagine, the ‘soul-searching’ that began in that moment truly has changed me to this day. It has given me a new definition for the phrase: “Live every day like it’s your last,” which I think I wanted to do, but never truly did before that moment. It reminds me that our lives are not defined by the number of days that we are alive, but more so by what we do in those days that creates our legacy and gives our children something to carry on………after we have gone.
Inspiration.
This is what that moment gave me.
As a mother, I have vowed to pass on this inspiration to my son: open your life to the beauty and joy that is inherent in each moment. Live your life with a respect for the impact you have on the people and environment around you. Know that you are alive for more than just tomorrow, and be present in each moment.
As a holistic physician, I have vowed to assist other mothers (and mothers-to-be) in this country to move beyond the ‘medicalized motherhood’ model by encouraging my patients to not only nurture their children with love and patience, but to also nurture their Motherhood with a bit of Inspiration.
Here is the first of a series of blogs regarding prenatal and postnatal health.
Inspiration is what I hope to share with you in my future blog posts. I thank you for letting me share inspiration with you, and I would be delighted if you were to share your own moments of inspiration with me. I encourage you to share any comments (about life, love, my blog, or just motherhood in general) or questions (health-related or otherwise) and I would be happy to respond.
Tara Gerou
