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Sacred Mother

Sacred, complex, and emotionally powerful, the Mother Archetype is the most influential pattern in the collective unconscious. Consequently, relationships with mothers often feel fraught.

Second in a new series, The Mother, at The Third Eve.

more essays

The Hearth from Which We Leave

How different it is to be in a nurturing family! Immediately, I can sense the aliveness, the genuineness, honesty, and love.
Jim Crow Love

A child should never feel like an outsider in their own family, never be expected to settle for something ‘less.’ This is what I feel most deeply about love and adoption.
Adoption as Legal Kidnapping

If more mothers knew how difficult it is to revoke a Consent to Adoption in court, fewer would sign them. The chance of regaining custody of one’s child so separated is almost nil.
House Pests

In sharing our lives with others we’re shaped into people with more patience, more discernment, more capacity to love wisely. We come to understand that hospitality isn’t just something we offer; it’s a way of being in the world.
Reflections on Losing My Child, Part 8: Tribulation is Treasure

Like many who have lost a child, I changed most in my understanding of what matters.
Reflections on Losing My Child, Part 7: Resolved to Heal

The word ‘heal’ comes from the Old English word hælan, to make hale, whole, or free from infirmity. Among traditional therapists and counselors, it is a favorite word that means next to nothing when applied to the aftermath of losing…
Reflections on Losing My Child, Part 6: The First Year

I constantly felt a tender ache of longing for my missing child. The finality of death was stunning and cruel, something I hadn’t expected to experience so bitterly, because I had every hope in an afterlife.
Reflections on Losing My Child, Part 5: Walking Her Home

I called Olivia’s birth mother and told her that our daughter was dying. We wept together. I felt the strength of two mothers and the will to go on.
Reflections on Losing My Child, Part 4: Night Song

My dying daughter’s prayers were answered. From the depths of where dreams grow, she dreamed of beauty, wholeness, and friendship. There are malls, dogs, and best friends where she was going, and people float like hovercraft–and there’s ice cream.
Anniversary

Choosing to face the blank page and write my 1500-2000 words a day became an act of obedience, and ultimately of love for the person I struggled to love more than any other, which was me.
Reflections on Losing My Child, Part 3: Waiting in Fear

We waited in fear, but didn’t tell our daughter that her hospitalizations were futile and would eventually end in complete renal failure and death. How could we tell our child such a thing?
Reflections on Losing My Child, Part 2: Trauma

The ongoing emergencies were traumas, brutal assaults on our daughter’s wellbeing that destroyed her trust in the world’s safety, robbing her of all joy.