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Kate Spring

~ growing a deep-rooted life

Kate Spring

Tag Archives: motherhood

The Wildness and the Wild

08 Friday Apr 2016

Posted by Kate Spring in Family, Wildness, Writing

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Tags

motherhood, nature, poetry, spirituality, wild, wildness

4/6/2016

6:12 am — A periwinkle sky, soft and bright and so translucent it seems to levitate above the mountains.  Which of course it always does, but only now do I see just how the horizon is born from light.

6:22 am — The sky drifts into pastels, pink and peach.  Waylon sleeps curled next to me as I read, and I think I am happy, content, peaceful, except none of these words are right.  It’s something quieter, deeper, something nameless that fills me.

It eases the urgency of doing.

6:32 am — The light has cascaded from the sky onto the mountains themselves.

The mountains are like a farm woman: strong, steady, curves around the muscles.  Sometimes they’re merely noticed, but eventually truly seen, causing the observer to stop and breathe in the beauty, the wildness, the stateliness, the pure bedrock of life at once tangled and ordered; a being large enough to hold contradictions and surprises and still offer comfort in the sheer mass of her embrace.

When I hold my son, I imagine the mass of the mountains in my hug.

When I hold my son, I feel his energy and I realize how much slower I’ve become.  How motherhood necessitates that.  How the wind, which once directed me, now flows through him.  How I’ve come into conversation with the roots of trees.  How I’ve learned to match the pace of mountains.

He is the wildness.  I am the wild.

When I hold my son, I realize I have become a home.

6:38 — He sleeps.  I write.  The light pours down the mountainside.

In another few hours it will reach the west-facing hillside and be upon us all.

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Alone at the Cafe

18 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by Kate Spring in Morning Inspiration

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Tags

coffee, life, motherhood, thoughts

Before responsibilities–land, a farm, loan payments–before motherhood, how could I have known the luxury of a morning alone.  How could I have known the beauty of sitting at a counter with a window seat, a cup of coffee heavy with cream exhaling steam upward on a cold morning.  How could I have known the stillness a slice of coffee cake could offer, its moist crumb coalescing with crystals of brown sugar in my mouth.

Before motherhood, how could I have known the contentment that comes when time floats out of mind, thoughts dissipate in the steam, and I nurse that cup of coffee–or should I say when that coffee nurses me?  This moment of taking instead of giving–how could I have known how marvelous it would feel?P1010040

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Moms are Individuals, Too

11 Sunday May 2014

Posted by Kate Spring in Family

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Tags

family, life, motherhood

 

Waylon, 3 days old, with Mama and Nana

Waylon, 3 days old, with Mama and Nana

It’s my first mother’s day.

“Thank you for making me a mom, Waylon,” I said this morning, because he doesn’t have the words yet to say “Happy mother’s day.”  Instead, he coos and gurgles and points at me, smiling.

I used to hate the phrase, “you’ll understand when you’re a mother…”  Those words, said by my own mom, in moments of my rebellion, causing her worry.

It’s hard to admit, that only nine months into motherhood, I understand.

I understand how I am still a child to her, a being created by her body, a tangle of my father and her that burst out into the world.  As Waylon enters a new phase of squirming until he is set free to crawl, I understand the constant tension of holding and letting go.

There is something else, though, that surprises me more: my mother is an individual.

How simple a revelation.  After all these years, to look at her and see that she is more than my mother, that her history extends beyond my birth, that she is her own person.  Of course, in a simple way I’ve known this, but until my own passage into motherhood, I did not stop to look at my mom as someone beyond her children.

Don’t we all do this?  Hold our mothers to our needs, push them away, and then fly back when we need the comfort of their breast, their bodies, their physical and tangible love.  Even now I can bury myself into her hug and feel as though every wound has been healed, every problem solved.

This is what we ask of mothers: everything.

I had no idea of this depth of selflessness until Waylon came into the world.  So this has become the central tension of my life: how do I be an individual and a mother at once?  It’s hard to find time to myself.  Even when I have the chance to go to town alone, I feel split, kissing Waylon’s cheeks endlessly, hugging him, not knowing how to let go until Edge takes him and tells me it’s his turn now.  But for everything I give of myself, Waylon gives back to me.  His needs are simple but constant, just as his love and joy are constant, and at the end of the day, my favorite moments are seeing him smile when I come home from work, how we both light up at our evening reunion.

So today, my first mother’s day, I say thank you.  Thank you to Waylon for making me a mother, and thank you to my mom for 29 years of being selfless, of giving herself to my brother and me despite our moments of recklessness that surely caused her to loose sleep.  Even now she continues to give, offering to watch Waylon for a few hours when I’m off, giving me time to myself, teaching me the balance of being an individual and a mother at once.

 

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Mama and Baby Go to Town

31 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by Kate Spring in Family

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baby, family, life, motherhood

The hardest part of going to town with a baby is the end: when the baby is tired and hungry, but won’t subtly breastfeed and instead pulls his head away every five seconds to let milk shoot out all over his face and shirt, white droplets speckling his hair.  This coincides with the mama overheating, feeling sweaty and flustered and ready to surrender her hope of completing the last items on the agenda: buying a chocolate chip cookie from the corner bakery and picking up a new book at the library.

The best part of going to town with a baby are the smiles: when strangers stop to coo, when the baby lights up at a new face and makes their day, when all the people who would normally walk right past instead become momentary friends.

I brought Waylon into town today to do the laundry.  We did laps around town while we waited for the clothes to wash and then dry. Waylon was happy for the most part, sitting in the laundry basket as I transferred the clothes from washer to drier, smiling up at a woman waiting for her own laundry to finish.   I saw his tiredness set in before he started to loose it.  His eyelids always redden when he needs sleep.

I pulled the laundry out before the drier sounded its completion, and stuffed the hot clothes into their respective bags, not taking the time to fold.  With Waylon strapped into the Ergo, I began running bags of laundry across the street to the car.  The duvet cover fell five feet from the car, tumbling out of the laundry basket that balanced on my hip, and as I turned to see it laying in the wet and muddy street, resignation washed over me.  Stuffing the duvet into the back, mud and all, I took a breath and resolved to get my cookie.  A little walk would help Waylon fall asleep.

“Just a cooke?  No tea, coffee?” the girl at the counter asked.

“Nope, just a cookie,” I said, smiling.  I took a little nibble as we headed toward the library, then closed the bag to save it for home.  We made it to the fiction section on the second floor before Waylon let out his first screech.

Sshhhh I hummed and added an extra bounce to my step.

Then the second screech came, and without taking the time to read the inside cover, I pulled a Tom Robbins book off the shelf and headed back down to check it out.  By the time we reached the car, he was almost asleep, and the rumbling car quickly lulled his cries.  Now I sit home, Waylon napping in the hammock, chocolate chip cookie half eaten beside me, and a new book to read.  The jacket of Villa Incognito reads that “in its lusty, amusing way it both celebrates existence and challenges our ideas about it.”

Perfect.

Between working, planning our second farm season, and being a mom to an increasingly mobile and curious babe, I could use a little escape, a little celebration, and a little challenge to my own ideas of existence.  And Tom Robbins is just the author to whisk me away for a bit.

With my cookie and book, I’ll savor the evening.

Sometimes, the hardest part and the best part of going to town is simply getting home.

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Five Months

28 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by Kate Spring in Family

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

baby, change, family, life, motherhood

Waylon turned five months old yesterday.

Five Months Old!

Five months.  I do not know how time moves, how days can go by slowly and yet months are gone in a moment.  Yesterday I took a walk alone for the first time since I can remember, only my weight to carry.  I stooped to take photos, stopped and sat on a snowy rock to write, pranced down steeper slopes in the woods.

frozen drops, katie spring

Today I went into town for a few hours by myself, leaving Edge and Waylon at home so I could run errands and have solo-mama time.  When was the last time I lingered in the book store, or tried on clothes?  By the end of my town run, though, I felt uneasy, as if I had over stayed, and I imagined Edge back at home, wondering where I was as Waylon cried and cried.  But when I walked into the yurt, Waylon was sleeping in his hammock as Edge did dishes and the music of R. Carlos Nakai floated peacefully in the air.

I remember the lesson I learned the morning Waylon was born–to let go–and I search for the balance between independence and motherhood.

As I read through old entries in my notebook, I found this, from September 30:

My body is shrinking, trying to remember the shape before pregnancy, but there is a space I feel inside, carved out by his body as he grew inside me.  Though I may get back to a certain weight, there is a new stretch within me, a cavern that cannot close completely. I am forever changed.

Like flowing water that carves the riverbank, we shift and adapt together, independent and intertwined: earth and water, mother and son.

ice and flow, katie spring

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In A Blink

30 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by Kate Spring in Family

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

baby, change, family, life, love, motherhood

“Isn’t it amazing how little you can get done with a baby around?”  A farmer friend asked us.  We laughed and said, “Yes!”

Some days all I do is nurse Waylon, change his diaper, and hold him.  When I try to do something else, he calls for me again, and I pick him up and we bounce or dance or eat.  A few days I have felt a mixture of frustration and disappointment as I feel I am not helping Edge on the farm at all, and then he reminds me again of all I’m doing, just as he did when I was pregnant.  Mostly, though, I drink in these moments with Waylon, and I remember how I’d giggle as a little girl when my mother would tell me, “I blinked and you were born, then I blinked and you were 2 two, then I blinked and you were five…”  How can a month have passed already?  I realize that he’ll keep getting bigger, and I savor these days of rocking with him, the endless kisses on his plump little cheeks, the cooing and gurgling and humming sounds he makes as he nurses, the way he stretches his arms up like he’s superman each time he wakes.

So as the days begin and end and keep on going, I am learning that getting things done is not as important as simply being with Waylon and watching him discover the world.  And though he grows each time I blink, he has slowed my pace down, and for that I am thankful.

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Welcome, Waylon

04 Sunday Aug 2013

Posted by Kate Spring in Uncategorized

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

baby, birth, family, life, motherhood, natural birth

Waylon has been with us for eight days now.  This morning Edge said the word “Sunday,” and it sounded foreign to me–time may be moving, but days and hours and minutes melted away when I went into labor.  Now, moments blend together like breath as I deeply inhale, filling myself with this life in front of me: a baby boy.

He was born at home, filling the yurt with his first cry at 1:52 am on July 27.  I looked down at him on the bed and announced, “It’s a boy,” before the midwives could tell me, and I fell back onto Edge, who held me as I held our son in my arms for the first time.  Now, the memory of physical pain has melted away, and I remember only the whole room breathing with me, the clarity of my cousin Amy’s eyes as she helped me through a contraction, the calmness of the midwives as labor intensified, the steady encouragement of Edge as I held him with all my might through each push, and the easy release of Waylon’s body as it squirmed out after his head finally made it through.

Waylon’s birth changed me in a way that has no words.  Everything but breath and love fell away.  Even in the pain I could breath, I had to breathe, and through the pain I found release.  It was the biggest letting go of my life–my body physically opening to let this being that grew inside me out into the world.  So it is that birth has taught me the first lesson of motherhood: letting go.

Letting go brought Waylon into this world.  Letting go brought love, space and peace.  May I remember this always, especially when I try to grasp onto him as he grows and needs to expand or contract without us.  Let me always remember how we did it together–how I had to push, how he had to leave my body to meet my eyes, how we had to put space between us to know each other in a profound new way.

Thank you, Waylon, for your breath, your voice, and your life that you share with your Papa and me.  Thank you so much.  We’re so happy you’re here.


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Welcome!

Kate Spring

Kate Spring

Welcome to The Good Heart Life: an organic gardening and lifestyle blog where we grow beauty, joy, and nourishment for the body, soul, and earth. I'm Kate Spring: organic farmer, mother, and chief inspiration officer at Good Heart Farmstead and The Good Heart Life. Grow along with us, and together we'll cultivate a more lively, joyful world one {organic} seed at a time.

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