The Birds, the Fishies and the Flowers

A Tale of Rebirth in the Face of Continual Change

I was born on Mother's Day. Every year my birthday and the day we celebrate Mothers are either shared or very close together.

I became a mother for the first time a year and a half ago. It was a long wait to achieve such a special marker in life. And as soon as I met it, and was gifted with a beautiful baby boy, I also had to face another big marker: loss.

Now my birthday and Mother's Day bring about a unique combination, one of celebrating life moving forward, as well as the bitter-sweet identity of being a mother.

Losing a child put me on the other side of the looking glass in life. I felt like I existed in the regular world but was now a part of this other silent, ignored world where lots of people also live. Many women came out of the woodwork with letters and emails, expressing quietly how they too lost a child or a partner or a parent, and I remember being shocked at how many people actually live on this other side of the glass.

As time went on, I thought I'd eventually bounce back. I falsely figured that the underworld of silent sufferers would go quiet again. I did not and it did not. Things don't bounce back. But they do heal and they do grow.

A mother's body is not the same after a baby; it will be beautiful, healthy, and strong, but it won't ever be the same as before something as big as bringing a new life into the world passes through it.

We don't bounce back after a loss either. I know I can and will be healthy, strong, and more beautiful than ever before, but I won't be able to go back and be the same as I was.

And I realized, after reflecting on my birthday and Mother's Day simultaneously for years that this is also true about being a woman. A woman's body, brain, and soul are not the same at 20 as it is at 30, 50, or 65. Our bodies, our gifts as child-bearers, our hormones, and our feminine souls are all meant to go through massive changes. Each time we're confronted with the task of letting the old, familiar self go and embracing the new one. This does not end when we surrender to our nature and to the cycles of life.

There is no escaping the difficult task of evolving for women or for Game Changers. The older I get, the more I realize there are more and more people that I run into the underworld of pain. Broken hearts, deferred dreams, losses from childhood that are still in the soul, people without parents, people without children, people with both but with the difficulty of adapting to the incredible responsibility it brings to do it fully and to do it with all the changes involved.

I had the loss of my son, but as people began to surround me and share their stories, I realized the incredible beauty and pain in the fact that I am not alone in this place.

So, for all of you who are celebrating or grieving this day of remembrance of mothers, I salute every woman who is with me in the great dance of evolving into each phase life brings. I'm leaning in and so can you. This is my message to us:

Our world is not going back to the way it used to be, it's up to us to change and be the new version we want to see.

Our bodies don't go back after having babies, not completely, but it's up to us to determine a healthy way to be in an updated body.

Our souls don't go back after loss or trauma. It's up to us to go inside and choose what we want to do with that, and who we want to be next.

And when we engage our lives, we realize we're never really going back- we're figuring out how to evolve forward to be more of ourselves, to determine who we want to be in each new season.

The new seasons, the changes, the wins, the losses, the hormone transitions- it's not going to ever stop. We have the incredible task of choosing who we want to be next and enjoying each moment this crazy life brings.

Below is a visual story of how each season brings different hats, different perspectives, different corners of life we must learn to exist within... and how beautiful it can be when we let go and just be the weird thing in the weird season- because it's always changing and we will have another chance again soon to evolve.

We we start up high, with the birds in the sky, something deep within eventually calls us back to the ground and even below.

"Put your ear down to your soul and listen hard" Anne Sexton

When finally below the surface, perhaps deeper than we wanted to know, we learn to swim with the fishies, we learn to go where they go.

Crisis takes place when the old has died and the new still has not been born" - Bertolt Brecht

From one extreme to the next, we again get the call. We are brought to the surface, to stand land-locked and tall. We are greeted with a blooming, with flowers and green, we are rewarded in seasons for evolving in-between.

"What matters most is how you walk through the fire" Charles Bukowski

The birds and the fishies, the flowers and the falls, keep changing her glasses and her vision of the world, but now she moves on, with an inner sight as well, with a heart that creates other hearts and a fire-proof soul. Her seasons keep changing, inside most of all, but what a gift to have wings, fins, and flowers in each world.

"Don't be a slave to the idea of yourself. If there is any peace, it will come through being not through having"

Happy Mother's Day, Game Changers. May it be well with your soul.

"Whatever causes night in our hearts may leave stars" Victor Hugo