The Birch Trees

When my daughters were 2 1/2 years old and 8 months old we moved into a new house that had birch trees growing just outside my bedroom window. Over the years, when the trees would broadcast their minuscule seeds over the yard, a seed would land in the garden bed outside the front door and it would begin to grow. This only happened three times in the 12 years I’ve lived here. So I saw the sprouts as magical and I potted them to be replanted in the yard where they could grow tall.
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I heard somewhere that, in magical traditions, birch trees were thought to confer protection to children. This made me feel that no matter how many times I felt like a failure of a mother, the birch had my back. The unchanging presence of the birch mirrored back to me the persistence required in parenting... the inevitability of bumping into my own wounds and fears... that I could still keep going in the face of struggle.
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The hardest part of parenting for me has been the ways in which I’ve grown up with my children. As they’ve grown, I’ve bumped into the wounds I experienced at those ages. That’s the difficulty... reparenting myself by showing up differently than I was treated when the wound is so active. Oof.
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Motherhood (probably parenthood in general) invites us into broaden ourselves to encompass more inner ground, to have more access to ourselves. This is a practice, an opportunity to devote ourselves to this stretching and reaching and gnosis. This invitation to fully explore the inner landscape of who we are and who we can be.

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