Grief and Matrescence: The Dark Mother

With special guest - Xochi Balfour

Photo by Zara Marsh

This week I’ve invited my dear friend Xochi to share a few words with you about grief and matrescence. Xochi has been a teacher, mentor and friend for nearly five years - and lucky for me, she is now my neighbour too! Her work in embodiment has deeply shaped my own relationship with grief, love and longing. Just last week she was sharing with me the themes for her latest gathering - The Dark Mother - and we realised how much of her work overlaps with grief tending. So with the intention of widening circles and sharing the people and spaces who have most helped me, I’m honoured to offer you Xochi’s words about grief, matresence, shadow, alchemy and becoming.

Ps. This letter is about motherhood specifically. If you have had difficulty conceiving, this possibly won’t be for you. Please take care of yourself and skip reading this or pass it on to a friend who might need it instead. Remember that we all navigate unique experiences of grief and the beauty of grief work is that we can find connection and solace in the shared well of grief.

With love, Nici

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Words by Xochi Balfour

No one tells you about the grief.

When you're preparing to become a mama, life readies you in so many ways for the immense initiation of body and soul. And you receive maps everywhere you go to help you understand what to expect. The joy, the expansion, the chaos, exhaustion, the love (isn't grief the price we pay for that, anyway?) are everywhere - but it's often the tenderness that catches you. And perhaps, the unexpected anger that can come with it. The bone-deep milky tears; the ceaseless and sometimes unbearable heartache as every compartment of the woman you once were is cracked wide open and rebuilt day by day into something so vulnerable, so grieving, so innately bound to this other being that reality as you knew it makes little sense. It's unbearable, and it's life-affirming.

And years down the line, when the intensity of postpartum has faded and I have learned to simply walk this earth as Mother, the grief stays with me. Grief of who I was, grief of what's been lost, grief of what my children are passing through as humans in this inherently messy earth walk, grief for my overwhelm and how that ripples over, grief for the planet they inherit, grief for the transience that itself gives life any meaning at all. Since having my first son seven years ago and then twins four years later, I remain so wide open, so utterly exposed in my tender mama heart - tears drop into my mundane comings and goings with such ease, it amazes me. And it makes me remember that I am fully alive. Present, awake, sentient. Profoundly connected to the truth of this life and the weight of its fragility and transience as it sits in my wild, beating and often exhausted heart.

With any initiation, we know that something must die. We are forced by life to cross a threshold where we will likely need to ask others around us for help and support, and where an old version of self will be left behind to allow the space of that which we are maturing into. In Matrescence, the death of the Maiden self is profound, and only exacerbated by a culture obsessed with static youth and nubile lustre. Mothers grieve a loss of freedom, a loss of the body they know, a loss of the relationship they know, a loss of time, a loss of sexuality, a loss of independence, a loss of autonomy. On top of that, many of us are processing birth trauma, isolation, postpartum difficulties, financial pressures and an even more pronounced sensitivity to the state of the world around us, wide open as we are in every sense. Rarely are we given spaces in which to safely process this grief, in ceremony and ritual, held in compassion and supportive process.  

This, as I see daily in my work - and my continual map of self - can in turn lead to an unintegrated deep dive into the shadow realm of Mothering. Anger, overwhelm, resentment, guilt and shame can spiral for mamas - only made worse by perfectionist ideals everywhere we look on social media, and constant exposure to the suffering of the world we raise our kids in: the collective unintegrated shadow that we also absorb. The more we push them away, the stronger they get.

For me, reclaiming our shadow is reclaiming our wholeness. We melt the frozen, judged and exiled parts of ourselves and we come back into union with the fullness of who we are, the energised human experience. Our shadow holds such richness, beauty, longing, passion. It is part of life itself. Reclaiming it in mothering liberates us: and this can only be done in a compassionate container. Mothers need so much compassion, first and foremost from themselves. And this journey is so much easier when we take it together. I created The Dark Mother for exactly this, and I have watched the transformation of mothers from all walks and stages of life with such joy as we break the taboos, excavate our armoured hearts, let the tears fall as offerings to the earth, to life itself, set the roars free, create simply more space for the earth-shattering love we contain. It is magic. And it's lineage work: for the ones who came before us and the ones yet to come. 

We slow down, listen, share, and move, and land back in our bodies so that with the holding of the earth they can guide us back into depth and wholeness. We learn from the Goddess in her many forms. Our circle of facilitators liberate so much in me with their brave and wise work exploring of all facets of mothering - from The Perfect Mother Myth and Mama Anger to Kali, Durga and Mother Boundaries. I am so excited to start our first extended, gentler and more integrative six month journey next week, with a strong and courageous circle, and I am so grateful to my sister Nici for the invitation to share this work. I have seen it save mothers, and transform the journey we find ourselves on in ways I could never have imagined. I bow.

The Dark Mother is a six-month journey exploring mothering through personal and collective shadow, within a tightly held container of sisterhood. The group begins this coming Tuesday 24th September.