Good morning, (M)other 🌻
This new exploration in sound continues. This time, we’ll begin with the music. In distilling a sense of Self through music, we expand to create a more beautiful and unique mothering experience. So, let’s continue.
Sound
Poses - Rufus Wainwright / Apple Music / Spotify / YouTube
For me, that piano opening is New York City — just as the sun is rising and the food carts are claiming their street plots for the day. Manhattan before all the people wake up to fill her with noise. Instead, this piano. Some ethereal twirl of energy that eventually becomes over-sounded by the matrix of work + play living.
A blend: Dwellings in (m)otherhood and Self
New York City. It’s been one year since this sky-line. I am witnessing how those years of world travel made being away from home with children so much smarter, lighter, exciting. Those years taught us to loosen up — especially me. While I still maintain that orderly disposition, somehow I am able to create new order in the midst of chaos. Today, I feel like there’s nothing I can’t do. I look back on all the transformation it took in order to make me feel this courageous.
In the hotel, Liv doesn’t take to the crib - no matter how much we try. So, we are sharing the king size with our princess — we’ve made her a bed of pillow borders. She takes up half the space. I watch her from the camera — arms flailed out, fingers too — she is asleep in the shape of a star. ⭐️
This morning I woke up next to her. A blow-out. Bedsheets and clothing soiled. Up like a tiger, I see Aviv has moved to sleep with Rain, who I learn later had a bad dream in the middle of the night. There was a giant crab. His dreams always turn around animals with intense human emotions. This one was anger.
I switch out the sheets after finding extras. Change her clothes and diaper. Liv is a child that meets eyes in the morning — any eyes at all — and smiles. Smiles like the sun is touching her skin. No matter what’s happening, no matter how dirty — she finds something to smile about and share it with you. Happy-go-lucky kid.
I strip her down again and run a bath. Liv still loves her bath. Now she sits in my lap, body covered in soap. She slips and slides against me. Skin-to-skin with your baby never loses its feeling of heaven.
On the road with your kids, everything is creative and makeshift. The experience forces your mind to open. Forces you to pull rabbits out of hats. Become resourceful in ways you never thought possible. Bed, bath, and beyond. Oh, how little we need. Oh, how little our children need in order to experience their magic.
—
New York is a city of constant noise. Sound. So much of it, from all directions. So much human life from all directions.
And Aviv is so alive here — New York speaks to his Aquarian energy. The industrial and technological boom that the city continues to be. The unstoppable newness of it all.
Here, I oscillate. After energy overload, New York forces me to tap out and observe. I rise and feel her, as if i am seeing her from above. All this stuff, all these people, all this noise. From an aerial view, it’s all a spectrum of beauty.
Out the window, the Empire State Building. I look out at Him. I give it the masculine form just to personify for a moment, like Rain’s animal dreams. Like the Hebrew language. Building-בנין, masculine.
For a moment I can see those construction workers that built him almost a hundred years ago. For a moment, I see Frida Kahlo looking up at him, after looking up at Diego Rivera’s murals. For a moment, I hear the sound of all the history he’s seen from above. Those Art Deco wings encircling the observatories up top. Silver and shining. For a moment, gravity disappears. The tower floats against the sky. The silver wings of it. They are the ones painting the clouds — flapping them alive.
Embodiment exercise: recall an important place and assign it a song.
Pick a song that serves as the backdrop to a place that has held great real estate in your life; a place that has made you who you are at this point — though you may no longer be there physically. Share it in the comments, and anything else this initiates for you.
What about this song represents the place?
What does this song help you recall about yourself, how the place it stands for helped form the unique You that you are? Write down at least 3 of those qualities and stick them on or beside your bathroom mirror.
Where do you feel those self-qualities dwelling inside your body?
How do you allow them to show up in your mothering? Or, othering?
If you haven’t let them show up in your life in a while, how do you commit to them showing up this week?
If you’re having trouble with the music as a catalyst, call up or message a friend that experienced life with you in this place instead. Perhaps they remember who you were when you first arrived. Perhaps they recall a song. Ask them to tell you what they remember.