Heart-Led

Annihilation by Motherhood

(This is an essay I wrote Dec 2025 at the request of a college mentor who included it in a program for a film festival.)

“That which is to give light must endure burning.” Viktor Frankl

I find myself at this point in my life where I am dedicated to burning away all of the parts of me that are not loving awareness. I am arriving this year at the halfway point between 50 and 60. *whew* It was 2020 when I arrived at the door of my half century birthday in this incarnation, optimistic and grateful, but also feeling stuck and muted. I’d like to come up with a more descriptive phrase, but ‘stuck and muted’ is very honest and accurate. It wasn’t a feeling of being trapped anywhere particularly tragic, dark or hopeless, but a bit of a place of numbness - not completely numb mind you, but more of living in a state where feelings remained within a certain narrow range. I knew there was something I was missing, but wasn’t sure how or where to find it.

My arrival at that half century milestone also happened to coincide with the global pandemic catastrophe which would reshape the whole world including me in ways I never saw coming. It is true what they say about energy spent “worrying” being a waste. In my case I have found it is because when I arrive at the places that I worried about, I realize that I worried about the wrong things. There were indeed things I could have been worried about, but I couldn’t have known about those particular things… and around in a circle I go. Anyway, my birthday that year fell during a period of actual societal shut down which was the opposite of what I had hoped for and planned. I was angry, frustrated, disappointed, feeling a bit sorry for myself. Simultaneously I was also annoyed with myself for feeling upset at a time when so many people less fortunate than me around the world were dealing with much worse situations. You’re upset because you can’t have a birthday party? Are you kidding me?? Judgement, scolding, and anger towards myself on top of my sadness and frustration. Put it all in a box and lock it.

What began following this worldwide tragedy and simultaneous (much less catastrophic but still real) personal crisis, was a personal undoing, unfolding, unraveling, into a rebirth and reconstruction. It has been a ride.

This is the decade in which I have faced some of my most well polished assumptions and noticed that they were well intentioned but wrong.

This is the decade in which I have wandered about some days fully feeling as if I am in a hall of mirrors, seeing uncomfortable truths in new ways in everyone and everything around me all day, only to wake up the next day and feel more or less “normal” again.

This is the decade where I’m learning that I’m a big soft, squishy, sensitive cry baby, after spending decades of convincing myself and those around me that “I’m not much of a crier” - which I understand is partly a generational thing.

It is the decade in which I’m learning to integrate all of the lessons and the tiny truths that I was

too stressed out

too afraid

too ‘busy’

to absorb in younger years.

It’s the decade in which I’m learning to relax and allow parts of myself I couldn’t allow on stage in earlier periods.

It’s turning out to be the decade in which I become my own best friend and understanding that that will enable me to be more present to the needs of those I love in a way I could not see until now.

I’m swimming in a combination of established patterns of “being Harrm” and also releasing the patterns that cause interruptions to the flow of life energy through me. The old patterns mixed with the new adjustments of letting go and shedding some of the old patterns is messy and clumsy. Half the time I don’t quite know what’s going on and I feel lost. I feel like a new person some days, and then I feel like the same old person the next. But there are some themes that stand out, that keep coming around asserting themselves as “the stuff” that I can reasonably articulate. One of the main themes is putting my heart in charge after relegating it mainly to the margins many years ago.

Back to the Heart

I have spent my adulthood prioritizing my thinking, my intellect as a primary leader, believing it to be the key to security and happiness. I have often treated the intellectual threads of myself as the boss of this life of “Harrm.” I came to believe through lots of influences over many years that my intelligence was the most valuable thing I have to offer the world, and the most important thing to cultivate for safety/security. I have built an entire life around valuing intelligence above almost all else, earning a PhD and building a career firmly inside the academy. And frankly, I recognize now that I worshipped it as a false god. When I state it so plainly, it is so clear and stark, and it is embarrassing - such a swing and a miss. Humbling. But it is what I really thought was right, and have spent decades investing my human energy in the pursuit of a very specific academic version of knowledge and knowing. It was only after having a series of interactions with more heart-centered people, and personal experiences of heart awakening that I recognize the very basic folly. I see it reflected in my career in the academy, in my relationships with friends and loved ones, in what I choose to read and consume, and in what I find attractive. It ripples out into everything.

Come to find out, the brain should never be the boss. The heart is the proper boss. It needs help from the brain, which is a powerful tool, but the brain should always be in service of the heart, not the other way around. Once I saw it, I cannot unsee it. It is not the rightful leader. It’s very sobering and humbling to see such a fundamental and long term error in judgement and orientation. The place I am these days with integrating this insight is learning to be still and listen for what my heart says. I’m learning to discern between the voices of the heart and head. My head has been used to being in charge for so long that it is still often difficult for me to notice when my mind is running amuck, making a mess of things while the heart waits patiently for a quiet moment to weigh in. My work is learning to listen, learning to release instead of bracing and striving so much. More yin, less yang. More heart and soul, less brain and linear thinking. My head was left in charge for so long that it is easier to share an exception to that pattern from those years than it would be to list out all of the many times I ignored my heart’s wisdom.

Motherhood

My children are, as many parents acknowledge, my heart living outside of my body. As their mother, I do experience them as extensions of myself in a way much deeper and more profound than I understood when I made the decision to try to become a mother. I realize in a new way in this phase of life, that motherhood is a very clear and fundamental part of why I am here, why I came into this life as a woman and not a man, so that I would experience being obliterated through the dissolution and expansion of motherhood not once, but two times. Nothing about this experience has been reasonable or rational.

The decision to have two children was clunky. I sort of always assumed the number for me would be two, not three as it was for my mother. But having my first, my daughter, A1, was far more shocking, stressful and demanding than I could have ever understood. Becoming a mother dismantled me and the life I had built until she was born in a way I never would have imagined beforehand. For a long time I didn’t enjoy or appreciate it. I loved her, deeply, but not many of the things about being a mother. In hindsight I should have received care for postpartum depression. But at that time, I didn’t consider what I experienced to be postpartum depression. I just didn’t like what it meant to be the mother of an infant. I wasn’t proficient at much that was related to what was demanded of me. It was so completely different from what I expected on so many levels.

I waited to become a mother until my mid-30s, following the feminist wisdom of the time to get one’s career in order and established before taking on the responsibilities of motherhood. I’m no longer sure that that’s a great model. There are pros and cons on both sides of the choices between early and later parenthood trajectories, but later was the path I thought was right, and I was fortunate to conceive. But in the 35 years leading up to my first child, I had invested in skills that did not prepare me for motherhood. All of my expectations of what motherhood would be like were destroyed in the first year of having a difficult, very fussy, clingy infant who was blessedly physically robust but who shocked me by adamantly refused to drink from any bottle placed in her mouth. She never met an artificial nipple she liked. It was breast or nothing for her. I didn’t even know that was a thing. We tried everything, different people feeding the bottle, every different kind of nipple, a tiny spoon, everything. We had the most patient and understanding childcare provider in the neighborhood, who hung in there with us through thick and thin. What a rude awakening. This bottle refusal was just the beginning.

For the first few years of her life, I was sure that that second child I was previously sure I would have was not needed, not necessary. I must have simply been wrong about the right number being two. I could see how anyone could be suckered into having one child, what with all of the marketing and they really are so darn cute in pictures and other people’s strollers. And holy smokes was my daughter adorable. People stopped us on the street all the time to tell us how beautiful she was. And after that tough first year, she was bright and sweet and always filled with joy - but continued to be challenging in different ways. After the annihilation I experienced in motherhood and mothering, I wondered who in the world would do it more than once? It wasn’t going to be me.

I broke the news to my husband when our daughter was 5. I adored A1, but I was done and depleted. I didn’t need another child to get the full experience of being a mom. I thought I was good, and he agreed that was fine with him. But for the following two months, in spite of the settledness of my brain, it didn’t feel right. I became depressed and sad and came to the inexplicable sense in what I now recognize as my heart that we needed to try for another baby. It didn’t make any sense to me. I couldn’t rationalize it. I was so sure that we were one and done. We even had convinced our daughter that even though she thought she wanted a sibling, she didn’t. Babies are a lot of trouble. They try to take your toys. They cry a lot. After some time, we convinced her. She believed us. But in the span of eight weeks my heart won against my intellectual mind. All of the reasons I had to not dive into that deep, sometimes dark pool of motherhood a second time couldn’t entirely mute my heart’s voice that wouldn’t stop. It waited patiently for me to stop complaining and justifying and denying, and insisted we needed to try for a second. I broke that news to my husband, and he trusted me and followed my lead. Four months later we were pregnant, and my son was born four days after our daughter turned 6 and I was 41. He is my heart baby, A2. He joined his big sister in having a strong opinion against taking a bottle. What was shocking to me with my first, became amusing to me with my second. With A1 it felt like an absolute crisis because I was raised on second wave feminist “values.” By the time A2 was born 6 years later I fully respected their wisdom and actually relished their strong wills. Good for them, recognizing the good stuff and refusing to settle for less!! They won and I have no regrets. Two babies who both nursed long beyond what I planned or expected. I had been so misled, but I learned. They taught me.

I love this heart-led decision that won me over, against my best thinking, during a long period in my life when I often ignored my heart’s voice. My children both become more precious to both my husband and me as time goes on, which is something that probably shouldn’t be a surprise, but it still is. As they begin to move away, and need us less, we lean in a little bit closer and have more space to appreciate and reflect. There is something so exhausting and chaotic about keeping them alive and fed and clothed for so long. It sucks up all of the oxygen for so many years. And now they are grown, both of them towering over me. Now I breathe more slowly and deeply, and there’s a lot less tension, and a lot more space for love.