{"id":1680,"date":"2017-04-12T21:53:49","date_gmt":"2017-04-12T21:53:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.noevenable.com\/singingcircles\/?p=1680"},"modified":"2017-04-12T23:36:34","modified_gmt":"2017-04-12T23:36:34","slug":"becoming-a-cave-woman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.noevenable.com\/singingcircles\/becoming-a-cave-woman\/","title":{"rendered":"Becoming a Cave Woman"},"content":{"rendered":"

[et_pb_section admin_label=”section”][et_pb_row admin_label=”row”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text” background_layout=”light” text_orientation=”left” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid”]<\/p>\n

I had one of those talks yesterday with my mother – the kind of talk where everyone cries.<\/span><\/p>\n

We got to talking about when I was a baby. \u00a0She described the pang she used to feel around mid-day when she was at work and I was home with the sitter. \u00a0That was the time her body would tell her it was time to nurse. \u00a0But I wasn\u2019t there, and she would feel an ache – a pull to be with me. \u00a0This really got to me, for a couple of reasons. \u00a0First, because I hadn\u2019t known she\u2019d felt this way. \u00a0And second, because I suddenly viscerally remembered how much I\u2019d missed her.<\/p>\n

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My mother and I, 1976<\/p><\/div>\n

My mother has always been a wonderful mother. \u00a0She and my father raised us in San Francisco in the seventies. \u00a0Like other progressives of their era, they approached parenting from a stance of inquiry. \u00a0Rarely did they tell my brother and me what to do. \u00a0Never once did they tell us what to think. \u00a0As our unique interests developed, they did what they could to nurture those interests. \u00a0That meant ceramics, science, and Nintendo for my brother, and music and children\u2019s theater for me.<\/p>\n

Of all the values my parents imparted, one stands out most strongly – the value of pursuing work you love. \u00a0My mother\u2019s passion was for language. \u00a0In her work as a speech language pathologist, she helped children and adults with learning differences learn to read.<\/p>\n

As I got older, I remember asking my mother how she\u2019d balanced her career with caring for us when we were little. \u00a0She explained that with me, for a lot of reasons, it felt right to go back to work when she did, when I was between three and six months old. \u00a0My father was a freelance writer, and the family needed her income. \u00a0But it was more than that. \u00a0She wanted more out of life than domesticity. \u00a0Moreover, she wanted to model for me and other girls of my generation that we could define motherhood on our own terms, rather than conforming to constricting social standards of what a mother should be.<\/p>\n

As I grew, I saw this not only in personal terms, but also in historical ones. \u00a0I felt proud to tell people my mother was a feminist. \u00a0She and other women of her generation broke the mold of what \u201cmotherhood\u201d had meant for their own mothers and grandmothers. \u00a0By working outside the home, even when their children were little, they paved the way for their daughters to one day enjoy an even greater freedom – the freedom to not have to prove that we could do so.<\/p>\n

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1978<\/p><\/div>\n

I respected my mother\u2019s choice. \u00a0I always assumed that when I became a mother, I\u2019d do the same thing.<\/p>\n

But when I became a mother, something happened that made it all look different. \u00a0Cave Woman happened. \u00a0(See my post from a few weeks ago\u2026)<\/a><\/p>\n

And with my discovery of those ancient, primal instincts and ways of knowing, all my old ways of thinking about career went out the window. \u00a0I just wanted to be with my children, and to spend as much time with them as possible.<\/p>\n

Now, that my children are four and one, I have more perspective on what motherhood means to me, and I can say with certainty – motherhood has transformed me more than any other single life event I\u2019ve ever undergone.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s been beautiful. \u00a0Humbling. \u00a0Difficult. \u00a0Fullfilling. \u00a0Many told me it would be this way, and they were right: it\u2019s made me feel more tenderness than I knew was possible, and also more pain.<\/p>\n

My time with my children has taught me more about service than I ever learned from teaching.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s taught me more about Spirit than I learned in Divinity School.<\/p>\n

And in those many late nights, singing to my babies, it\u2019s taught me more about music than I learned in all my years living the life of a professional singer songwriter.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s another thing motherhood has brought me. \u00a0And in this really lies the heart of it.<\/p>\n

Motherhood has taught me that, like my mother, I too want <\/span>more<\/b>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Because my culture, which I had navigated reasonably okay back before I had children, now felt strangely isolating. \u00a0Why had I never noticed before how strange it was to be living three thousand miles from my family of origin on a block with more than 100 neighbors I did not know by name?<\/p>\n

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I remember returning bleary and traumatized from the week long hospital stay, having been literally cut apart and sewn back together. \u00a0Who could I talk to about what we had been through?<\/p>\n

Those streets, which I learned so well through endless walking with my little one in the carrier\u2026 \u00a0How had I never seen it before? \u00a0How beautiful everyone was? \u00a0How precious? \u00a0How vulnerable? \u00a0Covered in their tattoos, the madman on the corner with the scowl on his face. \u00a0He too was someone\u2019s child. \u00a0Where could I bring that feeling? \u00a0I didn\u2019t know what to do with it.<\/p>\n

I yearned for some kind of structure I could enter, with my baby, and my raw new self. \u00a0A space presided over by a healer. \u00a0Someone who could help me figure out how to tie myself back together. \u00a0What did it even mean to be me, now?<\/p>\n

Not knowing how to find that in my own social context, instead I turned inward. \u00a0I dreamed about Her. \u00a0That great, primordial ancestor. \u00a0In jest, I called her Cave Woman, and imagined her Cave Baby too, growing and changing parallel to mine. \u00a0The original Earth Mama. \u00a0Day after day, I called on her like a guide. \u00a0I came to feel her wisdom running through me, filling me with new power, strength, tenderness, and fight.<\/p>\n

How would <\/span>she <\/b>have approached nursing? \u00a0Sleep? \u00a0Diapering? \u00a0How did she parent? \u00a0What did she know, in her gut? \u00a0My friend used to joke that she was going to get me a bracelet. \u00a0\u201cWWCWD?\u201d \u00a0What would cave woman do?\u201d \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Well, guess what\u2026 \u00a0\u00a0I\u2019ve researched this. \u00a0And based on what I\u2019ve read, I\u2019ve come to a conclusion. \u00a0Cave woman would have a pretty hard time living the way we do. \u00a0Actually, i believe she would be like a person forced out of her mind. \u00a0A life spent indoors… \u00a0Living in isolation, without nature, without ritual, without the support of extended family… \u00a0And prioritizing her children\u2019s needs so fully above her own.<\/p>\n

Because here\u2019s what Cave Woman taught me – \u00a0we weren\u2019t meant to live this way.<\/p>\n

In Our Babies Ourselves<\/em><\/span>, anthropologist Meredith Small highlights an interesting juxtaposition between cultural needs and evolutionary ones. \u00a0Culture, she explains, has, in recent years, developed at breakneck speed. \u00a0My great grandmother traveled in horse drawn carriages. \u00a0In just a few generations, technology has developed to the point where most of our conversations happen via particles traveling through the air into tiny screens we hold in our hands, and many of us store belongings in a <\/span>cloud.<\/b> \u00a0I mean, <\/span>wow<\/b>! \u00a0(And I don\u2019t mean to be a naysayer here\u2026 \u00a0I always kind of dreamed of storing belongings in a cloud. \u00a0\ud83d\ude09<\/span><\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

But meanwhile, our physical evolution, and with it, our other deep needs, has not yet caught up. \u00a0Evolution moves much more slowly, so that the slightest change can take hundreds of thousands of years to come to fruition. \u00a0\u00a0Take mothering, for example. \u00a0Today, many of us, like my mother, go back to work when our babies are only a few months old. \u00a0And we need to, in order to meet the needs of providing for our family, let alone the self-actualization that, prior to becoming mothers, we may have prioritized more fully. \u00a0But meanwhile, babies\u2019 needs <\/span>haven\u2019t changed <\/b>from what they were back in hunter gatherer times. My little one needs the same things that her Cave Baby ancestor, hundreds of years ago needed from <\/span>her <\/b>mama. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Milk.<\/p>\n

Warmth.<\/span><\/p>\n

Connection.<\/span><\/p>\n

Protection.<\/span><\/p>\n

To be held. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>This is the predicament of the modern mother: our babies communicate endlessly to us what they need, in a language our instinct understands. But other responsibilities, for example, the need to provide materially for our family, can make it very difficult to do so in the ways that babies are designed for.<\/span><\/p>\n

And this is why I cried in that conversation with my mother. \u00a0Because for a moment, I glimpsed past our modern seeming. \u00a0I saw her as the mama, and me as my child self, with those basic needs that our recent centuries of human progress could not erase. \u00a0I touched into those feelings I had as a baby– \u00a0just wanting to be close to her, to sleep next to her at night, to nurse and be snuggled close to her and be with her wherever she went.<\/p>\n

I felt how, despite her sense of fulfillment in her work life, and her generally positive attitude about those choices, my mother felt this too – that unique call to closeness that perhaps only mother and baby could know.<\/p>\n

I felt how, in a different world, and in a different time, it could have been different. \u00a0What if, like the Yequana, an indigenous people of Venezuela, described by Jean Liedloff in the Continuum Concept, my mother\u2019s work had been shelling beans, surrounded by the other women of the tribe? \u00a0Then I would have been right there with her, picking up a bean here and there where I could, in between rounds cavorting with the older children of the tribe.<\/p>\n

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Photo of Yequana children by Jean Leidloff, author of The Continuum Concept<\/p><\/div>\n

What if my mother could have lived in a way that didn\u2019t ask her to choose between her child and herself? \u00a0What if she and I had grown up in a culture where there was not such a distinction between grown up and childhood life, but where the two went on alongside and enriched one another?<\/p>\n

These cultures existed. \u00a0And, in some places, they still do.<\/p>\n

In Our Babies, Ourselves, Small explains that while we can\u2019t know precisely what our hunter gatherer ancestors would have done, there are cultures whose lifestyle is closer to those ways, and by listening to these people, we stand to learn a lot. \u00a0Moreover, we\u2019d better listen close, and quickly, because with the continuing expansion of Western culture, the world is changing fast. \u00a0Amongst the hunter gatherer tribes Small studied, she described how more and more of these people are now leaving their traditional ways to pursue hourly paid work in cities and towns.<\/p>\n

So what can we learn from modern hunter gatherer peoples about what our own ancient ancestors were like? \u00a0How did women live? \u00a0What did they do? \u00a0There\u2019s so much to say about this, but for now, I want to focus on three points:<\/span><\/p>\n