the embodied crucible of motherhood & marriage

reflections on sacrificing hypothetical possibility for lived reality in service of maturity, wholeness, and individuation

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It’s December already, and this means that I am in a season of wintering and nesting as I navigate thirty degree temperatures on the east coast and prepare for my baby’s birth in *hopefully* just a few weeks. I’m at the end of a long chapter of planning, waiting, and preparing with this pregnancy, which began with uncertainty and loss at its heels and now wraps up with a sense of trust and homecoming. My baby is already a teacher: he has shown me how to respect my limits, honor my heart, and tend my dreams dutifully and artfully. I signed a book deal and bought a home in this pregnancy. I turned down a job offer and started IFS coaching in this pregnancy. I walked through challenges in my marriage and defined love authentically and mutually with my husband in this pregnancy. This child has blessed us so much already. I love this chapter of becoming, this chapter of embodied motherhood and marriage.

When I think about the word embodiment, I get transported back to my twenty-something year old self. She spent every morning engaged in Mysore-style ashtanga yoga practice for over a decade, ate a vegetarian diet, and built a lifestyle that supported her connection to her nervous system. Reflecting back, I see her choices as admirable and noble. I also see her idealism as naive. While she lived a lifestyle that supported her embodiment, she lived disembodied from the tangible, real needs of other people. She didn’t have to sacrifice because she lived in youthful boundlessness, in what Jungian analyst Lisa Marchiano refers to as the world of“unlimited potential”. In Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself, a book that is grounding me and offering resonance right now, Marchiano writes:

“When we are young and have not yet made a serious commitment to a partner, a child, or a career, all possibilities remain hypothetically open to us. At some point, we will be asked to sacrifice unlimited potential for lived reality. Becoming a mother is often the point at which many of us face this sacrifice… In order to become firmly planted in your unique life, you must sacrifice unlimited potential for the manifested reality of ordinary fate. When you do so, you accept the necessity of being “pinned down, of entering space and time completely, and of being the specific human being that one is",” to use the language of Jungian analyst Marie Louise von Franz” (Marchiano, p. 19-20, 2021).

In my twenties, I was dedicated to my responsibilities as a practitioner and community member of my ashtanga yoga lineage as well as 12-step fellowship. Right relationship was important to me, and I showed up for my commitments to these communities with vigor and integrity. But commitment to communal relating is not the same thing as commitment to married life and choosing what is right for your family. It’s not the same thing as taking a holy vow in front of your family, honoring a sacrament, and wedding your life decisions to someone else’s. It’s not the same thing as weaving a vision of a family with your spouse, getting pregnant, grappling with pregnancy loss and fear of pregnancy loss when you get pregnant again, making sacrifices to support that pregnancy, and managing all of the not-so-glamorous aches and pains of pregnancy, from food aversions to nausea to nightly Charlie horses to body hair that populates like foreign algae in strange places.

My twenty-something year old self identified embodiment with both ascetism and idealism. She arranged her life to the needs and dreams of her body by structuring her days around yoga practice and philosophy, poetry and creative expression, and nervous system regulation. When I think about embodiment now, 33 years old and nine months pregnant, I think about the crucible of motherhood and marriage and all of their concomitant sacrifices. In Latin, sacrifice comes from sacrificum, which means “to make holy”. At 29 years old, taking a trip to India and signing up for the initiation of ascetic ashram living was sacred to me, asking me to sacrifice other pursuits, interests, and opportunities. I’m glad that I had the courage to enter that initiation and I know that experience was necessary for my development. It made knowledge and devotion holy practices and cemented them as cornerstones of meaning in my life. But at this point in my life, as I put the finishing touches on my son’s nursery, drink buckets of raspberry tea, and plan a household budget on my husband’s salary, the impacts of sacrifice on my body and habits are more fully felt and particularly localized.

The hopes and fears I metabolize at nine months pregnant relate entirely to the person I am growing and the family I am building. To sacrifice for them culls and sharpens my identity to homemaker, wife, and mother. I still have other identities I tend — writer, teacher, therapist — but they are peripheral forces that orbit around the fixture of my family. Sacrifice in this current chapter means that I accept the fixedness of maternal embodiment and give up the boundlessness I embraced in my twenties. Marchiano (2021) describes this sacrifice as one that “must be made in order to embrace maturity” (p. 20).

To live out motherhood in an embodied way is to acknowledge the depth and dialectics of sacrifice. The body depletes its mineral stores to support the needs of the developing baby in utero. The body changes its brain structure by turning off its deeper processing capacities and turning on its primal drives to tend, protect, and care for the newborn. The body generously accommodates stretch marks, wider hips, and larger breasts to support new life from itself.

For mothers, embodiment is a terrain of tension points between who we used to be and who we are becoming, where we must reconcile parts of ourselves against a new personality’s universe of needs, preferences, and instincts.

We don’t belong fully to ourselves anymore, for we exist simply as mother to someone else now. Lisa Marchiano says the following of this process of initiation:

“Motherhood, with its intense physical and emotional extremes, is a crucible in which we are tested and altered. In the alchemical vessel of motherhood, the heat is turned up high. Outdated parts of our personality are melted away, and new structures are forged. Motherhood is a dizzying high-wire act, a masquerade, and a communion with mortality. It is a falling from and finding of grace, a falling in and out of love, and heartache by the hour. Motherhood is the ultimate confrontation with yourself. Whatever is there to discover at the bottom of your soul, whatever dross or treasure, motherhood will help you find it.” (Marchiano, p. xii, 2021)

Motherhood is helping me find a place of belonging inside myself. Here, I am situated deeply in what feels most natural, instinctive, and connected. Building a family, tending this pregnancy, and nurturing a marriage is the most humanizing, whole-making thing I can think to do for right now. This ordinary chapter that so many other women walk is also one that unfolds in beauty and steeps in meaning as I take each forward step and watch each sacrifice dissolve another layer of attachment to who I was before.

I absolutely love who I am becoming.

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postlude

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A brief note on me: my name is Sarah Ann Saeger and I am a licensed IFS therapist, writer, and post-lineage yoga teacher. My mission is to help you embrace the embodied wisdom of your whole self. You can find me on Instagram where I share short-form musings & lessons related to parts work with over 100k followers!

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