Burying Dreams
How do you move on when your decades long dream of mother-hood finally dies?
I needed somewhere to put it to rest it. We borrowed some money. I hired a bulldozer, an excavator and a driver.
‘Can you dig me a hole in the mountain paddock,’ I asked, ‘I’ve got something to bury.’
The driver looked out across the expanse of bone coloured, sun bleached grass and scratched his head, ‘Sure, how big?’
‘4 meters deep, 40 meters long, 30 meters wide’
‘That’s big, what you burying? A dinosaur?’
‘Yep. Something like that.’
I didn’t tell him it was a multifunctional hole….. both a grave AND a place to channel all my pent up creative, nurturing and protective energy - my all consuming passion which desperately needed expression - in a dinosaur type of way.
‘It needs to look natural,’ I said, ‘so make it oval shaped.’
He shook his head, ‘Nah, we don’t do round, only square holes…’
I was mortified. Here it was again. For years my experience of being childless had been of feeling like the odd one out, always being a round shaped woman in a society where all the available holes of belonging were made to fit mothers, who were perfectly square and slotted in snugly - or so it seemed at the time.
‘It has to be oval,’ I said, and crossed my arms over my chest, ‘or no hole.’
He looked at me sideways and gave a tiny nod of his head, ‘O.K then, oval it is… I’ll give it me best shot, but it’s highly irregular you know.’
‘Really?’ I said, ’Irregularity and me are old mates….. do your best.’
The hole got dug. It was oval and it was big. Then we waited.
For several days we stepped out of the house and wandered over to the edge, drawn to this vulnerable new wound in the earth, mesmerised by it’s startling perfection, it’s velodrome shape and the gorgeous soft orange clay of it’s walls. Our entrancement with the strange hole awakened a manic ecstasy in our dog Molly. She would swoop down over the lip and cut delighted laps around and around the inside of the gently sloping walls, spiralling downwards onto the flat earthen floor at the bottom, where she would stand panting, looking up at us with a huge doggie smile.
Still the rain held off and the grasslands around the excavation remained dusty and brittle. The emus grazed far and wide over the paddock, nibbling on the perennial grasses which poked tiny nubs of green above the dry earth.
Standing on the edge and staring down into my hole, I had no sense of relief. I hadn’t managed to unload anything in there yet, let alone bury it. There was still a tsunami of pent up grief inside me. I’d become so used to that choked heavy feeling. Mostly I was unaware of it except in those overwhelming moments, when the pain welled up to the surface with it’s terrifying immensity. Something in me seemed desperate to keep it contained. I teetered back and forth between the edge of sorrow and rage and then depression as I squashed all that feeling back down inside.
I decided to have a go at ceremonially burying my dreams of ever having a child. I gathered up a few things from the house and stepped out into the evening. The moon was rising full over the mountains, the dead grass around the hole a silver rustling sea. I walked carefully down the sloping side into darkness, the dry crumbly clay between my toes cool and soft. In the bottom I lit a candle and wiggled it into the ground. It was easy to scoop out a shallow depression with my hands. I sat cross legged, my head bowed, not through reverence but with the internal weight of memories and dreams. In my lap I held a small clay statue that I had been given by a friend many years ago. She had made it a replica of the Venus of Willendorf, the pre historic earth goddess figure which was thought to have been a cult symbol of fertility. Huge pregnant belly and voluptuous breasts and buttocks with very little attention to limbs or face.
I remembered my own longing for the growing child in my belly and the yearning to experience that powerful initiation of giving birth into mother-hood, the desire to feed a baby from my breasts, sheltering her beneath the curtain of my long hair as she fed. I remembered my dream child’s full heavy limbed body lying satiated in my arms, one of her own plump little arms flung out in complete acceptance of the safety of my embrace. Her tiny hand closing and unclosing, her eyes moving beneath her eyelids as she dreamed. Her small moist mouth, milk dribbling from one corner down her smooth velvet cheek. Her soft curls glinting in the moonlight…
Bringing me back to the now, to the moon rising for a second time over the lip of the hole, casting one side, the past, into shadow and illuminating the far side as a brilliant blank canvas of orange clay and possibility, with me in the middle. A tiny figure in a huge grave of my own making wondering how it could be possible to die to the pain and step into a new future with any sort of meaning?
I placed the fertility goddess into the scooped out hole and covered her over with loose soil, patting her down firmly. Raising my wet face to the moon I begged to be released from the weight I was carrying, ‘Please help me, please help me let this out…I need to let this go. I need to say goodbye to this dream.'
A magpie warbled, hidden amongst the shadowy branches of a nearby tree and another answered, their poignant, melodic appreciation of the silvery moonlight tickling something awake. Slowly, tentatively, in response, a feeling in my body started to swell, gaining momentum as it moved upwards from my womb to my throat. Being in the bowels of the earth, mostly alone, beneath the moon I felt safe to let it come. It started to surge, to course, to flow powerfully upwards, an impossibly vast wave of anger, fury, resentment… raging at life, at the unfairness, at my inability to birth my dream child, to bring her into existence. My throat hurt like hell, the gatekeeper of that misery. So used to keeping quiet and containing the grief that It couldn’t let it out.
In the the huge stuck-ness of it all a little thought popped up, ‘So then, make a civilized noise. Any sort of noise will do.’
‘ A civilised noise? Like what? How’s that going to help?’
‘Try humming….’
I took deep breath. I began to hum, the buzzing bee noise escaping through my nose, my chest vibrating with it’s deep resonance. The tiny movements of sound and breath inside me were ripples of a stone thrown into a pond. Spreading outwards though my body, waking the grief residing in millions of cells that were me - they all began spewing their sorrow and rage into my blood stream.
Spontaneously the humming started to morph, flowing into a deeper groaning….a groaning from my belly, that went on an on and grew louder and louder and more and more guttural as grief tumbled out into the listening night. Finally my throat released and opened. I started to wail, a screaming, keening death knell. I smashed my fists repeatedly into the ground, pounding into the soft clay until I heard a sharp cracking sound beneath my fists. Toppling over sideways, exhausted of both sound and movement I finally curled up in ball on the dirt. Tears kept seeping out, running down onto the clay beneath my cheek. It seemed like hours and hours of soundless weeping…the water of my tears soaking into the clay, saturating it and then spreading out over the floor of the hole in a shallow pool around my head.
The moon rose until it was directly overhead, illuminating the hole and my prostrate form in bright white light. No past or present, just the now of post rage and grief endorphins, the cold clay and my body lying spread eagled on the ground staring at the white cold orb in the sky.
There was still a wet patch on the floor of the hole the following morning; the beginning of what the hole was to become; a waterhole. I was exhausted but relaxed in a limp languorous sort of way…was that it? Had I done it? It didn’t feel like it. I felt as though it was just the beginning…there was more grief to come, a lot more. I didn’t want the flood of last nights sorrow and rage to dry up down there. I wanted to incorporate that seed into this embryonic wetland. With no rain on the horizon I decided to pump some water from the well into the hole. There is something incredibly satisfying about beginning a big project. Opening the gates to my inner work and simultaneously seeing the waterhole becoming itself seemed fitting. I ran a hose down into the hole and switched on the well pump for an hour or so, watching that patch of tears slowly disappear under a shallow film of water. Eventually the entire floor of the hole was a reflective oval of blue sky and clouds.
Lying in bed that night I noticed a new sound in my world. A high pitched repetitive clicking and popping noise form just outside the window. I couldn’t work out what it was and yet it seemed so familiar. Intensely curious, I re-dressed and stepped out into the moonlight and the mystery. It was emanating from deep down in the waterhole. I peered over the edge, astounded. Frogs! Hundreds of little frogs…where had they come from? They were sitting on their haunches, encircling the pool of water, their heads raised to the sky, singing to each other and the moon. Tears started welling up again. I felt like a new mother of a precious, delicate and wondrous Being, the mother of a tentative community of life, a nascent wetland eco-system. The frogs were both part of that Being and the messengers announcing it’s birth, telling me that it was so. My chest, and my heart in it, felt incredible awe, an overflowing fulness that could only find expression through weeping.
And there I was again, crumpled up on the edge of my grave, on the edge of new life, sobbing my heart out into the night sky and knowing that my life was indeed coming un-stuck in the very best of ways. Cracked open and feeling again the intensity of the polarising aspects of love - both grief and joy.
I snuggled back into bed and woke the next morning to rain. It was falling heavily from dark clouds and soon the gutters along the edge of the roof were gurgling with water, flowing to the down pipes and into the underground network of plumbing that channelled it into the waterhole. I stepped out under the verandah to watch it’s effect and to suck in big lungfuls of the exotic sweet scent of rain. The water in the bottom of the hole was already starting to rise.
A strange ripple, along the entire lip of the hole, caught my eye. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing at first.The frogs were on the move. Hundreds of them, tiny cream coloured amphibians, marching up to the edge, over the lip and swarming towards the house. The dead grass was alive with creamy flashes of movement. Everywhere the ground was popping with frogs. The first to reach the the verandah made straight for the posts holding up the roof. They grasped the posts with their little sucker padded feet and climbing steadily upwards. The exodus of the rapidly filling waterhole lasted for about five minutes, until all the frogs were above the flooding ‘streams’ of the gutters. No doubt perched along the edges of the roof and the gutters themselves. Higher than the new and unpredictable flood that was changing their shallow pond into a deep pool of water. Clever, cautious little people of my heart…who taught them that?
