Sometimes you look around you and it feels as though other people have their shit together. Not everyone’s world becomes a mythic maze after they have kids. Some people buy homes and go on vacations. There are moms that go back to work. People have organized schedules. Some people grow up and actually fit into adult life. Not everyone journeys into the forest of the witches only to discover they are the witches. Not everyone falls into the hollow in the tree and never finds their way back to what they thought was the real world. Some of us travel from one underworld to the next. But the depths that we discover ignites a creative spark that cannot be extinguished, no matter how hard things get. 

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I am not yet out of the underworld of motherhood, and without yet forming a new identity, without yet reconstructing who I now am, I find myself dropping deeper, further down the hole of womanhood, deeper into the bottom of the well. I actually think the well is bottomless. But something miraculous happens to us Persephones, when we learn to be queens in the land of our deaths. 

Deaths in plural because we never stop dying. Death in plural because composting who we are is our journey of becoming. Death in plural because as a woman, or a person born with a womb, or a person who identifies as a woman, our shedding is who we are. 

Becoming a mother is the most beautiful, heartbreaking unfolding experience of my life. 

And motherhood shattered who I was. My belly broke, twice. The core of who I was expanded, then torn apart, emptied out, sewn together, lost, and pulled into some surreal reconfiguration. Uncategorized. Unrecognized. And then again. It’s as if who I was before was scattered on the hospital floor, and I had to collect the pieces and gather the dust and take it all home along with my newborn baby, and find a way to put it back together again. 

So I put the broken bits and the dust of the old self in a jar. And I took it home. At first the jar stood on the chair I use as a nightstand, next to a pile of very important unread books. At 3am, awakened by a beautiful baby who needed my body for nourishment, I would look at the jar and promise myself to get to it – to put myself back together – real soon. Then the jar started to collect dust. And because I never had time to close it properly, the dust from the outside started to mix with the dust inside the jar. “I should really close it.” I thought. But my arms were wrapped around a baby at my breast and I never got to it. 

One day, I found it on the floor by the side of my bed. The jar broke. The content was all over the place. It mixed with the dusty old floors, with dog hair, and with glitter that I never cleaned up after it spilled because I never got to it. So I tried to pick up the pieces of broken glass and I accidentally cut myself. I collected whatever pieces of old self I could find and it was now mixed with some drops of blood too. I put it in a new jar. I wanted to collect the dust as well, but a toddler needed me and I didn’t get back to it until a year and a half later. By then the dust of self was inseparable from the rest of the mess. Some of it got stuck in the cracks of the wood floor. 

Once, I found something I thought was a pile of vegan, gluten free cookie crumbs, and I didn’t realize it was the crumbles of a part of my old self, so I sweeped it and threw it away. Only two years later I realized that it was my inner stripper. She was uncovered on an art car at Burning Man in 2007, and she was so hot and fun and crucial for my well being. And now I realized that she was gone. She’s been gone for a while and I didn’t even notice. I cried. And then someone else was crying in the other room so I had to go and take care of them. 

Then a different rhythm of being a mother was developed. The isolation of the pandemic wove itself beautifully into the dust of old identities. It snuggled me. Comforted me. The jar was shoved into a dark closet at some point when I was attempting to tidy up the house. It’s easier to move through the world without a sense of self when your identity is not necessary because no one is out in the world. Home. Books. Plants. Trips to nature. Relief. 

When it was time to re-emerge and come out of the Covid Cave, my personhood was still nowhere to be found. Or maybe it was non-existent. I couldn’t remember where I put the jar. And I was pretty sure its content was no longer relevant.  A vulnerable moosh picks the kids up from school. Awkward. But loving. Don’t tell anyone, but I’m actually not an adult. I’m just pretending. And I know I’m not doing a great job. But that’s ok. 

And without realizing, without noticing, the hormonal cocktail of pregnancy and birth and breastfeeding, and the new rhythm morphed into a different new road made by necessities and survival, slowly surrendered to a whole new ocean of unknowns. Not yet out of the underworld of motherhood, I find myself, now in my mid-forties, on the threshold of a whole new underworld. I didn’t know there were more depths of darkness to discover. And here it is. Perimenopause.  

The journey of hormonal shifts that reshape the person. A removal of sheathes of identity, and a  dissolution of concepts, connections, and containers. An undoing and rewiring self and society. No longer existing in the world in ways that were known before. Entering a wild melting of shape, voice, patterns. A collapse of conversations that swirl in a universe that you no longer fit in. 

For some women and people with wombs, the process of becoming a mother and all the changes that come through it is a deep untangling from the maiden archetype, and a messy, yet formative journey of rebecoming. Then when Peri arrives, she swirls through the new formation and throws them into a new fire of reorganizing who they are. 

For some of us who didn’t become mothers but really wanted to, the transformative fire of midlife can be a whole other world of reckoning, of wrecking balls, of wreaking havoc, of weakening some connections to unhelpful concepts, and of reconceptualizing who we are as we unearth who didn’t become. 

For some of us, the storm of new existence is a continuous shattering, a butterfly that hasn’t left their cocoon yet, and is now remelting in the chrysalis, with the imaginal cells trying to reconstruct a new sense of self from a self that was not yet formed out of the soup of self from before. 

Our journeys are different. But we also find ourselves in one another. Some of us are more together. Others are forever tumbling weeds. Some of us are way out there. Others have a sense of being established in the world. Some of us feel strong at times and fragile at others. Some of us walk the edge and then move toward the center, only to become tightrope walkers. Some of us walk the paths carved by those who came before, and then learn how to carve our own paths. Some of us are on roads that keep leading to dead ends, until one day, we find a hammer, and we break the wall, and ahead of us there’s a vast open field of possibilities. We weave together different selves. We’re not just one thing, but many. 

The earthquake of big life transitions can become opportunities to reinvent who we are. The creativity is intertwined with the ferocity of dissolution. Decay is a prerequisite to fertility. Right now, with the backdrop of a collapsing civilization, the power of womanhood – the physicality of womb, the symbolic language of femininity, and the archetypes that emerge out of feminine encoded energies (this is not a gender thing) – is needed. The crone is needed. 

I want to glorify Perimenopause along with other women rising now, to say yes to this untethering process, to wrap the body going through this massive shedding with a blanket of soulfulness. I want to hold hands with other marvelous women and walk toward the forest of this new becoming, paint the world with the beautiful blood that sheds from the shifting of working wombs to wisdom wombs. I want to lean on the bark of an old tree and let the merging of skin and bark tell a new story about what beauty is and what desire can become. 

I would LOVE to know where you are on your journey, who you are unbecoming, what you are turning into, what’s in your dust jar of old forms, and what the fire of your transformation is teaching you. What does your underworld look like? Are you the queen of your deaths? Share a bit of your mess in the comments. Witnessing each other is wisdom making. 

And if this speaks to you, and you know this will also touch the heart of others in your life, please share this with them. 

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With so much love,

Hagar