Today is the 27th birthday of my first child. She and her sister changed my life, made me a better Feldenkrais® practitioner and — as all successful children do — tore out pieces of my heart when they left home to become who THEY are.
They found their way into this series of blog posts because I would never have had children and they would never have had the mother I became, if I had been willing to be who I thought I should be.
My girls were born of deep longing and incredible struggle. When I married their father, I had no idea that I was too young to agree that we would not have children. Nor did I know I didn’t have to do it.
At that time, conception was rarely a solitary endeavor, so my first step was to renege on that agreement. I no longer remember how many months of persistent knocking it took, before he opened the door.
Many more months later, I came face-to-face with the fact that I did not have an ‘easy’ profile for getting pregnant. Over the course of countless meticulous monthly temperature charts, anyone could see that I had two cycles in which I could have have gotten pregnant. As I said, I have two children.
When Jaime was 6, Samantha was 2, and I was deep in the realization that I was not the mother I became a mother to be. That’s a story in itself, the end of which is that in order to become that mother, I left their father. It was suddenly clear that I would never be an old woman lying on her deathbed remembering an idyllic journey through life.
My decision to become who I knew I had to be cost me friends and Feldenkrais® clients. I learned that there will always be some people just can’t deal with who I really am, and that they need to do what they need to do, while I do what I need to do.
Moshe Feldenkrais told us repeatedly — “You do not change who are you just because you walk through my door to work with me.” Nor do we change who we are when we walk into the room to work with our clients. If we are not who we are in the rest of our lives, we cannot be who we are in our work.
If you want more Feldenkrais®clients, be willing to be who are you are… in your studio and everywhere else.
