The most surreal feelings from 2024
2024 was a big year fom me.
On New Years Eve, 2024, I was pulling cards from an Animal Tarot deck on Cerritos beach with a dear friend. We pulled cards to receive messages for 2025. I remember feeling a big shift coming, watching the sun set over the orange skyline kissing the ocean. I pulled the Eagle - the message telling me that big, big shifts were coming, and to expect the unexpected.
2 days later, I found out I was pregnant (unexpectedly). The rest of the year unfolded with more unexpected events.
To name a few: —
Feeling the intuitive pull to move to Costa Rica to birth our baby there.
Baby “boy” being a girl.
Feeling the pull to India and choosing to “follow the most expansive thought”, leading my partner and I to travel to India at 6 months pregnant. (10000% the right decision in the end, even though there was so much fear around it).
Plus so much more…
However wild and unexpected the beginning half of the year was (packing, moving to a new country, traveling across the world pregnant, spending 2 months in India in the India summer)… It’s got NOTHING on the second half…
Becoming a Mother was the most unexpected surprise of all.
Of course I knew “mentally” that I was becoming a Mother, but truly nothing can prepare you for the experience itself. It’s an experience that one cannot understand conceptually — you cannot GET IT at the level of thought. Moving from “Maiden” to “Mother” is only something that can be experienced. (If you’re a Mom reading this, you know what I mean).
It’s the hardest quantum leap I’ve ever taken. It shakes your reality, it leaves you speechless for months, and it still continues to blow my mind every single day that I grew and birthed a baby into this world.
My labor was HARD. I rode the waves of contractions for 2 days and 2 sleepless nights.
And even thought 2024 was the hardest year of my life — one of understanding death — death of the ego, death of “me” in many ways, death of my alone time, of certain freedoms that existed before..
It was the ultimate rebirth in the best way. The birthing of my baby girl, Emma, and the birthing of Me as a Mother.
Some of the most surreal feelings from 2024:
Driving home from the hospital with Emma. One day she’s inside of me and the next she is next to me. Truly mind blowing to this day I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that she came out of me…
The last few days before becoming a Mom. I could feel it coming. I woke up on September 10 (I went into labor the night of the 11), and I told Roge I needed alone time. I took the whole day to myself - I went to the beach, took myself out to lunch. I could feel somewhere deep inside a knowing that these would be my last moments just me and me.. for a while at least. I wrote a eulogy to my solo, independent self. Simultaneously celebrated the death of that era and the beginning of motherhood.
The moment she was born, watching my belly go from full to empty in one swift push. Feeling the instant relief after days of laboring, feeling my organs instantly feel more spacious, my lungs more spacious. I was high from this moment for days after in disbelief.
The deepest, purest, absolute love that I never knew until meeting my Daughter. They say “there is no love like a Mother’s love” and I will admit that I thought it a cliche until now. There is nothing like this love.
Redefining myself through the process of Motherhood. And yes, becoming a Mother does define you. It cannot not. There was life before Emma and life after Emma. There really is no middle ground in beginning life with your first child. It’s like one day you were you… And the next every single part of you shifts, Your whole life shifts.