Everything is a beginning

the saudade of motherhood

There was an album I listened to on repeat when I was pregnant with my daughter. I’d put on my big headphones, sink up to my neck in our tub, and listen to all sixteen minutes of Ólafur Arnald’s When We Are Born…over and over again.

I cried every time. But I think that’s why I listened to it. I needed to cry. It felt healing in a way nothing else did.

In the warm arms of the water I’d hold my belly and rock, feeling emotion move like an ocean inside of me.

The first song of the album is called “Saudade”, a Portuguese word with no direct translation, but that gestures towards the painful, delicious, potent longing that comes from loving, and missing, something deeply—including something that hasn’t yet happened.

As much as motherhood is a grounding, it’s also a birth into the life-long waters of such utterly untranslatable feelings. Love, longing, bliss, grief. It is an experience of setting up residence in saudade. In emotions so deep, just to touch them is a kind of fulfillment. So complex they can’t all-the-way be spoken to, unless in song, unless in poetry.

If I didn’t cry during the first three songs, tears would inevitably find me at the end. The last song, “Undone”, begins with a spoken word poem by the late Lhasa de Sela. I highly recommend giving the song (and the whole album) a listen. But the gist of it is this…

At the moment of birth, as we leave the only place we’ve ever known and are literally pushed out into a mystery, we all must be thinking… “this is it, this is the end of my life.”

When really, it’s just the beginning.

It’s a fragile, emotional truth. One that, when I sink into it, holds me like a baby.

How many times have I thought this?

How many times has the world I’ve been living in grown too small? Has everything around me grown so uncomfortable that just when I think I can’t take it anymore, a trap door opens beneath me and I began to fall into what, I’m sure, is the absolute end. Only it isn’t.

As much as I thought of the baby in my belly when I listened to this last song, I thought more about myself. How pregnancy and becoming a mother is exactly this. A process of growing too large for the space you inhabit, of having a motion, a wave, that is so much bigger pick you up and thrust you out, out, out into something entirely new. Of thinking your entire world must be ending—when, really, it’s just beginning.

In the end, this is why I listened to this album on repeat. And why I still do.

To remind myself that these deep, unnameable feelings that wash in with the transformation of motherhood are healing.

That the end of each cycle may feel scary. It may take everything you have just to stay present as you’re pushed out into what waits for you.

But that everything, everything is a beginning.