The eclipse of parenting

Remembering that the light returns

I was on a hilltop in Texas, and I was alone.

Well, not entirely alone, I had traveled to hill country with one of my oldest friends to watch the total eclipse unfold. But standing on the windswept rooftop of our Airbnb, listening to the wind sing across the bowl of the land, I felt more alone, and more alive, than I have in a long time.

This was my first official trip away since my daughter was born. I’ve spent a night apart from her here or there, but I was never farther than a few hours and never gone for longer than a day.

This time, however, I was boarding a plane to fly across state lines, crisscrossing time zones and ecotones until I was halfway across the country for a long weekend.

It was exhilarating, worrisome, rejuvenating, scary…and fulfilling in a way I deeply, deeply needed.

My friend asked me four years ago if I wanted to travel to Texas for totality in 2024. At the time I was preparing to get pregnant so I answered honestly… “I don’t know.”

Getting ready to have a child felt like preparing for a major cosmic event, one that I knew would be awe-inspiring but that I couldn’t plan for or predict. I told her to circle back closer to the date.

So a few months ago, when she asked me again, I checked in with myself and realized I was ready. After two years of breastfeeding on demand and handling all our childcare at home, I hadn’t been ready to be away for longer than a day. But this eclipse felt like the perfect opportunity to test the strength of my daughter and I’s orbit, the gravity that bonds us no matter how far we tip from one another.

I prepared in every way I could. We listened to Daniel the Tiger’s “Grownups Come Back” on repeat and read The Invisible String nightly. I expertly planned my flights so that we’d have a morning and evening together on both travel days. Even so, I had anxiety for months beforehand. Would this hurt our attachment? Would she feel left behind? Was it selfish to step away?

Before having a child, traveling was one of those things that always brought me home to myself—especially traveling alone (if I were an astrologer I’d blame it on my 9th house north node in Aries 🙃).

The last big trip I had planned for myself was March 2020. It was going to be an epic international pilgrimage, visiting a constellation of countries across Europe in an answered prayer to experience my ancestral homelands. It was going to be the trip of a lifetime, after which I planned to come home and begin trying to get pregnant.

Then, we went into lockdown the week I was meant to leave.

I tried to reschedule it once, then twice, not realizing that 2020 was going to be, well, 2020.

By the time the year was out, and the end of the pandemic was nowhere in sight, I knew I couldn’t wait any longer to get pregnant. It pained me, in a visceral way, to say goodbye to this trip, this last important sojourn, but I knew a soul was ready to come in. And she was. I was pregnant by the spring.

It was an unbelievable joy to welcome my daughter into the world the next winter. But whereas my spirit once felt like a kite sailing on high winds, after having a child, I suddenly became a piece of origami, folded, folded, folded so tight I could fit into the palm of a hand.

It’s hard to recognize yourself when the things you loved most, the ones that defined you—those outlets, activities, practices that always brought you back to yourself—are no longer possible.

I love motherhood, but sometimes, I feel like the price of admission has been the very ribbing that used to make my life the wide, expansive, wind-catching thing that it was. I’m still figuring out who I am now that my life is folded into such a perfectly small, perfectly important shape.

My daughter and I have taken trips together since she’s been born, of course, but as anyone with a child knows, it’s different.

Part of why I loved traveling so much, especially alone, was all the mental space. The ability to slip into anonymity. To be silent for days at a time. To encounter new things from a place of complete observational quietude and interior awe—my only job to be open to the wind and whatever my body and spirit is telling me comes next.

Travel with a child is many things but—bless its heart—it’s not this.

I’ve felt guilty about yearning for these times of solitude and freedom again, but I also realize that holding guilt around this as silly as feeling shame for realizing you need, sometimes, to breathe.

And so that’s what I did. I traveled to Texas to view the totality—an eclipse happening in my own north node—took a deep breath, and reconnected to the freedom at the center of me.

It was a beautiful experience, from beginning to end. The fields upon fields of bluebonnets and yellow butterflies flickering like sparks up into the air. The silver rivers snaking through the twisting junipers. The ancient oats resting their limbs on the forest floor.

I slept in every morning and allowed my body to follow its own rhythms. I remembered my dreams. Incredible dreams, meaningful dreams. I wrote them down first thing in the morning, my eyes misting over with gratitude. The gratitude of remembering one’s own dreams.

Then, of course, there was the eclipse. The clouds parting just enough the moment before totality that we could watch the moon slide like a disc of impossible onyx in front of the sun. Witnessing the world suddenly plunge into a 360 degree sunset, pink glazing the bowl of the land from end-to-end. We laid on the rooftop with the wind whistling around us, looking into the pupil of the sun, and watched the solar flares reach out like the light in someone’s eyes. My body nearly shook with gratitude. For what we were blessed to witness. For the expanse of land, stretching in all directions. For the wind. For the freedom to feel it all, to be quiet and complete within myself for a moment. To be alone with this gratitude.

Immediately after totality, someone put on opera and it floated across the whole valley like an exquisite fog.

Having a young child is a kind of eclipse. One that, like all eclipses, is temporary. And yet, when you’re in the dim middle, it feels as if life will be turned upside down forever.

Before the ancients mapped out the eclipses, before they could prepare for them with their towers and standing stones, I imagine it must have been profoundly worrisome, terrifying even, to witness the sun be swallowed.

To not know if the light will come back.

But laying on that rooftop in Texas, watching the sun come back, first through the tiny diamond on the rim and then opening again into unspeakable light, I remembered…the things that bring you alive will always come back to you.

This is a truth at the center of existence. As predictable as moonset and sunrise.

Before I left for my trip I told my daughter “mamas always come back.” Anytime I had to step away, I repeated it, until it became a mantra for her. I wanted her to remember: Mamas always come back.

And so now, on the other side of this eclipse, this trip that did so much to remind me of who I am, I repeat to myself:

The things that bring you alive, will always come back

The life you were meant for will always come back.

It’ll come back.

It may not be the same, your life, the light, but it’s not meant to be.

Eclipses are meant to change you, shake you, show you the cosmos for a moment so that when the light does come back, you are more grateful than can be imagined.

You’re grateful for your life, for the light, for the love, for the things you hold dear.

You are grateful, profoundly so, for simply what is.

You’re grateful to be alive.

So as I flew on the plane home the next day, reading my fantasy novel without a single responsibility in the world, I soaked it in, that gratitude. And in that moment I was more than a kite, I was a boat in the sky, sailing. I was the water rippling through the clouds. I was the wind.

Later, when my daughter ran into my arms as I walked through the door and hugged me with her whole body, I cried. It was so needed to be away, and it was so needed to come home.

There is a perfection to eclipses, if we can simply allow it.

Because it’s only when we surrender to the eclipses that happen in our lives—motherhood, darkness, birth— that you see what was once invisible to you.

The light you took for granted. The radiating potential that never leaves life. The things that will always bring you alive, that will never forsake you, but will return again and again to help you come back to life.

Eclipses show you the corona of who you are, beneath everything.

The passion, the red threads of existence, the solar flares that continue to burn.

They show us that even in hidden times, we can survive.

And that, on the other side, when the light returns, as it will—it always will— we will once again thrive.