We are all in the flow whether we know it or not.
Published in The Taoist Online
2 days ago (thetaoist.online)
Today is an incredible day for my family. Yet the significance fully hit me only moments after I woke.
My daughter Cora is returning to work after over a year of maternity leave following the birth of Isla last November. Isla was born twelve weeks prematurely and had an intense and traumatic beginning. I’ve documented the first year of her life here in Modern Women for those who aren’t familiar.
Her older sister, Roisin, a well-qualified and experienced early childhood practitioner, is going to provide daycare for Isla for three days per week, and I am going to care for her every Friday. Roisin also home-educates her own ten-year-old daughter, Amari, who is autistic. Again, more about that here if you’d like to know.
What might seem like an everyday situation is, to us, breathtakingly wonderful because of our unusual and traumatic family history. Today, I’m yet again blown away by the flow of life — of a Universe that is always working in the direction of our healing and well-being.
Roisin and Cora were separated in childhood during what I’ve always referred to as the divorce from hell. Cora and her two younger siblings were abducted by their father over twenty-five years ago and taken to live on another continent. Roisin and her older sister remained with me.
Other events happened that estranged my oldest daughter from the rest of the family, and Roisin and I found ourselves alone with one another.
It was very hard for her to grow up without her brother and sisters, and I know that she has struggled with feeling like the one on the periphery of sibling relationships. The separation of children from their parents and from one another has devastating effects, many of which are lifelong.
There were many years of both joyful reunions and heart-wrenching goodbyes at airports. For those who have never experienced it, there is little that comes close to the agony of letting go of the hands of our children at a boarding gate, not knowing when we would see each other again.
Roisin and Cora spent their entire lives having intense sisterly reunions lasting no more than a couple of weeks each time, then being forced to unhook themselves from the bond they had formed and let go again. It was the same for their brother and sisters — for all of us.
Our hearts have been excoriated from all of that repeated ripping apart.
When, a decade ago, Cora chose to take advantage of her dual nationality and come to live here in the UK, we were delighted but could not have foreseen how events would unfold.
All she knew was that she was following the pull of her heart in taking such a giant leap out of the familiarity of her upbringing and extended family in the USA. No sooner had she arrived, but her partner of eight years broke up with her, and she found herself broken-hearted in a strange country with nobody to hold on to but me.
That terrifying circumstance, which initially felt so unbearably cruel, turned out to be exactly what she needed. The bereavement opened up her original mother’s wound at being separated from me as a five-year-old.
There were moments when we feared being swept away by the emotional pain and seemingly impossible circumstances in which we found ourselves.
Through this shocking situation, she was given the opportunity to be re-mothered, and I was given an opportunity to redeem my guilt-ridden mother’s heart. There were many weeks of sobbing and holding one another. My broken-hearted daughter became her five-year-old self again, and it was she who I was wrapping my arms around.
Only a matter of weeks later, feeling terrified and not at all ready, she took another leap of faith and accepted a job in the environmental sector. She met Isla’s father on her first day in that job, and they both knew instantly that they had each met their soul mate.
It still makes us smile in wonder at the intricate weaving of events in each of their lives that needed to happen to bring them together. They didn’t sit down with a plan for their lives, carefully working out all the steps and details involved in finding the perfect job and partner. They each simply followed their hearts in the everyday, ordinariness of their day-to-day lives.
They found one another, both in spite of and because of huge events that happened many years before. Events that they had no part in planning.
My part in our family story has been to stop trying to control the bigger things that I can’t understand, to learn to forgive, and to listen with trust to my inner wisdom.
Be still like a mountain, and flow like a great river.
Lao Tzu
Every one of us is living our ordinary lives, mostly unaware of the flow of something far greater that runs underneath and around us. To me, it feels similar to swimming in a warm river that supports me from beneath and all sides while I breathe above its surface.
Sometimes, we might feel as though we are drowning in this river. We thrash about, fearing for our lives, exhausting ourselves in our attempts to swim to an uncertain shore. We cling to bits of driftwood in the form of our identities, relationships, jobs, and habits.
Twenty-five years ago, the flow of this river took us through the equivalent of some difficult rapids and over a vast waterfall. There were moments when we feared being swept away by the emotional pain and seemingly impossible circumstances in which we found ourselves.
The river continued to flow on, and we had no choice but to flow with it. Sometimes, thrashing around and sometimes floating.
The river doesn’t mind what we do. It will reach its destination regardless, and we can either exhaust ourselves with attempts to swim upstream, or go with the flow and glide gently downstream.
Time and again, life has presented me with these questions;
‘What happens when you stop trying to divert the flow of the river?’
‘What changes when you simply let go, and float?’
Over the past year, Roisin has moved away from the town in which I raised her, taking her own leap of faith to uproot her family and move closer to the city where Cora and I reside. It was a big step, and the birth of baby Isla was a massive catalyst for a change which she may not have initiated without her.
This tiny baby, who was born under such difficult circumstances, is playing her own part in drawing us even closer together. She has ushered in the next stage of family healing.
None of us sat down together a year ago and planned the details of Cora’s eventual return to work. Yet, through natural events which have unfolded over the past few weeks, both Roisin and I have found ourselves freed up from unnecessary obligations and available to offer care for Isla.
There have been almost no obstacles to overcome because we have all allowed ourselves to be carried by the natural pace and flow of the river of life. Our shared history reassured us that, somehow, everything would work out.
This morning, I am both profoundly grateful and filled with awe to witness my family flowing together into the next part of our journey.
I could not have foreseen this remarkable day.
Written by Grace Delphia
·Writer for The Taoist Online
Stubborn optimist, sharing stories of resilience. Grace is a therapist and former midwife. For privacy, names have been altered,