Mother Woman

We all imagine our lives contain chapters or phases. We generally move through them without much thought or notice. I guess we take that for granted but when you are forced into a new chapter or phase in your life you're left wondering how to cope.
How to keep turning the pages. How to learn who you are all over again.
I spent a good seven or eight years discovering who I am as a woman and also as a mother. Only in the last two did I fully develop this new sense of womanhood.
I embraced it and really found depths of myself I only ever dreamed of, or saw in other women.

I wanted to be that warrior, that goddess, that nurturing mother. I finally found her and suddenly I feel like I've been swallowed up by the enormity of this new part of my life.
I've spent so many years in that role as life giver and mother, now that chapter has ended.

I never imagined I'd be walking this path, living this chapter so soon.
I thought I'd be that crone.
The wise woman, an older woman.
Not me. Not now.

Who am I? Or more importantly what to do with me now?
I guess it's just adjusting to the reality of my life.

Who ever thinks they'd wake up without a uterus one day? Seriously. It's not something you think about on a day to day basis is it?

Perhaps I let motherhood define who I am?

A dear friend said that she's a woman and parenting is something she does.
I find it hard to separate the two.
I have for so long felt like a mother and rarely saw the woman in me.
I'm faced with the reality that bringing life into this world is a memory now.
Past not future.
So how to get that woman back?
How to look inside me and remember the woman warrior goddess?
I felt like I found that woman within me by becoming a mother and birthing.
Can they really be separated?
Womanhood and motherhood.