I am pleased to present the second place winner in our spring 2009 Writing It Real No-Contest Contest. Mary Oak has woven her childhood longings and adult experience into a rich tapestry in the service of informing many through her life review. As she writes in her bio information, after surviving a cardiac arrest in 2007, she is completing a “multifaceted illness memoir to provide inspiration to those seeking to explore and understand healing in unconventional ways. Wounding’s Grace: Confessions of an Extraordinary Heart is a working title. As you read, notice the way Mary keeps us firmly grounded in time in her narrative, although she is moving from present to past and then slowly back toward her present. Although we don’t have the rest of the story here, we leave this excerpt fully aware of the enormity of what the author is working toward. I am eager to read the completed book and hope to see it one day soon.

Excerpt from Wounding’s Grace: Confessions of an Extraordinary Heart
by Mary Oak

Earth Mother. Goddess. Earth Mother Goddess. The clay pendant rests in my hand. The size of a thumbprint, she is a replica of one of the ancient figurines predating weapons or war. She is round, the droop of her breasts pronounced on her full belly. There is the slightest indication of hands, folded on the sides of her belly. She is rounded off with thunder-thighs, no legs below. From behind, her bum looks like an inverted heart. The Mother Goddess must sit a lot with all that nursing. Her image is in rich currency among middle-aged women as we drift further from the culturally sanctioned norm of beauty. We look to her to remind ourselves there are other terms and once they were honored. Worshipped, even. She is also known as a goddess of love, my friend Patti told me when she presented this figure as a gift to me. In addition, she is a fertility charm, which made us laugh, sagging mother of four that I am.

The Goddess in my hand is the rounding down to womb and breast, embodied by me for many years. No head. No feet to go anywhere. For a long time, it was all I wanted for myself. Originally, this was my act of rebellion against a long line of suffragettes and feminists and an upbringing where liberation was defined as breaking away from societal expectations. In the nineteen-twenties, my grandmother was one of the first women to receive a Master’s degree in economics. My mother dedicated her life to low- income housing reform, lobbying in D.C and founding a prominent housing organization. One aunt worked in the Secretariat at the United Nations; the other was a key figure in draft resistance and became a lawyer for union workers. I reacted against the expectations put on me of aggressively pursuing a successful career. My mother left me to be “cared for” by Magda, a Hungarian refugee who was mentally unstable and abusive. I had an internal agenda to prove the value of embracing motherhood completely, compelling me to fulfill that role and function.

 I graduated from high school with no intention of going to college and was busy becoming a dancer. I had been dancing for a couple of years. Tentative and awkward at first, I persisted. I gave myself to dance, again and again, pushing through the doubt and hesitancy, pushing through and continuing. It wasn’t long until it was hours a day. Evening classes, weekly; bi-weekly; five nights a week; intensives; a summer residency. My collection of leotards and footless tights grew, in varied hues until my whole wardrobe was that of a dancer’s. Practice. Warming up and stripping down and sweating. Phrase of foot, arch of back and arc of arm. Contract and extend. Leap and land. Drill of repetition and thrill of the same movement sequence opening to effortlessness. The ecstasy and grind of it; surrender and grace.

Dancing entranced. The bold intimacy of meeting others through the vocabulary of movement. No plan to follow, improvisation relied on instinct. The vibrant sonic textures of the synthesizer borne out through body; bending in rise and fall; undulation and turn in accord with the fierce beat of the Conga drums. Expressing resonance in rhythm and breath; in rhythm and current; in rhythm and resistance. The thrum of finding rhyme with another, seeping into dancing beyond a given choreography. Tonio. Our primal dance between the sheets. We danced in wild joy devoted to exploration. Carnal incarnation. Days and nights continuously in motion.

I sheared my hair off, an unwritten requirement, but I still stood out from the boyish dancers, my breasts too big and cumbersome with a bounce that inhibited me from moving entirely freely. Already I was marked for the Mother. Gitta, my dance teacher, noticed this as was her want: to take everything in with penetrating awareness. Wiry and petite, she was honed down to essential poise, pure elegance. Her composure fascinated me. Dance was her meditation; her mastery in being centered was total and deeply affected me. She and her husband, Manfred, had come from Berlin and started an avant-guard dance theatre — Group Motion — that was quite the rage in Philadelphia at the time. Because my lover, Tonio was a dancer in the company, I began to have personal contact with them, and their daughter of two, outside of the studio. In observing Gitta attending her little one so fully, I caught scent of another dance. Raw instinct, angelic pull, it tugged at me. When Gitta got pregnant for a second time I witnessed her shifting throughout her pregnancy, irradiated with mystery in the phases and transformation of gestation. As her belly rounded and breasts filled, I yearned for access: to move towards birth.

Tonio and I got a call just after Gitta gave birth at home. We threw our clothes on and rushed around the block from Tonia’s to Gitta and Manfred’s. The placenta had just been delivered and the midwives were busy. In Gitta’s arms, the babe was enfolded, and I was rapt by the steady, radiant gaze between mother and child. Manfred beamed as he announced his daughter’s name, “Aura.” Tonio and I stood aside, squeezing hands, dazzled and amazed, silently welcoming this new one. Betsy, whom I would later assist at births, brought the placenta over to us in a bowl so we could watch her examine it. She stretched out the amniotic sac, translucent and expanding, and pointed out where it had ruptured. Then she let it rest, wrinkled in a heap, beside the gleaming rawness of placenta. She unfolded this organ of transfusion to reveal the veins and arteries branching into a tree of life. Still reeling in wonder, I watched as Aura rooted in to nurse.

Years later, while my baby sleeps, Tonio and I talk on the phone. Dishes are piled up in the sink. My four-year-old son is nearby, occupied with the elaborate train track he has set up on the living room floor. From time to time he makes engine sounds. My eight-year-old is outside working on his fort with a friend. My mother radar is spread to encompass them all while Tonio and I catch up. This is our first contact since he and his new lover attended my wedding almost a decade ago when I married a man whom I met shortly after Tonio decided to pursue gay liaisons. Back then, Tonio had referred to my future husband as ” your high priest” and found it fitting that after leaving dance, I would settle down to raise a family with a spiritual teacher. Tonio has become a successful choreographer. He tells me about a recent piece he based on the pattern in a quilt that his grandmother made when he still lived in Cuba.

“You’re still dancing, aren’t you?” His question startles me. It is impossible to imagine dancing again beyond the mother dance that engages me now, seared through with its entirety, claimed by Mother Goddess as I am.

I am thick in the dance of creating the home I always longed for, filling the mother dearth of my childhood. Back then I caught glimpses of Mother Goddess in the guise of my best friend Marggie’s mother. Their home, the rectory of Summit church, was just around the corner from my house, but worlds apart. Here was a mother: always home, home for her children in brisk cheer. Her hands were rarely still: washing dishes or clothes, folding laundry or batter; kneading bread and stirring soup, slicing oranges into “boats” for us, stitching Halloween costumes, knitting scarves and mittens. Soothing, she provided, always: home. For years now, every time I don my apron to bake cookies, I conjure her in her bright warm kitchen, preparing sweetness. Earth as mother: source and sustenance.

Now my kitchen lies in shadow and my children are growing, going, gone. I turn the Goddess figurine in my hand. Gaia. She was the mother I bonded with from early on, in refuge. Although I had a mother of my own, she was busy forging her way through a demanding and meaningful career. In the end her gifts to me have been far greater than if she had fulfilled domesticity. But I didn’t always know that because when she wasn’t there. In her absence, I was hurt by Magda in her refugee madness. I cried out in raw hunger for a loving present mama. I set out to prove this was possible, through me.

I leapt into becoming a mother with delight! In each pregnancy my heart grew full to overflowing, as spirit became flesh within me. Every time, I reveled in the primal creativity of a baby becoming through unfolding embryonic growth. There was urgency in me to devote myself completely to the service of another. And another. And another. And another. I oriented myself entirely to motherhood: cradle of becoming and sustaining. Rounded in the softness of it, the breastfullness. I was at my best full melon- bellied, dreaming and feeding each child into being, tending angelic flame.

My Madonna stance was fed on dreams of inexhaustible nurturing. I gave myself completely away with no regard to replenishment. By the time my third child was conceived it was routine for me to be on my own at home with the children with only meager involvement from my then-husband, and in the following years his absence escalated. I grew haggard with continuous waking, my sleep skimmed, stalled in dream state and never deeper, my heart grown floppy as the belly of this figurine.

Heart and womb. Both are muscled organs overlaying openness; fibrous bands wrapping round hollow space. Heart and womb. Both share a capacity to contract, to contain. The muscles of the heart spiral round from its apex, a shape shared with galaxies. This whirling pulses in the subtle body as well: a wheel of energy parallel to the heart of flesh, a swirl in circulation. Rendered as a lotus, this heart’s gestation seeded by love, empty of self, filled with another. A mother’s heart: all embracing.

Through me, I strove to give Mother Goddess reign within, giving myself to motherhood completely. I once wrote an article for Mothering Magazine entitled, “Developing the Heart through Family Life.” I see the humor in it now: my heart developed to a point of failure, failing to be as mighty as the Mother Goddess I aspired to.

There is an accommodation that is accented in the physicality of mothering: the way one’s appetite and sleep patterns change, the squirt of milk when one’s infant cries. Reflexes of responsiveness that cross over energetically ~ a kind of diffusion of being as primary to mothering as holding is: womb first, to breast, to lap, this gesture extends into consciousness. A psychic merging that the child, in growing, must emerge from. Having a sequence created a sense of prolonged diffusion in me.

When I weaned my fourth child my body had been engaged in feeding for fifteen years, solid. What resume can this accomplishment be honored on? Sharing substance with another, eating for two, keeping the milk supply up. I joked about it being my own form of “Nursing School.” Energetically, though, according to my acupuncturist, it was a recipe for depletion, a set up for the diagnosis of heart disease that followed, three months after my last child was weaned: my heart too large and too open. Enormity of heart doesn’t pose any risk for the Mother Goddess, but it turned out to spell danger for me, mere mama.