The dream/nightmare must have been inspired by the dinner conversation with my husband on 'what motivates a person'. When I woke up, the last thing that I remembered of the nightly vision was a lady at a party leaning right into my face and telling me: "I can't feel your fire.”
Child-proving away my life
Holy shit! I rolled my growing baby belly from one side to the other, I couldn't feel my fire anymore either! What had happened?! Here I was, still in the process of 3-D-printing my child, and I had already started to cut down my high-flying dreams to a toddler-safe height of 10 cm. I was child-proving my life before a child was even running around. Even though I had told myself that I would not lose my identity in parenthood, that I would not equate my identity to ‘only’ the mother role, I had already started to round off my edges to protect my child from any foreseeable or imaginable dangers before it had even left my body. And it seemed that my reasoning on what was safe or not had gone off the rails a bit.
'Voluptuous Edginess'
My child was not going to be that helpless, or that easily influenced or damaged by any of my edgy actions! And if I did exert any influence on my child, I would want the imprinting image to be me as a strong role model and a fiery woman; and not as someone who had given up her dreams and ideas because someone somewhere (and not even the child itself) might raise a disapproving eyebrow!
A twinkle returned to my eye as I decided to reclaim my edges and started planning my next steps. This was going to be fun! My mischievousness was back and I already had an inkling on how it might revive me in all aspects of life - professionally and privately. What had started to feel flat would become voluptuous - an image befitting my gestating body. Hey! I had already gone up two cup sizes, and unaware of the extent of my protruding bump I kept involuntarily bumping into walls and people. Flat no more! 'Voluptuous Edginess' was my new motto!
Implementing ‘good enough’ mom
During the next couple weeks I told a friend that I would stand model for her act drawing class to commemorate my pregnant body, and I signed up for an additional coaching course that would run well through my pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood and that would force me to continue coaching throughout. I knew that without an accountability structure in place, I might end up trying to accomplish perfection in motherhood even though I knew that what I actually wanted was to become a ‘good enough’ mom.
Where are you playing small? How would it be to live your edge? Is perfectionism running your life?