"Til the landslide brought me down"

“But time makes you bolder… Even children get older… And I’m getting older, too…” I sing to my daughter in bed. Her head, and somehow the rest of her long toddler body, is resting on my chest as she finally starts to slow down. I can’t see her face, but her breathing tells me her eyes are getting heavy, as each breath slows and her chitter-chatter of stories slows, too. “Zog is a DRAGON, and Princess Pearl is a doctor… But where is Tabby McTat going?”

As I continue singing the lines as a last-ditch effort in tonight’s now 90-minute-long bedtime, my mind flashes back to scenes a decade ago in Canberra – a daydream that happens often when I sing this particular song. I had not long arrived in the country’s capital city with hopes of being a full-time Master’s student – one of my first largely failed quests to put down my corporate career and start again.

From the time I got my acceptance letter, I had three weeks to organise moving across the country to a city I hadn’t seen before. It was a cold Winter’s morning when I landed and rocked up at the townhouse where I had found an available room online with two male roommates.

A serendipitous set of events led me to a pub to watch a choir sing on one of my first nights there, and having long loved singing, I joined the choir the following week.

Over the months ahead, we’d meet each week to learn various poppy-folky songs. The room was organised often in a semi-circle from basses to sopranos – as we sang the lyrics on music sheets, led by an amazingly kind conductor. Each piece would start out pretty rough until we’d finally master a verse, and the room would erupt into clapping in amazement of how our voices could flow together in what felt like a perfect harmony. Fleet Foxes’ White Winter Hymnal was one such example of a song that we all seemed to marvel at the beauty in which our voices would appear to almost frolick together.

Most of us became friends – with many of us becoming the absolute best of friends – as we’d live up the precious time of our lives of being in our early to mid twenties. We’d sing in a choir together on a weeknight and then hit the dance floor on the weekend – laughing at people’s expressions when we’d say we all met through a choir. “Like a cool choir!” we’d laugh, “Not like a weird one!”

I remember very clearly when we learnt Landslide, which, perhaps surprisingly, was one of the harder songs we did learn – mostly because we all had a mental view on how the song was sung which was quite different to how the music sheet presented. For example, the low notes were actually a lot lower than Stevie sang – and the pacing was also much more deliberate than what you’d hear on the radio. Still to this day, I chuckle a little when I sing the line, “Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?” because the word love was so much lower than the rest of the line and my blended alto-soprano range would freak out at the jump.

I’m snapped out of my reminiscing momentarily as my daughter does one of her little regulating twitches followed by a loud exhale – a sign she’s entering a deep sleep – as I sing the line,“Can the child within my heart rise above? Can I sail through the changin’ ocean tides? Can I handle the seasons of my life?”

The seasons, huh. Oh, the seasons. I laugh a little to myself when I reflect on the season that was the 23-year-old version of me singing Landslide in Canberra. Such an intensely serious little soul carrying the world on her shoulders. I had left my job and taste-tested Europe (the good old 7 countries in 2 weeks on a bus edition), the west coast of Canada and then back to Spain and Italy when I realised that I needed more education certificates to fulfil my dream of actually living overseas.

I had hoped the travelling would dull the blunt stabbing of my first real big heartbreak, but I arrived in Canberra still feeling the year-old wound. It should have been the only time that I would fall madly in love with someone who was never certain about me. Whose reluctance I’d take as a challenge to win over, and not as a red flag that it just simply wasn’t meant to be. He’d end up falling in love with me, or so he’d say, and I’d end up falling into my own American dream with my California boy in a bubble of false belief that I’d finally be safe. That I’d met someone good and smart and capable and not damaged like I saw myself to be. He would change my life, right? Wrong.

Well… maybe right. He did change my life in many positive, beautiful ways. But as I sing the lyrics reflecting on the seasons, I’m saddened to think that only a few years later I’d go on to make the same mistake in believing I could make someone choose me when all the signs suggested otherwise. That I could contort and mould myself into the person they suggested they did want, as opposed to truly loving and owning the person I am.

The more I reflect on all my years involved in romantic relationships, the more I realise that this has been a recurring theme – to attract someone unsure and make them certain. Like a work project to conquer, or a prize to win. And each time I have been wounded when the inevitable truth could no longer be fought – and so then I’d find the arms of someone who believed themselves to be a saviour. The arms of someone that would smother me in a “love spell” that I’d then quickly wake and try to break out of. And so to and fro, to and fro the pendulum went. You’re either winning love, or running from love, right?

Until now. Until this moment. Lying in my apartment with my daughter asleep, heavy on my chest. No sign of a white knight or jousting contest anywhere.

“Climbed a mountain and I turned around… And I saw my reflection in the snow covered hills… ‘Til the landslide brought me down”

Much has been written about children being mirrors – about how they make you confront the parts of yourself that need love or repair to continue growing. My daughter has held this mirror to me many times over when it comes to things like control, surrender and my relationship with work – you know, the small stuff.

But what I had not once anticipated was the mirror that motherhood would hold to me about self-worth, self-love, boundaries and self-forgiveness. About what it means to be emotionally safe and secure, and what we model to our children when we allow ourselves to be in situations that do not provide that. That do not represent self-worth or self-love. That do not model strong boundaries of trust and self-protection.

I know this might sound silly, but it can be hard to recognise when you’ve found (or created) an environment absent of these things. Often we’re told unhealthy environments are loud or aggressive or visually uncomfortable – when in fact they can appear as normal as the sun rising each day. Nothing loud except the energetic tension. Nothing aggressive except for the repetitive wounds one makes to oneself by allowing trust in all its forms to be minimised. By continuing to believe that if you could just be a certain way, then perhaps you would be more loved. Nothing uncomfortable except for the two individuals who, despite the greatest of intentions, have demons that do not play well together.

It happened little by little and then all at once. The earth beneath me ruptured slowly until I could no longer ignore its presence. The landslide did indeed bring me down. It brought me back down to earth and into this warm, cosy bedroom that’s peaceful and calm – with a toddler asleep on my chest and the words of a Fleetwood Mac song bringing me back and forth between the past and present.

“Well, I’ve been afraid of changin’... Cause I’ve built my life around you…”

Dismantling a life of seven years, and rebuilding your life with a toddler, is no small feat. Over the past six months, there have been weeks where I have enough energy to feel as if I could conquer the tallest of mountains with my child on my back. And there have been weeks where I have felt as if I am dredging through the muddiest of fields with no map. Many weeks feel as if I take three steps forward to be forced five steps back. But amidst the mountains, muddy fields and two-step dances, there is much happiness and peace – for everyone involved.

Once the fear of change subsides, the opportunity to meet one’s self anew becomes clear. Time and time again I have been grounded by motherhood and grateful for the familiarity of the daily rhythm it requires of me. I am blessed every day to have a daughter of the brightest nature who is pure joy – even, yes, even as we approach the threenage year and I am left wondering to what extent it will break me.

And in the familiarity of motherhood, I am also faced with the unrooted feeling of getting to know myself again outside of motherhood – and outside of a relationship that no longer held the space for my whole self to be seen. I am amazed by the seemingly mundane moments where I am staring at a computer screen wondering what colour casserole dish I’d actually like in my kitchen – or what food actually brings me joy.

“Ah, take my love, take it down…”

As I realise my daughter is now well and truly asleep – after a week that the Gods decided to throw at me to laugh at my last article about “direct and indirect mothering” – I gently roll her off me and onto the big bed we share. I brush away her golden curls to kiss the side of her face, as I do my nightly ritual of thanking the Gods for this life – for her, for our health, and for every day we’ll spend together for at least another 60 years.

It’s nearly 9 pm, but my mind is racing with all the admin I need to do to get ready for the weeks ahead. To get back to working on my PhD after a couple of months off, to finding some more of a village and getting my daughter ready to slowly slowly slowly start a new routine of care.

I close our bedroom door and find my laptop. It’s been a long day, and there are a million unknown crossroads and rugged paths ahead – but my heart is happy, and my soul is clear.

“And if you see my reflection in the snow covered hills… Well, the landslide will bring it down.”

With care,
Kiya

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