Soon after our son was born I realised I was trusting my footsteps in the dark as I learned how to parent him and it’s taking many shifting and forming arrivals to begin to understand what I was trying to do. Four years on, a conversation unfolded with my very dear cranial sacral therapist about what used to happen to our son whilst he breastfed as a newborn. As he sucked I could literally feel how his mind was connected, stimulated by EVERYTHING in the universe. His mind seemed continually switched on and did not seem to stop. Yet, whilst breastfeeding he would suck and suck and suck, suck, suck until – suddenly – his mind finally arrived at stillness and peace. He needed the physical action of sucking (the rooting reflex) to land within himself.

I told others about my experience of him breastfeeding in the past. It seemed to float past them. But she said immediately – YES! That’s what all breastfeeding mothers do. Help earth their kids. Prior to this we had been talking about souls from the angel world, from other planets. Suddenly – BOOM! – my footsteps in the dark made complete sense. My intuition, my water mother-ness, had been helping my son’s first footsteps in arrival. And all my journeys with him since, all the battles in the dark (being questioned and quizzed about why I was doing what I was doing, being told I should be doing it differently, being told what other’s would do in that situation) make complete and utter sense.

It took me four years, two months and eight days for me to feel I was starting to arrive. For me to land, to find the earth within my intuition. Prior to this I’d just been clutching tightly in the storm to what I knew in my heart. To the only way I knew how to parent: to listen and respond. To not be afraid of not knowing but just keep listening to the depths, most non-verbal, in my core, my tie from this life to all life over time, what I knew existed centuries, millennia ago and the seeds that I wanted to sow for the future when so many of these seeds had been lost and tunnel forward, ignoring out the well-meaning advice, blocking out the criticism as much as I could. At last, I arrived, in those still early days of being a mother, with my voice, my identity beginning to re-emerge.