A little Mother’s Day Medicine especially for you:

My daughter, Felix Kalypso Xochitl, is in her coming-of-age year. 

So far, it’s been a year of emotions, connection, passion, creativity, and compassion. During late Summer we will have a 4 day sacred Xilonen / matriz ceremony for her… where she will receive sacred teachings from, and give her commitments​ to, her family & community. This year has been all about her preparation for the ceremony, for becoming a woman. We have opened conversations about sexuality and the sacred female body and begun to learn ancestral skills for womanhood… but all this is for another time. 

Right now I want to talk to you about Sorcha, my daughter’s pregnant foster cat. We got Sorcha because Fia (short for Felix) wanted her. I have to admit, it took me a bit to put 2 and 2 together and see how perfect it was for her ceremony year – to guardian a female feline birthing body. It has been truly amazing and I highly recommend it. Among other things, Fia has done tons of intrinsically motivated research until she got passed all her worry and was able to relax and listen to her intuitions and read Sorcha’s signs.

Anyway, the thing I want to highlight in this post is a little tidbit Fia found in her research. Do you know that when a cat give birth it is called? . . . omg. get ready for it:

when a dog give birth it’s called whelping.

when a cat gives birth it’s called queening . . .

QUEENING

Yes, it’s called queening… Imagine if you had had that term introduced to you as a young becoming-a-woman instead of that weird term “deliver.” I so often hear people, women, mothers, use the term deliver – even those who are quite aware and awake in other areas. This is a kind of erasure, erasure of the powerful, inspiring, royal reality of birth and mothering.

Mail gets delivered. 

Packages get delivered. 

Products get delivered. 

Babies, our intimate strangers crossing threshold of worlds, do not get delivered!

Doctors may think they deliver. We may even agree. Truth is mothers, along with their babies, bring new ones into this world from the womb-world. Mothers definitely don’t deliver their babies. I used to always say mothers give birth, until I met Sorcha and sat with her while she queened​, looked her in the eye, witnessed her incredible beauty before, during, and after the actual birth. 

I witnessed the making of a queen.

What if we were to embrace birth as the royal rite of passage of becoming QUEEN? What if this were our collective agreement about what becoming a mother is, about what birth is, about what mothering is?

Here is a picture of Sorcha right after giving birth, looking oh so queenly, to inspire you.