A Dark Night of the Soul

dark night of the soul: a spiritual crisis in the journey toward union with the divine

The kids started feeling a bit sick last week. Taylor decided last minute to book a trip to a men’s retreat called Convergence held by the organization Sacred Sons. This would be his second time attending Convergence, held about once per year, and I remembered the growth he experienced last time so was in full support of him leaving for 5 days.

I wasn’t exactly looking forward to taking care of 3 kids by myself, but I was pretty confident (over-confident, actually) that it would be simple and perhaps even easier than caring for them WITH my partner, since there would be one less person’s energy around to take into consideration. We both are home with the kids and each other all day every day, so energy and how ours all interplays is a big deal for us on a daily basis.

So, the night before Taylor left, my kids started showing their sickness much more intensely. Mazzy had night terrors multiple times in the night and kept having to go to the bathroom because she would get so scared she would almost pee her bed. We all share a room so while this was sad to witness, it was also challenging because none of us got great sleep, except Chosen because he sleeps through anything :)

The next day Taylor left while it was still dark out, and it was my first full day on my own with the kids.. It was definitely a huge struggle! I understand that women do this all the time (staying home with three kids) but I’ve never had to really parent by myself. Sure, Taylor has left before for a long weekend to go camping or to last year’s Convergence, but never with a baby as young as 4 months old and not for 5 days (which turned into 6 days, actually, but more on that later).

I tried to keep up with my regular schedule that day, of school-related Zoom calls and my bi-monthly call with my mentor, Donna Maria, but that quickly proved to be pretty impossible with loud fussy sick coughing sneezing kids wanting to be near me at all times. I cut my call with my mentor short and was honestly a little sad and frustrated about not being able to fully participate. How inconvenient to be with my sick children! ;) I ended up rescheduling my work calls and hangout sessions the rest of the week, and started scheduling them for the Monday Taylor would return (which was a mistake, but more on that later haha).

SO, the following days kind of devolved further and further, with all of my kids having night terrors each night and Mazzy vomiting because she was coughing so much, and having explosive diarrhea at the most interesting of times. Both bigger kids pooped in the bathtub, and Mazzy wet the bed during these days of me solo parenting. Not to give you TMI but .. to help paint the picture of how insane it all was.

Taylor didn’t have service at the retreat he was at, and I’m super glad because I’m sure if I could have reached him I would have really tarnished his experience with my complaining.

To top it all off, everything I was cooking for the kids was making it all worse. Homemade soups with lots of garlic and onions to try to boost their immune systems, homemade beans to try to help clear the digestive tract… it all made everyone super fussy (including the baby.. Elder is the most gassy baby I’ve ever had and has a really hard time at night, screaming and fussing, if I eat gassy foods like garlic, onions, and beans for dinner). Not sure what I was thinking besides trying to make sure they were being supported by my food choices, but what little they did eat was not sitting well in their tummies.

So, by the third day I was at my lowest point, kind of flailing, it seems… Really struggling from not sleeping at all and in hindsight was definitely in fight-or-flight mode. My kids were soooo needy and not eating and super fussy and I couldn’t pass them off to anyone else. We couldn’t even go to the park because I wouldn't wish this sickness and all of the related shenanigans on anyone, ever!

I really experienced a LOT of empathy for single moms. Not that I didn’t already but feeling so alone and trapped (this is coming from an Aquarius person, who LOVESSSSS her alone time, and has historically prided herself on how emotionally disconnected she could be from the “drama” of everyday life and emotions, lol, but more on that later, too) and so exclusively and desperately needed was really breaking a lot of shit down in my psyche.

Speaking of single moms, I kept having this recurring thought about Taylor coming back and telling me he was going to leave us/divorce me. I had no clue why this thought kept coming up for me, but it was terrifying when I had two seconds to sit and think about it. I’m sure it had to do with my realization that I am not as badass as I thought I was and I don’t NOT need my husband in this crazy dance of parenting, as much as I always think, “I love him and want to be with him, but I don’t NEED him.” If that makes sense… not in a weird way, I just always felt very confident at this mothering thing, I guess, and contrasting myself to Taylor, I always felt like he needed so much support in parenting our kids and I didn’t. Ego!!! Hello!

Anyway, I had this come-to-Jesus moment as I was laying in bed waiting for my kids to fall asleep, listening to their coughing and sneezing and whimpering as they were trying to do so.. I felt so guilty and sad and helpless.. I let myself really cry for a minute and feel the dark night, then I told myself, “YOU have to decide how you feel and how you react and how you act toward your kids. Choose better!” Up to this point I have to admit, I was not the nicest mama. I was at the end of my rope and super reactive and ungrounded and at times mean. To my sweet little children, who were feeling so yucky. Like, think about an unhinged woman, that was me. I was in my own world and putting up barriers around my heart because I was in fight or flight mode.. I was wanting to “flight” and escape but I was instead feeling the “fight” aspect of this in how I was interacting with the kids..

So, I told myself that I would be calm, grounded, loving, and my heart would be open for myself and for my kids. I would be gentle, kind, and reparent myself by parenting them in the way I wish I would have been as a kid. Which is usually my M.O., but .. you know.. the whole fight-or-flight thing knocked me off my game. :)

That was a huge turning point for me. I thought back to WHY I was pushing my kids away, being dismissive to their emotions, and wishing I could escape this whole ordeal. I wasn’t present. It’s BECAUSE I was parented this way when I was a kid. My emotions weren’t seen, were dismissed as irrelevant, and it was easier for me to escape the sometimes-chaos of my childhood by retreating to my room to be by myself and dive into my books or my imagination.

I started seeing this whole thing as a deep lesson for me, and a mirror to reflect back to me what I needed to nurture and care for within myself. I needed this peek inside of myself, to what my inner child(ren) were feeling now and felt as a kid, to heal that part of myself (or begin healing it) and then move forward as an adult and as a parent in a way that actually feels more aligned to my highest truth and values.

Phew! (Btw, if you haven’t checked out my parenting worksheet and are feeling called to examine your own inner children and parenting style, please read this post and click the “download the worksheet” button to be emailed the worksheet! I’ve gotten really great feedback from people on this particular download!)

So, the following days and nights were easier, because I was present, grounded, and choosing to be loving and not to be short-tempered. My kids really responded well to this shift, as you would imagine, and things started feeling more normal.

Taylor texted me on the day of his flight on his way to the airport and I felt such a huge relief. He was planning to arrive back to our home around 1AM so I told him if he wanted a good night’s rest he should sleep in one of the guest bedrooms because night time was still loopy and not restful for us in our family bedroom. After he got on his flight, I turned my phone off and went to sleep, really looking forward to feeling Taylor’s support the next day with the kids and really just expecting him to come back so grounded and refreshed and happy.

Womp womp! Haha :) I woke up the next day with the kids and turned my phone on to see his message about staying in a hotel near the airport since he was feeling feverish and sick and didn’t want to drive home like that. Darn! I texting him back to please be home by 1pm for my work-related calls so he could be with the kids.. no commiseration or empathy for him being sick at all lol, jeeze. Just a plea to save my own sanity. I could tell that his phone was off so I spent the morning anxiously cleaning so I wouldn’t check my phone every second to see if he was awake and on the road back in time for me to work.

I really felt like I NEEDED to do my work call and NEEDED him to come back ready and able to help. I NEEDED to go back to my old life and my ability to separate myself and do my own thing.

The universe laughed at me :)

Like, did I not actually learn ANYTHING? This lifetime is not about separation and dismissal of emotions and definitely not about being able to escape and put walls up and distance myself from my own self and my children and my partner.

It’s about being IN emotions and being PRESENT with all of the big feelings and big life events and even just the every day stuff that I usually can pretty easily bypass. My coping mechanisms from childhood are SUPER strong and ingrained.

And tbh this time in history has so many of us feeling that fight or flight energy and escaping into our phones and not being truly present with our kids and family throughout the day… I’m not any different in that sense from anyone else who has shared with me about feeling this way lately.

But add on top of that 5+ days of shenanigans to really melt the ego down into goo, and I’m hoping the message really sinks in this time for me, that that ain’t the way.

So, Taylor texts me around midday that he is just waking up, sick, and not going to make it in time for me to work. Then he video called me and I just couldn’t even LOOK at him, because he was laying in bed “just chilling” (my observation, not his) when I felt like he should have been racing around trying to gather his things to get back to us.

I felt really upset and angry and frustrated and embarrassed that I was going to yet again have to reschedule my work calls. Again, so ego-based and self-centered. No empathy towards my husband who was obviously struggling.

This is a reflection of how I am toward myself on the inside, for sure. Not that I realize it always in the moment.. but this is part of my programming that I’m also trying to shed. SO much pressure to avoid feeling. To act like everything is normal even if it’s not. To separate myself from what it really means to be a human being, sickness and emotions and not having childcare and having to reschedule and all of the rest.

I really invalidate it all in the moment. But I’m starting to catch myself. To dig deeper. To release the patterning and programming and open the walls I’ve built up inside me.

Anyway, Taylor came home later that day and was upset with me for not seeing him and valuing where he was at. We sat and chatted awkwardly for a bit and then really dove deep and the walls fell down in both of us and we both cried a lot as we were trying to hold space for the other to talk about what was being felt.

He said he felt sad because he had felt such a depth of love and kindness and “being-seen-ness” from his brothers at the retreat, and came home to feeling such a lack of that with me. Which I can totally relate to because I remember feeling exactly that feeling when I would come home from summer camp each summer as a tween/young teen. Going from such an extreme high at a place where the container was set so magically for us to be really true to ourselves, to an extreme low of “back to reality” with all the humanness that that entailed in my childhood home..

I told him about my recurring thoughts/worries while he was gone about him coming home and saying he wanted to leave us, and he told me that one of the main things that he processed while he was on retreat was his massive fear of ME leaving HIM. He needed to be supported by his brothers as he processed this fear, where it came from, and released it so he no longer lived from that place of fear.

So cool and strange but not surprising that we were on the same wavelength and connected in this way and PROCESSING this same stuff, even though we were so far from each other in distance.

Anyway, I really had a double-level dark night of the soul this past week. I thought I had really aced the first level but NOPE.. had to go through it again in a different way to really get it :) And of course I’m still working on all of it.

I love this process of uncovering, unlayering, processing, shedding, coming out of my shell. Perfect that this all happened during SCORPIO season! :)

I used to think I was pretty set and grounded in who I was… I know, more and more deeply with each passing day and with each passing dark night of the soul, that I really have JUST scratched the surface…

It’s like when Michelangelo was commissioned to sculpt David… (This is a metaphor I heard first from a mentor of mine.) A handful of other sculptors passed on the job before Michelangelo took it on (at age 26!!), because of the faults in the big hunk of marble that would eventually become the perfection that is David. Some other sculptor actually started the job too, and abandoned it after just scratching the surface, basically.

But Michelangelo was reported as saying he already saw David within the marble, in his mind, clear as day. His job was to just remove the layers between the world and David. That is how I feel about “the work” during this lifetime. I’m not adding anything to myself to make myself better. I’m just removing layers and layers and layers that are covering up my true form.

I think that is the path for most of us, actually, if we choose to accept it. :)

We are perfection on a soul level, reflections of the Divine in every way. But we have all these layers over that, traumas to heal, conditioning to remove, programming to overcome… in order to help that inner perfection shine through.

That has been the process this past week for me. Seeing the layers and trying to shed them.

If you’re interested in working with me, or if any of this resonates with you, leave a comment below or shoot me an email :) I would love to learn more about you and hear your story.

Love,

Ashley