Which Wolf I Try To Feed

I howled like a wolf at this moon... do you know the old Cherokee proverb about the two wolves that are inside of us all? 

One wolf represents all the shadow aspects of being a human, the choices that lead to trauma, anger, envy, greed, struggle, guilt, shame, victimhood, ego.

The other wolf represents the light aspects, choices that lead to joy, peace, love, alignment, uplift, strength, kindness, empathy, truth, faith. 

The wolf you feed is the one who reigns. 

I see this in life and especially in pregnancy and postpartum. We have all of these choice points where we get to decide. We decide who will support us in our journey, we decide where we will birth, we decide how we will approach our healing journey afterward, how we will approach motherhood, how we will view our child and the process of unbecoming who we were and stepping into who we will be in the future. 

In a lot of ways, we get to be blissfully ignorant of the wolves before we enter this phase of life. Or maybe we think we have the awareness but it’s not the same as the level and depth of awareness after we have our baby in our arms and are navigating life from that place. 

But once we step onto the path of motherhood the wolves make themselves more known. And they grow much more rapidly depending on which we feed. It’s so easy to go down the path of the shadow wolf when we are in the sensitive postpartum period. Because of the swirling hormones and the liminality of this time and place in our life, it can be easy to make those choices and roll down the hill into negativity, darkness, and feelings of despair or victimhood… and it’s super easy to be influenced in that direction by external forces as well. 

I think culturally there is this pressure to go toward the shadow side and to embrace the struggle. To identify so strongly with the maiden aspects of life — fierce independence — that we resist moving easefully toward the mother aspects (right relationship with codependence), and eventually the Queen aspects (ability to view everything as perfect and to navigate all situations that present themselves from a grounded place of normalcy and ease).

Releasing the programming that we need to suffer in order to grow is a huge aspect of our cultural and general humanity-wide ascension process. Digging in and examining whether you carry this story or programming, either during your pregnancy or even before you conceive, can pave the way for that work to be done before you are in the throes of your postpartum experience.  

So, in my view, we have varying degrees of these two pathways, always.

The path of normalizing and acceptance, and the path of “problemizing” and resistance. 

The light wolf or the shadow wolf.

(And life is not black or white, we have a lot of variations on gray tones in there as well, but perhaps viewing choices on a spectrum with shadow on one side and light on the other could be beneficial in this example.)

Of course if you are on the path of normalizing and acceptance, you would balk or maybe just roll your eyes if someone came to you and started pointing everything out as a problem that needs to be fixed. 

And if you’re on the path of viewing everything as a problem to fix, you’d resist if someone came and said that actually everything could be normal if you allowed yourself to enter into that space of acceptance. 

I remember so clearly, after I had my first child and was struggling with her constant breastfeeding and how challenging it was for me to get her to sleep at all, for naps or for bed time.

I was complaining to my older sister (who had three kids at that time) and she said “yeah, that sounds pretty normal to me for that age,” and I replied very adamantly with “I don’t want this to be my normal!!!”

Like how dare she try to foist this reality onto me that I was so resistant to! I would not accept this as normal! I had to *do* something to change it so it was easier for me to handle. 

Really, I was just in resistance ... after having two more children since then, I can see that what I was experiencing was very much normal, but I was just so resistant to accepting what motherhood really looked and felt like (and releasing the independence, structure, and control of my maidenhood), so I was creating these struggles for myself, hurdles to overcome externally, instead of doing the work within myself to move into grace and presence. 

One more story that I’d like to share from my experience to illustrate the choice between trust and fear, normalizing vs “problemizing:” 

When Mazzy (god bless the heart and soul of my first child for agreeing to come into this reality as my learning-on child) was around a year old, she got really sick with a high fever that eventually turned into a roseola rash.

Taylor was away and I was by myself with her and her fever got up to 105 and I panicked and decided to take her to the hospital. 

Even though at that point I was adamantly against “the medical system” in most cases, I still had to learn some lesson from entering into that system.

I had to go into a place I thought in some part of my body that I could trust and I thought would support me, in order to feel what it felt like to be — in reality — hurt and traumatized by that system. 

So, I brought her to the ER and it was one of the most traumatizing experiences I’ve had with any of my kids.

I thought they would maybe give her some IV fluids or something. Instead, about seven people from the staff there swarmed the room we were in, told me to take off all her clothes, and made me feel like a terrible parent for not having already given my child Tylenol to bring her fever down at home, or any vaccines to protect her from all the other scary childhood diseases that were just waiting to take her into an even worse state than she was in at that time. 

They were condemning me as my sick screaming child was in my arms, and I started wailing right along with her. I felt devastated, dismissed, negated. I should have left right then and there but I was worried they would call CPS on me. 

They gave me two needle-less syringes full of toxic colored baby Tylenol and were going to force them into her mouth to squeeze down her throat as I was holding her and she was screaming. “Ok I’m just going to give you some of this yummy medicine to help you feel better.” I grabbed the syringes and told them I would give them to her myself.

And that was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done to my kid. She was screaming and staring at me like “you’re supposed to be my safe person, how can you be doing this to me?” The immense feeling of losing some part of the trust she had in me was really real.

Ultimately I got her to swallow most of that toxic medicine, and sat there as a nurse tried to make her want it more by saying “it’s just like candy, look it’s red and purple” when my child had never had any candy or artificial coloring at that point in her life and had no concept of what this crazy woman was talking about. 

I really realized that I was in an alternate reality.

And when I brought Mazzy home and her fever eventually broke and she was feeling better, I had this innate feeling that she was intrinsically different than she would have been had I not given her toxic artificial coloring laden medicine when she was in such a sensitive feverish state. I had altered her constitutionally in some way. It was a huge regret for me. 

And since then, now I know, fevers always break, they are necessary even when they are high, and a high tempest of a fever is a sign that my child’s immune system is strong enough to fight off illness quickly and powerfully and it is not a thing to try to tame with something like children’s Tylenol.

I’ve come to a place where I can and do normalize childhood fevers, after my experience with that one and the others that have come since then.

What I am trying to say with all of this is that I had to make that choice of going into that system that I didn’t trust, in order to see FOR REAL that that was not a safe place for me or my family, to awaken my inner mama bear protector, and also to be able to confidently go into that system as a doula later and not crumple under the pressure of the staff who were pushing their own fears onto the women I would serve. 

Now in hindsight I have that learning in my toolbox and I can share these insights with folks in my community.

But that doesn’t mean everyone agrees with me or wants their experience normalized. 

Sometimes we need to “problemize” our experiences so we can go where we need to go in order to grow. We need our problems to be seen and validated by someone outside of ourselves. And we need to take the path to fix them so we can experience whatever we are needing to experience on a soul level in order to grow.

If I could go back as the Ashley I am now, and do things over again with Mazzy, I would 100% do some things differently. But no one at the time could have suggested that to me. Not my sister who I ADORE and really look up to for advice, or anyone else.

No, I had to learn on my own. 

And ultimately I’ve come to a place now where I realize that normalizing feels flowing and accepting of “what is” to me, it feels like it ends in alignment, learning, and joy, happiness, or bliss. For me and/or my kids. 

And “problemizing” and resisting does and has lead to some traumas that I wish I could take back, but that were necessary for me to learn. ... how alignment feels in my body… and how the opposite feels as well. 

This is my navigational compass now: my body tells me.

I feed the light wolf because I want it to thrive inside me. I feel it innately inside my body when life is in flow, when I’m surrounded by support, and alternatively I feel very clearly when I am headed down the alternate path of seeking imperfection and struggle for myself. 

So, in general I guess I’m reflecting on all of this because of some experiences I’ve witnessed in multiple clients and friends as of late.

I am reflecting on the path we take as humans in this really challenging reality we’ve all constructed for ourselves, the path to growth and experiential learning.

And how I have to come to a place, as someone who has traveled these pregnancy/birth/postpartum/parenting paths for a handful of years now, to share my story but also sit with unconditional love and acceptance of the reality that other folks choose and create for themselves, as they do their own work to heal and grow, and that what works for me is not what works for everyone or anyone else.

That’s my work now in this stage of life, where I’m (please Goddess) done having children and digging deeper into the Queen/Sorceress archetypes in my own life and way of navigating my world.

Really looking forward to deepening into this stage and sharing my thoughts along the way, as they come through!