Stone Circle Love, mom

@Figment @Katla @Swift @Skáld (tags for ref or joining)

For Katla and Swift.

The decision not to conceive you must have come as a surprise. I was thinking about your birth ever since I was a little girl and had stubbornly warmed a finch chick back to health under my belly.

If you could see into my mind, you would know it’s great turbulence. You would consider also that such storms can be moved through one being into the next. If you could see this world, too, that is forever evolving, you would also come to fear how quickly the permafrost melts, and how a place can stand one day and be gone the next.

I know this means I will never share my joy of the world with you. That you will never smell a crisp winter morning. That you will never hear laughter, enjoy a good meal, or feel the love I have for you. You will never see the eyes of your father, never meet your aunts and uncles and cousins, your grandparents, your partners. You will never be parents. But you will also never know blood, or illness, loss or grief. You will never have to make this decision. You will rest in peaceful nonexistence.

I think you would have thanked me.

But you had other plans.

Katla, that night it was you who came first to me. I suppose you could not wait any longer. Maybe you’d had enough of my protests, the cries and writhing of my body that afflicted us all. Maybe you knew even then this was to be the nature of our relationship- me asking for one thing and you determined to do the opposite. You made me a mother that night, and I could do nothing but stare at you. It was simply that I’d never seen anyone so beautiful in all my life.

Swift, you were second born and never to let me forget it. I’d never known such a fire as you, how you resisted even as I strained with all I had. You were not prepared to part from me and there was a point I believed you would not! I prayed to gods I didn’t believe in and swore heavily at your father for putting you there, and one of those things managed at last to work. Even in the dimness there was the ash of your fur and the roundness of your muzzle and I reached for you; my son.

I held you both, brother and sister, together at my chest and laughed, or cried (I can’t remember which). My throat was too raw for sounds, my tongue panting too hard for words. So it was with my mind that I spoke to you.



Hi babies. I can’t believe you’re here. And you’re you!

I’m your mom.

I’m probably going to make mistakes (a lot of them).
You’re probably going to upset me at some point. And I’m going to upset you.
I'm gonna say the wrong things sometimes, maybe even do the wrong things.

But I promise you, whatever happens, this is always true:

I love you.



And I knew, for all my resolve, there was nothing in this world that could have prepared me for the magnitude of you.