I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
The word liminal describes an in-between state or time characterized by ambiguity, transition, and the crossing of thresholds. It’s the boundary between what was and what will be. Twilight, a doorway, a life transition: these are all liminal.
In Goddesses in Older Women: Archetypes in Women Over Fifty, Jean Shinoda Bolen writes of the goddess who accompanies liminality, Hecate:
In Greek mythology, Hecate was the goddess of the crossroads who could see three ways at once. When you arrive at a form in the road, she is there. She can see where you are coming from, and where each of the two paths at the crossroad might take you….
Hecate is at the crux of the situation when a woman enters the third phase of her life and heeds a pull inward. She appears indecisive or as if her energy is lying fallow, when she is in this liminal phase. If she stays at the crossroad until she intuitively knows what direction to take, she emerges renewed and replenished.
On my older reinvention blog, I wrote about Hecate multiple times. And I still feel at a crossroads, two years after I left my technology career and began wandering in a wilderness I didn’t expect to confront. Hecate accompanies me on this journey, though it doesn’t really feel like a journey as much as an excommunication from what my life was.
Bolen writes of this phase of life I’m in:
At some point after fifty, or postmenopausally, every woman crosses a threshold into the third phase of her life, thereby entering uncharted territory. In a youth-oriented patriarchy, especially, to become an older woman is to become invisible; a nonentity. From the archetypal perspective I elucidate, however, it is possible for this third trimester to be a time of personal wholeness and integration; when what you do is an expression of who you deeply are.
Today I have my hysterectomy and it’s yet another symbolic passage during this midlife — approaching late life — reinvention. I’ll be put under general anesthesia and will, for a time, be completely unaware of the world (I hope). When I wake up, my body will be different. While it’s been years since I could have produced another child from this old womb, the final eviction of the organ of motherhood still resonates symbolically.
I will have past, present, and future with me today. My father and my 22-year-old daughter are accompanying me, keeping vigil while a surgeon reconfigures my body. This reminds me of the most fortunate thing in my life: my family, and how we support each other.
My father has accompanied me through some of the darkest periods of my life. Today is not dark, but it is scary. And I’m glad he insisted on his presence today.
I recall that my maternal grandmother had a hysterectomy in her fifties. Like me, she eschewed overuse of medical care, until she had to take action. I think of her being with me today. She was an artist, and a fierce mother bear, and she claimed to have an IQ of 150.
Bolen writes:
Hecate is a goddess of intuition. Her three-way perspective allows her to see the connection between past, present, and future. This ability to see patterns that link past situations or relationships and present circumstances is an intuitive way of perception. Seeing how a situation evolved—or where someone is coming from—is not uncanny or mysterious to an intuitive person. At significant junctures, Hecate is silently present as an inner witness. Hers is wisdom learned from experience; she is what makes us grow wiser as we grow older. At significant forks in the road, she recalls the shape of the past, honestly sees the present, and has a sense of what lies ahead at a soul level.
I’m at one of those significant forks in the road.
I recall when I had my third child, the daughter who will drive me to the surgery center today. Her shoulder got stuck on the way out. I was at a midwife-run birthing center not a hospital (again, avoiding overuse of medical care) so there was no option for a caesarean and anyway by then that wouldn’t have been an option to save her, and me. The midwives quickly shifted my position onto all fours, to use the Gaskin Maneuver. My daughter was born perfectly healthy. When they placed her in my arms, I looked at her face and I recognized her. I said to her, “Oh, it’s you.”
What does lie ahead for me at a soul level? Today I’m thinking more about my body than my soul, but the body and the soul inform one another.