Living our one life with pride of ownership

Visiting minister Keith Kron told our Unitarian Universalist church a story a few weeks ago about The Possum. And it's still sticking with me.

The story was about this mysterious creature who took up residence upside down on the tree across from a cafe where magical things tended to happen. He hung there, bringing residents together in wonder, until a distant neighbor, living alone in grief after the death of his spouse, visited the cafe. The man's encounter with the possum helped him realize his next purpose in life: taking in stray animals on his lonely farm. The possum's work was done and he magically disappeared as unexpectedly as he had come.

Keith Kron also told his own personal story of finding new meaning in a magical way. As a gay teacher in a conservative area from a traditional religious family, he made a new connection and had a revelation: he was unhappily living four separate lives. He was keeping parts of his identity private, never wholly integrated. He shared certain stories with some people, other stories elsewhere. As a consequence, he never felt he was able to take full pride of ownership in who he was.

It takes a willingness to be vulnerable, to merge parts of your private life with your public life, in order to live fully open and wide to what the world does have to offer. It takes a measure of risk to be willing to let go of secret identities and multiple lives in order to intregrate and tell your one story.

His ultimate message is that in order to feel the magic of our purpose in life, we have to tell our stories without shame and live our one life.

When we are Thinkers on the Choice Mom journey, some of us are fearful of how others might react to the choices we are making. Some of us worry that we won't find acceptance from family and peers and colleagues. We sometimes grieve for what we don't have, and project that sense of loss onto the child who is not yet with us, wondering if they will be angry someday about growing up without a father. We might feel shame that in this one area of our life -- finding a life partner -- success has eluded us.

After we become Moms, I've noticed that we tend to realize that what others think of our choice no longer matters to us as much. WE know what motherhood offers us. The only opinion that matters is that of our child, and as they grow older -- generally happy and healthy -- we can breathe easier. We feel more free to tell our story proudly.

In the coming year, it is my goal to bring more of us together as a community so that our pride of ownership in Choice Motherhood can be shared by women who need to feel our strength.

As proactive, resourceful women, we have a lot to be happy about. We are creating new meaning in our lives, with rules that might not work for everyone, but that work for us and our children.

The energy of Thinkers and Moms who connected at the recent Choice Moms networking workshop in New York City was a great reminder for me that we need more opportunities to find magic and inspiration from each other.

I've got five cities in mind as destinations for these gatherings in 2009. But I'd like to hear from you. Where should we meet? Where should we hang up our possum and share our stories so that more of us can discover from each other what we need to learn in order to take the next logical steps in our individual journeys?