In this episode, Kimberly and Marysia discuss how they’ve navigated the challenges and benefits of single motherhood. In many ways, their lives and stories run parallel: surprising pregnancies, marrying into another culture, becoming single mothers with babies, and living out single motherhood while being entrepreneurs. This honest, raw, and tender conversation offers vulnerable testimonies and nuggets of wisdom for other single mothers. They emphasize the difficulties but importance of building kinship and community, undoing internalized shame, and tending to community. Marysia’s School of the Sacred Wild is now open for enrollment with Kimberly as a guest teacher!
Bio
Marysia Miernowska is a teacher, author, Earth activist, green witch, folk herbalist and healer rooted in the Wise Woman Tradition of Healing. Born in Poland, she carries with her a lineage of European folk herbalism. Marysia honors plants as sentient beings, elders, healers and teachers. As a Plant Spirit Communicator, Marysia channels messages from the Earth spirits and guides students to connect with plant spirits through meditation and through their bodies, to receive guidance and learn about the constituents, energetics and properties of plants. Registration is now open for the School of the Sacred Wild and can be accessed through the link below.
What She Shares:
- Journeys into pregnancy
- Trauma and shame around single mothering
- Finding kinship and community
What You’ll Hear:
- Marysia’s surprising journey into motherhood
- Managing cultural differences as a couple
- Traumatic experience becoming a single mother with a baby
- Kimberly’s pregnancy and divorce
- Single motherhood sisterhood
- Navigating single motherhood challenges and joys
- Marysia entering single motherhood
- Receiving judgment for divorcing
- Physical manifestations of wounds and healing
- Functional freeze reactions for survival
- Finding the village as single mothers
- Fairy godmothers and aunties
- Bringing in chosen family for children
- Cultural differences in background and local living
- Anticipating the death of empty nest
- Reviewing mothering choices
- Grief and cultural isolation
- Predictability and calm in hiring anticipatory help
- Working through shame in asking for more help
- Nervous systems and being trapped
- How culture is physically organized disruptive to kinship
- Spontaneous social interactions
- Taking risks and extending our ways of gathering
- Doing it imperfectly and letting go of shame
- Tending to the ecosystem of families, parents, and single mothers
- School of the Sacred Wild herbalism program
- Creating kinship and a deep sense of belonging between human & non-human
- Holding vitality of the Mother archetype and cutting back, releasing, and discerning
- Kimberly to guest teach in School of Sacred Wild
Resources
Website: https://www.schoolofthesacredwild.com/
IG: @marysia_miernowska
Course Link for Listeners: here