Walking with scars
Hello friend,
It's Majo.
I turn 40 this year with new identities I never asked for.
Widow. Single mom.
When I look at the length of my life, everything was pretty smooth up until age 36, which is right about when I struggled to conceive my first child.
The next couple of years became a brutal initiation into devastating loss, grief, and transformation.
My first birth and postpartum were very difficult. When my son was about a year and a half years old, things began to stabilize. My husband Enrique and I got pregnant with our second child — a daughter.
But a few days later, he was diagnosed with the most aggressive, rare and late-stage, colon cancer anyone could ask for. My best friend. My lover. My husband. The father to my children. The sweetest, most generous man I have ever known…
died three months later.
I gave birth to our daughter a few months after he died.
As you can imagine friend, it's been hard for me to be public about any of it, except for this one Instagram post.
I've been quite busy picking myself off the floor, and also taking care of my babies.
Grief has rocked me to my core.
While the hole in my heart will never disappear completely, the fog is beginning to lift — and I can see the shore again. In November, it will be two years since he passed. The grief isn't raw anymore, not the way it was. It has matured. And I'm learning to walk with the scars.
Honestly, I have wondered whether I would write to you ever again.
For many years, I was quite a public person — I had my podcast in which I interviewed several experts. I wrote and published a book with a top publisher. I ran a coaching business.
And then I went silent. I lived some life.
I'm a different person now— more willing to take risks (knowing life can be short), to listen to the voice of my inner artist, and to trust my own inner authority as a single mom with two littles.
Who am I though? I don't know. I'm still becoming — like many of us going through transition and transformation, in that complete re-structuring of our life, future, faith, and identity.
Many teachers and coaches talk to you "from the other side." They have figured it out, they have crossed over. They have experienced the transformation, and have integrated it enough to guide you through it.
Sometimes I wish that were me, but it isn't.
I'm still in it. My youngest is only 16 months old. My kids and I are living with my parents now.
I'm writing to you from the cocoon — grappling with the big questions in life, groping for the walls in the darkness, while seeing the cracks of light streak in through the walls. Sure, I have some tidbits of wisdom I've earned the hard way. But I still have a lot of questions.
I’ve certainly been humbled. And it's made me think back on something I used to only think about from the outside.
As many of you remember, the heroine's journey has long fascinated me, which is why my podcast was called HEROINE , and I interviewed women about their transformations and the various inflection points in their lives. I was always interested in the "underworld" — and the initiation that would mark most of the ancient Goddesses.
It was kind of cute though. Intellectual.
Well, now it's alive.
In this darkness, I want to narrate my experience.
We don't get enough content from people still in process, still figuring it out, way-finding without a map.
In the next couple of months, I'll be sharing short vignettes from my life (memories, moments), along with some wisdom and reflection. Resources that are helping me in transition.
You don't have to be a widow, or even grieving a death, for any of this to be for you. Maybe your transition looks like a break-up, a move, an illness, postpartum, a career that ended, a self that no longer fits. I'll share the specific things that are actually helping me carry this — the books, the practices, the people — not as a formula, but as company for whatever your own initiation happens to be.
I hope you'll stay close while I find my way — I think we might find it together.
Until we meet again,
Majo