Nothing Is (Ever) Missing

For four years I really did think something was missing in my life. The concept consumed me, and any free head-space I had was filled with internal dialogue that dragged me around in circles. One particular dialogue kept stealing the limelight: my legacy.

A legacy is something that lives beyond your years—a mark you make on the world that will be remembered after you’ve gone. Your body may die, but the essence of your life lives on.

Speaking for myself, I think this was where my female hormones kicked in and drove the need to leave something that I created, made from me, that would live on after I was gone. It was me ticking the legacy box within.

I started to question whether the void of a legacy was driving the yearning for a child, or was the void of a child driving the need to leave a legacy?

It was one of those heated debates that would have drawn a good crowd if it only happened outside my head.

Then I came back to basics. Why do I want to be a mother? I broke it down and articulated every aspect of motherhood as I defined it: every trait and every act. I started looking at where I was experiencing those traits already, in my current life, and started listing them off. I kept going until I’d found so many examples that I truly felt I was all of these things already, to the same degree as I imagined being them to my own child.

In studying with Dr John Demartini, I had learned and intellectually found it to be true that nothing is ever missing in our lives. It’s just that whatever we perceive to be missing is appearing in another form that we’re not acknowledging or recognizing.

All of my needs were being fulfilled and I was already a mother, exactly as I defined motherhood to be.

I ruminated on the concept of legacy again with three specific traits that kept drawing my attention back. I’d partly defined motherhood as “to nurture, mentor, and inspire,” and these traits led straight into the next great (internal) debate.

On one side was the concept of nurturing, mentoring, and inspiring my own baby and therefore pouring all of my energy into one person and focusing my ability to nurture, inspire, and mentor into this single human. In the other corner, I argued the point that if I had one of my own, it would limit my capacity to help tens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of other people who I am seeking to display these same traits to, in order to have my mothering needs fulfilled to the same degree.

Would I be limiting my contribution on this planet by distracting myself with my own child?

I actually shocked myself with these thoughts and left the debate room.

Later, when I returned, I realized that this was my legacy. In proving to myself that nothing is missing in my world, I would live a life acting out all of my mothering characteristics with other people—as well as my plants and my cat, which made it to the list of where I already display the nurturing trait.

Nothing was missing, but the thought that something was missing was the very thing that made me shift gears, making my time on Earth that much more worthwhile and my contribution to humanity that much greater.

Am I thankful for it? With my life.