the freedom I thought I lost

For a long time, I believed that once my dreams came true, I would finally arrive somewhere stable and lasting. That life would settle. That love would feel effortless. That I would no longer struggle.

A happily-ever-after state where the work was done.

Wasn’t this what freedom was for? Wasn’t the whole point of freedom to use it to create the life I wanted and then, finally, be happy forever?

And yet, as I committed to marriage and became a mother, I found myself yearning for all the freedom I had lost.

My dreams had come true. I was living my dream life. I was grateful, happy, and deeply blessed to be in it.

And still, I was struggling.

Sometimes I still do.

First of all, no one told me motherhood was this intense. I mean, the intensity was beyond anything I had imagined.

I knew that having a baby would limit my freedom for a while, and I was okay with that. I thought this would mean not going out at night, not taking spontaneous solo trips, not having the same spaciousness I had before.

And I was totally okay with it.

But no one told me I wouldn’t even be able to go to the bathroom in peace.

I’m sure many mothers remember those early days: the screaming baby finally falls asleep on the boob, and even though you really, really have to pee, you do not dare move. So you sit there suffering on the couch, bladder burning, held hostage by a tiny sleeping dictator.

Of course, those early days pass.

And now, thank God, I can usually (or sometimes?) go to the bathroom in peace. And that’s about as far as my freedom goes.

I’m kidding. Kind of.

My freedom does stretch a little further now. I can go to community events during the day. I can occasionally go out in the evening without worrying that my son will cry the whole time. My husband and I can even go away for a weekend once or twice a year while our son stays with his grandparents.

But compared to the freedom I once had as a single traveler with enough money in her account and only herself to think about, my freedom today is nowhere near that.

And I struggled with this for a long time.

Until recently, when something shifted.

During a healing session with a dear friend, she channeled a message for me:

The freedom she seeks is within her soul.

At first, I didn’t fully understand what that meant. I sat with it for days. Then I trusted that when the time was right, the meaning would reveal itself.

And it did.

One morning, I was outside with my son in the backyard. We collected dry leaves and little flowers and made pretend meals for our feet. For hours. I got so immersed in this silly little game with him that I lost all sense of time. I felt happy. Light. Free. There was nowhere else I wanted to be.

And in that moment, I understood.

Freedom is a feeling within.

It returns when I step out of the cages my mind has built. When I stop telling myself I should be somewhere else, doing something else, becoming someone else. When I stop resisting the life in front of me and let myself be fully here.

I feel free when I am fully present.

I feel free when I let myself experience the moment as it is, including all my emotions, with curiosity instead of judgment.

When I stop trying to fix myself. When I stop trying to fix how I feel. When I simply meet myself, and this moment, with openness.

The way my son does.

I learn freedom from him, even though he can’t make many of his own decisions yet. He is restricted by us all the time. Don’t jump off that. Don’t touch that snake. Don’t eat that. Don’t lick the laundry detergent. The list is endless. There are truly a million ways a toddler can kill himself with his freedom.

And yet when I look at him, he lives so freely.

He feels everything fully. He expresses everything fully. He does not shame himself for his joy or his frustration or his sadness. He lets his emotions move through him, and then he moves on. He remains present. Available to life. Available to wonder. Always finding something to play with, something to notice, something to love.

He has a free soul. Because he has a free mind.

And when I let myself live the way he does — even for a moment, even in the smallest fraction — I feel that freedom in me too.

When I let go of my mind’s cages — who I should be, how I should write, what I should be doing with my little time, how much money I should have made by now, how much weight I should have lost— when I let go of all that relentless chatter and arrive in the present moment, I feel free.

Who knew I would learn a deeper kind of freedom from my greatest attachment?

And here is the thing:

This inner freedom, I would never trade for the external freedom I had before.

I am still learning it. Still practicing. Still forgetting and remembering. Still being pulled out of the moment by the mind, and then called back again by life itself.

But at least I know now that it is not my external life that is stealing my freedom.