Dream Harvesting as a Mother

 

I crawled out of bed at 1:30 am, grateful for the four hours of sleep I managed but aching for more. My body was heavy with fatigue as I shuffled downstairs in the dark.  Too tired to shower, I twisted my nappy hair into a claw clip and called it good enough. While my witchy latte—organic coffee laced with ashwagandha, cacao, and cardamom—steeped its magic, I spooned yogurt into my mouth and laid out the crucial items: passport photos, expired passport, application, cash.

A few days earlier, I discovered my passport had expired—just sixteen days before my departure. After a brief moment of panic, I booked the closest urgent passport appointment in Atlanta - five hours away - and shot off a desperate text to my circle of sisters.  Within a few short hours, meals, rides, and childcare were handled. The necessity of the village isn’t a theory when you’re a single mother—it’s your lifeline.

A few mornings later, I was flying through the night, belle hooks in my ears, Ain’t I a Woman accompanying me as I reflected on the windy road that brought me here.

The First Call

Fourteen years ago, Uganda first called me.

I don’t remember how I found the announcement for the Earth Birth Symposium but when I saw it, something in me lit up. The midwife, the traveler, the woman with a curious and persistent love for African culture—all the parts of me were pulled toward Northern Uganda like a tide I couldn’t resist.

But leaving Nehama, my only child then, was bittersweet. She was just four and a half, stepping into her own rite of passage as she began attending a homeschool co-op in Little Haiti, Miami. The thought of being an ocean away for eleven days felt deeply unsettling. And yet, alongside the maternal ache was an intoxicating thrill—the freedom of solo travel, the promise of meeting birth workers from around the world, the taste of relief from single-motherhood duties, if only for a brief stretch of days.

Of course, the old voice of patriarchal motherhood tried to shame me: How selfish. How could you leave? Nehama will surely need therapy to recover from this damage. That voice is relentless.

But underneath it, I heard another one, clearer, older, deeper—what I now call the mama essence. She’s untamed, primal, and always aligned with the truth of my soul’s purpose.

She said clearly: Corina, you must go. Nehama will be held. And what you bring back will feed her too.

So I went.

The journey was long—over twenty-four hours of flights, a night in Entebbe, then a

twelve-hour bumpy van ride north that included a flat tire and several hours on the hot, dry roadside. By the time we arrived it was 10 pm and pitch black.  There was no moon and no city lights, only the outline of the solar-powered, dome-shaped birth center rising in the darkness.

As we entered, thirty traditional midwives holding candles encircled us, their voices united in song. When one song ended, they shrieked with joy and began another. Their fierce welcome carried me past exhaustion into a kind of rapture. It remains one of the purest, most magical moments of my life.

 

 

Remembering Myself

The next ten days were a blur of cold bucket showers at dawn, shared meals with birth workers (mostly doulas), and teachings that stretched my mind and heart: homeopathy, the history of Uganda’s civil war and its toll on mothers, low-tech interventions for postpartum hemorrhage, cord burning, closing the bones, making palm wine and shea butter.

 

Amid the learning, I felt myself re-emerge. Not just Corina the mother or the midwife. But Corina the traveler, the dancer, the drummer, the writer.

There were tears too—the ache of trying - and failing - to connect with Nehama through choppy internet; the way her father’s bitterness blocked my attempts. I only spoke with her once or twice in those eleven days. That remains the one sharp thorn in an otherwise luminous time.

But there was also sisterhood. I met Rachel Zaslow and Olivia Augusta, co-founders of Mother Health International, both teaching with toddlers at their breasts. Rachel’s daughter, Amaya, would nurse while absentmindedly playing with her other nipple as Rachel calmly led a workshop. I felt at home instantly in their unfiltered, embodied presence. 

What they had built with the local midwives was extraordinary. In a region with staggering maternal and neonatal mortality rates, Ot Nywal Me Kuc (The House of Birth and Peace) became a sanctuary where outcomes transformed. In nearly 20,000 deliveries, they’ve never lost a mother and they’ve reduced the perinatal mortality rate by 87%.  Standing there, I made a vow: One day, I will return to volunteer.

The Return

Now, fourteen years and two daughters later, I am preparing to fulfill that vow. In just days, Jade (11) and Amaya (9) and I will fly to Entebbe, then make the long drive to Atiak. We’ll spend two months there—me working at the birth center and possibly the local

hospital, my girls immersing themselves in the rhythms of Ugandan life.

This time, my excitement is interwoven with maternal worry in a different way. The vaccines. The bugs. The food. The time away from school. The littles are apprehensive. But I trust this choice—sometimes as mothers we must walk forward with trembling faith, knowing the gift will only be clear in hindsight.

As a Jewish mother of melanated daughters, it matters to me that they connect to their African and Middle Eastern roots. In Miami, this was easy; diversity was everywhere—in our friends, our community, our music, our daily language. Here in the rural South, it takes effort and intention. The melodic sounds of Haitian Creole, Cuban Spanish, and Jamaican patoi were traded for the slow drawl of southern twang.

Travel is our bridge.

In the past five years since we moved here we’ve touched down in Guatemala, Colombia, Hawaii, Mexico, and the Bahamas. And now Uganda.

Dream Harvesting

Uganda isn’t the only dream that’s blooming. I feel myself in a season of dream harvesting, after nearly nine years lost in the underworld of postpartum mental illness, perimenopause, midlife awakening and dark night of the soul.

I remember the unraveling vividly: Amaya was just three months old when it started.  I was sleepless, brittle, anxious, snapping at my kids, resenting my partner, empty of my usual passion. I returned to work far too soon, with my baby strapped to my back, and carried

the crushing weight of being breadwinner, midwife, and mother of three. I felt like an imposter and failure in every role.

The shame was suffocating—the midwife who couldn’t enjoy her own motherhood.  I was too ashamed to ask for help so I suffered, as too many mothers do, in silence and alone.

Until one day at the Miami MetroRail, standing with my girls after a museum trip, I looked down at the busy freeway below and thought: I just want to jump. 

My heart pounded in my chest. The only thing that kept me rooted were their faces.

I couldn’t let that be their story.

 

 

So I made a another vow: to reclaim my mental health. For them. For me. No matter what it took.

I humbled myself, borrowed money, sought help, and slowly rebuilt. Over time my energy returned. My self-compassion deepened. I reconnected with my daughters. I left the toxic relationship that was draining me. And I began to rise.

Out of the ashes came MotherFly—my new body of work, my purpose, my offering. I stopped helping women just birth babies and started helping them birth themselves.  I discovered matrescence and began to use it as a framework to empower mothers to not only birth babies but new business, new creative ideas, and new purpose.

Now, years later, my podcast is thriving, my coaching programs growing, I’m speaking internationally, and celebrating my first 10K month through MotherFly programs.  I feel anchored, embodied, and supported by a matrix of relationships and practices that keep me anchored.

So when I saw the expired date on my passport, I didn’t unravel. I acted. Because this dream is too close, too alive, too sacred to abandon.

Through MotherFly, I’ve found my wings.

 

And I am unstoppable.