A Mother's Embrace

Is writing really a bad idea?

I guess it is a bad idea the same way having kids is a bad idea. Your heart will break and there will be tears and you are so tired all the time. And yet. There is also bliss. Unimaginable joy. Euphoria.

There is LIFE in all its twisted glory.

Keep on writing…—but not for success. Write to tell us your truth.

— Kati Helsinki, in a letter to Steven Pressfield

My truth — the last two-ish years I’ve been enthralled in birthing, and subsequently raising, our child. I have been roaming another world completely. I’m softly returning from a landscape of labor, trauma, pain, mysticism, magic in the mundane, anxiety, overwhelm, the deepest love, a daughter who holds the key. I faced death and therefore life. Deep tearing throbs still, breast as nourishment, wild desire, fevers, chills, a range of excrements that leave the body from clear to opaque, milky to bloody. I’m unsure if I’ve fully returned from the underworld or if the work of transformation is still happening. Maybe it always will be from here on out. From maiden to mother.

It’s all a mess and it’s the deepest being alive I’ve ever known.

The message sent to me is that these stories are for the privacy of a medical room. They are not for meal-time monologues, coffee chats, and surely not for women or men who are not parents.

It’s been my experience that the medical room is too bright, sterile, masked, and devoid of the warmth and rawness this trip through transformation requires. Not all of the doctors and nurses are to blame, they are overworked and underslept in this season of pandemic but the patient has to deal with the fallout somehow. This story needs holding. It can not be thrown into the receptacle next to used N95s and forgotten rubber gloves.

This story needs a Mother’s embrace.