A Gorgeous Catastrophe

This. This piece, called "I Became a Mother and Died to Live," from Janelle at Renegade Mothering. I read it and my mouth gaped. Not every single word, especially as Chris and I share parenting and work so that both of us live those moments of being left as the other goes out into the world.

But so much of it feels true to me about my experience of becoming a mother. Especially these sparks:

Someday he will speak. And you know you know him better than everybody else, and always will, and you know when he’s sleeping you’re there when nobody else is there, and you’re watching him breathe so you can breathe and watching him sleep to drift into your own.

And you’re falling into a love you’ve never known. It’s like quicksand; the more you struggle the deeper you fall. Only you’re not struggling, because it’s a gorgeous catastrophe, and there’s nowhere else to go.

(I still find it hard to fall asleep if he's not beside me.)

At some point the reality will hit us: We are never alone again, no matter where we are, and we are the only ones in the world who have become this person toward this child.

A gorgeous catastrophe -- YES. When I was pregnant, I imagined that birth would be the crucible that transformed me into a mother. When it went so differently than I'd dreamed and planned, I felt that I'd missed out; I felt just like myself, still. I was disappointed.

But I needn't have been. The death of my old self and rebirth of my new self took longer than 24 hours, but it happened, relentlessly and irreversibly.

Kali. A phoenix. Nature itself. All the myths of dissolving into ashes and rising again, re-formed, apply here.

When I first read this post days ago, words flooded my head and I bookmarked it to write about here. Now, I have no memory of what I wanted to say. If life ever was linear, it is certainly not so now.