I thought when I got pregnant that I would feel like a *Woman* glowing with divine feminine energy, brimming with the vaginal power of all my woman ancestors, connected to all the women of the world past present and future. But I didn’t. I thought that once the milk started flowing out of me I’d feel a deep connection to womanhood and that my gender expression and identity and assignment would click together and pour out of me like a joyous river. It hasn’t. Something beautiful has happened though. I do feel clicked, whole, broken apart and reformed but not in the ways I expected. The whole time of the pregnancy, and now as I am climbing out of the foggy boggy soggy woods of the postpartum time and into my new phase as a parent, I have felt like a plant. Like a peat fen, like a tulip, like a Venus fly trap. I’ve felt like a chapter in a biology text book. Things feel like they are on autopilot and like my body is gestating, blooming, tearing open, bleeding, leaking, in ways that feel very mundane and out of my control and just…. factual. It doesn’t feel magical or divine, it feels earthly and biologic. I am tired from all of it. In the early days, I felt weak, torn apart at the seams, frayed. Now I feel more put together, but in a matter-of-fact way. I am tending to her every need. I am a source of comfort, learning and food. I am absolutely dumbfounded that we all start out this way, it is so hard. Why don’t we talk about it and why don’t we get time to do it properly? I am tired, and I am already feeling guilty about not being productive enough, not bouncing back enough, not showing my capacity enough. My capacity is expanded in a way that I have never expected but its not magical to me, its out of pure necessity. I am a genderless biological blob trying to form around what my larva needs of me and what the world wants of me and what I can possibly be and turn out and express. I am an exploding plant with blood coming out of it. so much blood, and milk, and tears, and sweat, and I am covered in saliva and I am being chewed on and sometimes I tuck it all in and put on work clothes and go to a place where I do work and get paid and pretend to be a normal human being meanwhile the blood and milk are streaming out of me and my larva is home pulsating and waiting to be plugged back in. I feel guilty about being away, but guilty about being home too much when I am not away. How do so many people do this? How is this normal?
— Anonymous, She/They