A Woman Is a Woman Until She Is a Mother

He would remember when he was past forty the dusty almost medieval smell of the screen itself as it / pressed its grid onto his face. She was behind him now This would be hard for you if you were weak / but you’re not weak, she said and neatened his little red wings and pushed him out the door.” Before becoming a mother, I thought of books as most-efficient compassion machines. Now I think that children are more

When one is skin-to-skin with a baby, the membrane between humans, between one consciousness and another, is thin, seems permeable. The body of writing about motherhood, or feminism, is a body. As is the body of writing about pain and compassion. Women who exemplify pain are sometimes saints and sometimes witches; they are sometimes as ordinary as a mother.

worse, more compassion or less? More selfishness? I have been self-assessing. When I do not mind caring for my son and I am exhausted, and when I do. When I hoard my time with him, and when I run away.

the case of motherhood, one is sometimes told that the “before” and the “after” will be different. A chasm opens. I was often told this would be the case with respect to compassion.

A scale does not describe the “before” and the “after” experience well. Perhaps the “before” and the “after” is more like what happens at an eye exam. Is this lens better of worse, a clinician asks and offers two choices in succession. The first sharpens, and the second blurs. Or, the second is too crisp, makes things vibrate and ache. Is this better or

Pain Scale,” Eula Biss explores the concept of pain thro

“Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: It can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up,” says Anne Lamott.

What happens to a woman’s brain when she becomes

Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born has arrived, a used copy, but I am

Women’s stories are used to stigmatize people who get abortions, but they are also used to combat stigma. We have protesters who put women’s faces on posters, alongside pictures of fetuses, in very intimately vulnerable situations, used to shame.” Then, there are the opposite scenarios in cases of abortion advocacy, when women share sometimes painful personal stories because they aim to help others

Carla Holloway, in her Private Bodies