A Poem Rewriting Itself in My Blood

Mothering is one of the most feminist things I’ve ever done.

Growing up refusing to wear dresses and rejecting almost every other prescribed aspect of girlhood left me certain I would also reject motherhood. My coming-of-age years didn’t show mothers in a very feminist light. More often they were stitched in silence and sacrifice, wearing pearls and pain like matching jewelry.

The biggest secret I kept from myself most of my life was how much maternal energy I carry. During my twenties, I never thought about having kids. I was too busy falling in and out of love and dancing with my then unconscious fear of commitment. Then I turned 35 and was suddenly afflicted with all the attending cliches. I now believe that the soul of my son chose me around that time. Or we were destined to be mother and son, but he whispered in my unhearing higher ear that it was time. The obsession was upon me: I had to experience growing a human with my body.

In Dandelion, the brilliant memoir in essays that won the Uplift Voices contest at Jaded Ibis Press, Danielle Bainbridge writes about this phenomenon so eloquently: “Recently there’s been a girl child weighing heavy on my mind. She is dark skinned and big eyed, and bow lipped and fat. I think she’ll change the world, and she will be my daughter. I have started to write names for her here and am seriously thinking all the time about pregnancy. I know it seems so crazy, but I think something inside of me is shifting to make room for her. I feel her always pressing down on me and it fills me with an inexplicable joy.”

As a queer woman, it’s not usually a happy accident to get pregnant. It’s a well-planned-for event that involves multiple people and a lot of consideration. In my case, I made a child with my girlfriend’s ex-husband’s boyfriend. We had many conversations during which we anticipated every eventuality in our hypothetical child’s life and agreed on what we would do. We co-authored a 50-plus page parenting plan, dually signed it, and had it notarized. Then we had our son and never looked at that document again.

In delivery, as I gathered what negligible strength I had left for one more heave, it occurred to me that I would possibly die, that this last one would bring another whole body out through my pelvis and tear me completely in half and kill me. I cried, mumbling “I can’t, I’ll die,” but it was as automatic and inevitable as the next inhale, and so I pushed and tore and broke and out he came, silent and grey and motionless into the room. There was a still moment, only held breath and heartbeats, before all the bodies in the room exploded into action. There was no letting the cord stay attached awhile; no immediate delivery into my arms. Urgent attempts to save my baby’s life trivialized all these plans I had, as well as the long anticipation of learning the sex, which someone revealed by calling out the obvious, “He’s not breathing!”

They whisked him away and I was furious with terror, screaming and crying, “Give me my baby! Give him to me!” I saw people gathered around him several feet away, suctioning out his airway with a small vacuum hose, and I had no coherent thoughts, only panic, and I could not speak, only shriek. The nurse stood between my baby and me, her arms stretched out to the sides as if trying to touch us both at the same time. She was reassuring me, “You’ll hear him soon, listen, wait for it, he’s going to be ok . . .”

When his cry came, his body was placed on mine. On contact, he peed, the hot liquid spilling over my sides and mixing with the blood and fluids under me. The relief I felt was just as hot, just as liquid, and it washed me clean.

I had discovered my maternal energy before that time though with my oldest, the child of my ex. The third time I saw her, she was standing with her birth mom (my partner at the time) when I pulled into the driveway on my motorcycle. I watched as her two-year-old body jumped up and down, her small hands covering her face, a scream barely audible over the rumble of my engine. I turned off the bike and dismounted, took off my helmet, and as soon as I put it down, she ran to me and leapt into my arms shouting my name. Holding her, the spontaneous and overwhelming love I felt made me stagger a few steps backward. It was in that moment, I knew — we would belong to each other forever.

We moved in together at lesbian speed and had our daughter half the time. My partner worked a lot, so I ended up doing the bulk of the moming: fun outings, nap time, potty training, bath time, bedtime. It all came so naturally to me, and I loved every minute of it, even the hard work and inconvenient parts.

My kids are ten and fifteen now. They take care of themselves, by and large. Nobody needs to be tucked in anymore. No bedtime stories. No twenty hugs. I was talking with another mom in the airport. We looked on at another mom who held an infant. I admitted that I missed those days. She scoffed and said no way, never again. The car seat and the snacks and the diaper bag and and and . . . No way. For a moment it felt like I should agree with her. I didn’t.

Bainbridge has the words for this feeling also in Dandelion. She writes about human yearning for “Something to shelter. Something we are responsible for housing whether it be a dream, an idea, a memory of the summer rain, or a child.”

I worried loving motherhood would make me a bad dyke or a bad feminist or both, but in the end, it hasn’t contradicted who I really am, it’s deepened it. I held and rocked my babies with the same bold hands that loved other women. I mother with a queer mouth that sings lullabies and protest songs in the same breath. I mother like it’s a poem rewriting itself in my blood.

For so long, I resisted the roles society tried to hand me, wary of being boxed into definitions of womanhood that never felt like my own. And yet, becoming a mother on my own terms has been a revelation, not a surrender to tradition, but a reclamation of it. I’ve found beauty, strength, and radical joy in mothering — not as a duty, but as a choice. This love, unexpected and fierce, is mine. And claiming it is one of the most feminist things I’ve ever done.

I didn’t lose myself in motherhood.

I found her.

And damn, she’s magnificent.