This baby in my belly will be a rainbow baby when they arrive.We didn’t plan to get pregnant, we didn’t try.

This birth.
This birth started to heal my grief.
This birth brought my mother to me, one last time.
This birth showed me who I am and could become.
This birth was so much more than contraction, sensation, effort.
This birth was the ultimate release.

Too suddenly, it all falls away –

The nonsense of knowing and needing and numbness of daily dirt –

Woven, over time,

Cell and song and wandering,

Come to find you home.

I’ve fallen in love, at last,

With a woman.

The little face, some new, some passing,

The joy outstretched in underground roads, they pour from see and sound

My daughter Donavyn, has been asking a lot of questions about my mom. We planted roses for her birthday last year but Donavyn was still too young to really understand why mommy was crying. ⁣⁣⁣⁣

Sometimes when I lie in my bed and close my eyes to take a quick recharging nap
my children quietly (finally) themselves, napping
I can see my mom’s face
her freckled olive skin
as if it were inches from mine.…
and I remember what she looked like when she was alive,
and I remember what she looked like when she was dying, that in between alive and not alive look that your skin gets,
and I remember what she looked like dead.

I drank too much, I talked too much (and listened too little)
I danced all the time.
I was selfish and unaware.
Then I became a mother,
and my baby got sick,
and I lost my mother (my only family) all in a year.

Matrescence is a term anthropologists use to describe the process of becoming a mother, the transition into motherhood. It is a complete identity shift, punctuated by chemical changes in a birthing person’s brain, sleep deprivation, and a (temporary) loss of control over how her/their body looks and feels, not to mention freedom, time and other relationships being subjected to the whims of a tiny, needy little human.