to become

becoming a mother has been, for me, an intense metamorphosis of being. i am certain i am not alone in this. but perhaps unlike others, i had never before given real thought to the idea of creating life, raising a small human, and loving so wholly until my uterus demanded it should be so.

i have become a mother, and m is truly my purpose. she is my pearl, and my love. i pour into her all that i feel, all that i know. i give her all i can summon to please and comfort and nurture and adore her, and, in so doing, i have little left at all! for all that, it is a conundrum to me that i am now discovering valuable pieces of myself because i have given so much away to m - the loss has revealed parts i always feared i'd miss, and revealed that in their loss there is much i've gained instead.

to become a mother, i have given up many faces, desires, wants, and illusions i once had for myself and my ego - these have been replaced with the consuming love i have for m. to become a mother, my already stark feelings of wrong and right have sharpened, because to help create the world in which i wish my daughter to live, fools cannot be suffered.

i'm now unbearably aware that with only a small slip, the space between all people can be as easily filled by the marks and matters of personal grievances, personal pain, personality, personal perception - care or crassness, vanity or compassion, disrespect or adoration.

it is perhaps more common, more mundane, though, that this space is filled only with increasing silence: it is true that the less we say to others, the less we find to say. sometimes the silence roars and roars - and there is still nothing, beyond the sound of it, to say. but there is no honesty in this silence. and without honesty, there can be no self. and without self, there can be no selfless love.

or we drift away and drown far apart in misunderstanding, indifference - indifferent to self, to love, to thought, to passion, to honesty, to conviction, to mystery, to beauty, to rage, to desolation, to the silence itself - this is the saddest fate, and one i don't wish for anyone. so i share with m and give to her everything and all that i can give her from myself. i know now who i am, because of her.