How strange it must be to for cells to divide and multiply, organizing into a body, inside your own body. Organize into a new organ with its own organs. All this inside you, without your effort, just a 14 billion year old flywheel of life turning without your permission.
How strange to be compelled by all of nature to divide from this organ. You must release it from an opening in your body. Cut the tie that binds you or you both will die. The organ screams with fire. What is this?! What is this?!
How strange to call it a child. You are only just larger than it now, but wisdom will hide till later. You are in a body that has a stronger hide, longer bones, and now language that makes you believe you’re a grown-up. The promise is that years themselves are like packaged-adultness, and how often that promise leaves us wanting.
How strange to be the first experience in this child’s life. The first home. The first of every basic sensation. You will use language and emotion only in the measure you have it available to you. You will use and be driven by genetics and the map of your own early experience of life.
How strange that some of you unfold into this relationship like a flower opens in mountain valley. Some of you untether like a lost kite. Some of you can only mimic something you’ve seen once in a movie — because no one ever shared their fragrance with you, or let you feel softness of their pedals while you slowly became a person.
How strange every mother has been mothered, and all people. But how broad an experience to simply call it mothering. How much we are. Each of us. Each a person. A collection of programs, adaptations, and observations. And in there — in all that material — how much of it is from mothers.