There’s milk and a sweet smell. The bed sheets, mangled. The bed is gravity—I slink toward it, whether I want to or not. I live in a body I do not know. A lot of people never bounce back. I went through a big thing but no one wants to hear about it. It’s too hot and I’m not used to feeling my breasts against my ribcage. This is my life right now—this mattress, this dark room. Looking back on the birth, how it didn’t happen here. Some nights I’ve sat awake, watching them sleep, scratching blood all over the sheets. We do this, women, and we become wild. The bottom of the ocean—that’s a place I’ve been. I pull the cool sand up over me like a blanket. A little fish swims alongside, asleep, but on the move. It’s hard to rest next to the squirm. The first time I felt her was alarming. Tiny thing. Perpetual thing. She was awake in me. Now I wake for her. I breathe for her. We aren’t alone. There are other eyes. Other hungry mouths. She and I are made of the same sand; therefore, I must allow her to slip through my fingers. She becomes her own, and I become my own again.
The Mother Myths
Our very own Zoë Etkin has released her third book, The Mother Myths, a collection of poems that explores what society tells us makes a “good mother,” and how those myths and narratives create internalized tension, self-doubt, and shame in new mothers. The poems in The Mother Myths span from the time of childbirth through the first few years postpartum, chronicling the tender beauty of this time, as well as the deep grief of lost identity and changed body. This collection puts the raw and real aspects of the postpartum period into the light for all to see, exposing what so many mothers go through in the Western version of parenthood. Any mother who reads this collection is sure to find a piece of her own experience somewhere in the book, and in doing so, knows she is not alone.
