And while I miss my carefree self, my fear has also brought a new vision. I have seen in my own gradual shift from fearlessness to extreme fear that to be scared is to care, sometimes too much, sometimes to the point of sickness, but to have no fear is to be carefree, untethered to the fates and concerns of others, unable in some cases even to see them beyond one's assumptions.

I’d spent my twenties constructing a hard, certain self on the foundations of boldness, ambition, an ardent sense of justice, a lean and muscled body, and now pregnancy is a confusing tumble into uncertainty, interiority, quietness.

Motherhood, I grow to realize in these first months and years, is the experience of everywhere-and-nowhere-ness. It is to be the only answer to a very specific set of physical needs and it is also to be a psyche, a cosmos, an aura through which another being sees, passes, exists.

And as has been the case with many other unanticipated changes of motherhood, I’ve developed a new respect for women’s knowledge, for all the seemingly tiny, insignificant tasks women have performed throughout thousands of years in relationship with the world around them, in the sustenance of life.

Nights I awake at two, at four, at six, and in the grainy coffee black I hold the warm parcel of her, feel the eager pressure of those small gums, our animal bodies pressed together, the darkness undulating a bit in my delirium

I resist the exhaustion, the sensitivity, my rounded belly and breasts. I resist, above all, the softness of pregnancy. Pregnancy is all curves and couches and naps, all tenderness and susceptibility.