She had been warned about this, about the tiny fistfuls of hair she’d started pulling from her head and plastering to the white tile of the shower wall. Each time she carved out exactly eleven minutes to wash off the stench of sweat and sour milk, more loose strands. Like the other warnings—that there would be a moment during her unmedicated labor when she’d feel certain she was dying, that the sleep deprivation would make her feel like all her internal organs had turned to sawdust— this one had done little to temper the bite of the experience itself when it eventually came for her.
In the four months since giving birth each shower had saved her, a secular baptism that brought her back to herself again and again. Now, rubbing the stray hairs together into a clump resembling a black hole (as satisfying as it was repulsive) she was again reminded that her body was no longer—would never again be—entirely her own. She understood now what she only knew in theory before: that the very organism of “mother” is plural and that in those moments of being split, one slips out of the skin of maidenhood like a selkie forsaking the sea.
She had spent the decade prior trying to create a layer of maidenhood thick enough to slough off without regret. Perpetually single or briefly in ill-advised love with men who in no way shared her desire for family, she decided to indulge in the things she’d likely forgo after her mattressence. Ambivalent one night stands, solo international travel, a job that spread her life across the country, two wildly impractical degrees. She practiced loving her own company and tried to savor each decision that was made for herself alone, firmly believing that a future self would be settled in, attached and codependent in the way she longed for but couldn’t possibly fathom.
Her desire to have a child had been constant, immune to doubt or second thought. She didn’t believe that a calling to maternity is paired with the possession of a womb. But with a proclivity for caretaking and a wide, soft, sturdy body, she felt that “mother” was an identity she had always carried somewhere within her, stored in a box for future use but seeping out through the cracks and seams. An unoriginal calling, perhaps even an embarrassing one: the world already teems with mothers and their offspring. Most of the greats— artists, writers, thinkers— choose childlessness and despite the “have it all” rhetoric she’d grown up hearing, it seemed clear to her that, more often than not, parenthood came at the price of this sort of greatness. There were exceptions to be sure but she did not possess the kind of magical thinking that would cast herself as one. And yet, sleeping alone in mediocre hotels across America, drinking alone in London bars, or sitting alone beside the Arctic Ocean, it was motherhood she dreamed of.
Now the imaginings had given way to the reality, she had claimed this long-anticipated identity— and it was still what she wanted. More than anything. When she made it to the other side of the push that was somehow, impossibly, the last and they poured what felt like a bloody squid onto her abdomen, she looked into the eyes of the sea creature that was her son and she had never wanted anything more. She had never been more in awe or more in love or more relieved or more completely and utterly wrecked. In the photos from those first moments of becoming something new, images her partner lovingly described as “not flattering but beautiful,” her eyes look empty and her face looks bloated, blanched, something washed ashore. It was not flooded with the kind of post-birth euphoria she had read of but rather it was the face of someone who recently straddled two worlds.
Her son was born with a thicket of dark brown hair at the nape of his neck and a layer of peach fuzz atop his head. “He has hair, we can see his hair,” the midwife had said to her while she was star-fished in the huge bath tub. But the pain was so white-hot that she could hardly hear the woman, let alone care. Later, as she gently rubbed the coat of bloody fluid from his grapefruit head with a wash cloth, they said that it would likely fall out, all this hair he’d grown inside her womb, and he’d start anew.
Yet at four months old, it was still there just below his bald spot, thick and dark as when he emerged. In the middle of the night when she sat awake nursing— his head, a moon orbiting the planet that is her massive breast— she’d softly stroke the strands while trying to lull him back to sleep. Often in these moments she was leaden with exhaustion, sometimes her nipples burned from blebs or vasospasms (two terms that she only discovered from panicked symptom googling) and her potent body odor subtly stung her nose. She’d lean down to instead breath in the smell of her son's goose-down head, feeling so connected to this warm, new creature and so estranged from herself.
Early motherhood had stripped away the things that made her feel like a character, leaving her instead a nondescript animal, all flesh and instinct and fluids. There was a real, beautiful freedom in surrendering to this state. There was a shattering sense of loss too, the kind that is hard to pinpoint or articulate and is so clouded by the misty layer of joy all over everything it would be easy to ignore.
A friend who had passed the threshold into parenthood a few years before had warned her of this too: of the actual impossibility of “getting your body back” after pregnancy. Your uterus will shrink, you may lose the excess weight, you may resolve the diastasis recti, the linea nigra will fade, your fingers and feet may return to the size of all your rings and shoes. But, even if you eventually appear to the naked eye remarkably similar to your former self, your physical being is in fact forever altered by the experience of growing and birthing a child— and that is to say nothing of the transformation that extends beyond the corporal.
What struck her most though wasn’t all the ways her body had been impacted by carrying and birthing her son, even with the second degree tear, the horrible hemorrhoids, the extra puff that lingered on her neck and belly, the postpartum hair loss. Rather it was how entirely utilitarian and fully shared her body continued to be. He had left her womb but he was still a part of her and his needs and desires always overrode her own. It was her body but it was his food source. It was her body but it was his favorite bed. It was her body but it was his surest comfort. She dressed in simple, stained clothes that were always covered in spit up and drool, that worked well under a baby carrier, and that offered easy breast access. She stopped wearing jewelry that he could pull on or try to put in his mouth. She kept her long hair, which she rarely had enough time to wash, pulled back in a greasy ponytail or an unkept bun.
Even before the hormone drop caused the many strands to come loose, she knew that the curtain of straight dark hair reaching halfway down her spine was entirely impractical, a relic of a past self. It was exactly the same length it was at eighteen, when she chopped it all off as a surface-level gesture to suggest she was cutting loose her child-self (symbolically it had resonated but aesthetically it left something to be desired). Fifteen years later and it seemed she’d returned to a point that begged for such an act, this time as logical as it was performative.
But something stopped her and it wasn’t just the memory of how long it took to grow out the mistake that was her bangs-forward pixie cut. Maybe it was that, rare as the occasion may be, when she did find the time to shower and it was washed, dried and brushed till gleaming, her hair felt less like a relic and more like a portal. When she pumped enough milk to leave the other half of her dyad at home with his father and she got to go sit alone at a bar for an hour, writing and sipping a half-pour, she could catch a glimpse of her reflection and feel like she had, momentarily, slipped back into singularity. Maybe she knew that to relish this feeling and simultaneously feel the magnetic pull of her child was part of the great contradiction she’d live with the rest of her life. And that even while embracing the body of the mother, she could still choose to keep the hair of the maiden.