i keep checking my blog to see if i’ve written anything lately, and i haven’t.

i’ve been wanting to write this amazing treatise on motherhood, but nothing i write seems good enough. [i have three or four discarded drafts.] so maybe i’ll just tell you what i’ve been thinking in a less treatise-like way.

i think mothers are luminescent. i spent the beginning of may with my sister and her newborn. she luminesced. i paged through the pictures of her labor and she looked divine: holding herself on the side of the tub, drawing into herself on her side on the bed. she miracled that baby right out of her–never mind the abnormally large head. [this, of course, is to hold all those brainy brains my nephews have.] she has embraced two the same way she embraced one, with a heart that expands and expands, and luminesces.

and then just as new life broke its way fresh and bleating into the world, i had another friend [and heroic mother] lose her pregnancy and brush death. at the same time that motherhood luminesces, it is so dangerous. it puts you, your body, on a precipice. and how brave [how brave!] are all those mothers who walk to the edge of that precipice again and again.

and then there are the mothers who put their bodies through such agony [physical, mental, emotional] just for the chance to balance on the precipice of pregnancy, never knowing if this surgery, this procedure, this drug cocktail will give them the chance to hold their own tiny sweet miracle of creation.

so, really, all of you, all of you mothers amaze me. it is no small thing. it is no safe thing. it is no easy thing. you are all luminescent in the gift of yourself.