@fey@pagan.plus Honestly as I was reflecting on my own postpartum period you were on my mind. I have often wondered what that transition would feel like in a society where shared maternal responsibility is a large part of the underlying social structure, but here in our current world it’s quite an isolated process. I think when I had my daughter I found myself able to, eventually, lean into that in a kind of ascetic way — like those rituals where folks are entombed alive for three days and then pulled out and returned to their communities, or the self-mummifying monks who slowly die within their own heads, seeking transcendence and the rememberance of conscious body as they do so. However, it was about that painful, especially because contrary to both of those examples you neither have the solace of community nor total solitude, you are always performing and serving another being, which in its own way is a kind of ascetic practice: learning to serve the needs of another basically always before your own is something people who aren’t mothers (even fathers) can literally never understand — I’ve yet to meet someone who truly lives that way willingly no matter how extensive their activism or charitable intentions.