“In the weeks after the birth, the world turned inside out. Black became white. Day became night and night became day. Lovers became fathers. And Livy found aging mothers—the heavyset women with the weathered faces and the weary eyes, their soft bulging bellies like ghosts of long-gone pregnancies—to be the most beautiful creatures on the planet. The young, childless women with their taut skin and flat stomachs and anticipatory smiles, were not ugly to her, just meaningless, their beauty like grape juice to wine. She fell in love with mothers everywhere. How had they done it? Livy was bewildered, humbled in the face of the question. She felt slain by childbirth … She felt the daughter-self, young and vain, dying, and the mother-self, huge and sad, rising up in its wake, linking her to nothing less than history.
Until you are a mother you are blameless. Now you are on the other side of history, Livy thought, staring around at the weary faces of the other mothers. Now you are dirty.
”— Danzy Senna, “The Care of the Self,” You are Free
