05/21/2026
“Women give birth astride a grave.”
This is a quote I read before I ever became pregnant, and I felt the heaviness of it even then. I saved it. I tucked it away for another time and forgot about it.
Years went by, and I found myself pregnant, feeling as though I was death herself. Crawling, puking, peeing my pants, pulling myself through life by my fingernails, which were not as strong and pretty as everyone told me they would be in pregnancy. (Nor was my skin glowing or my hair luscious. In fact, I lost quite a few teeth.)
Once postpartum came around, I was thoroughly convinced I was actually dying now. I had them check my labs over and over again. I had them check my hormone levels, my mineral levels, my stores, my everything. They checked me for parasites. They checked me for obscure viruses. And while I did get some clarity in that, the main thing I saw was how depleted my body was.
I wasn’t dying, but the life was being sucked out of me. It is a similar feeling, especially during a time when you are only expected to acknowledge life, light, and the beauty of motherhood.
There’s another quote from an article written by Claudia Dey where she says:
“No one had warned me that with a child comes death. Death slinks into your mind. It circles your growing body, and once your child has left it, death circles him too. It would be dangerous to turn your attention away from your child. This is how the death presence makes you feel.
The conversations I had with other new mothers stayed strictly within the bounds of lists: blankets, diapers, creams. Every conversation I had was the wrong conversation. No other mother congratulated me and said, ‘I’m overcome by the blackest of thoughts. You?’
This is why mothers don’t sleep, I thought to myself. This is why mothers don’t look away from their children. This is why, even with a broken heart, a mother will bring herself back to life.”
I found a new level of understanding within that when I became a mother myself.
I read another interview where Samantha Hunt told The New Yorker:
“The part of sexism that bores and angers me the most is the coddling simplification of women into Hallmark cards of femininity. When I became a mom, no one ever said, ‘Hey, you made a death. You made your children’s death.’ Meanwhile, I could think of little else. It’s scary to think of mothers as makers of death, but it sure gives them more power and complexity than one usually finds.”
Then I remembered a sign in the abortion clinic I worked at around the time I became pregnant. I don’t remember the exact words, but I remember the message: that along with the power to give life also comes the power to refuse it, to carry it, to end it. The power of life, of birth, also carries the power of death.
We are the bridge between life and death. That’s not something you should have to stay quiet about. That’s something you scream until your throat is sore… a collective scream so strong that every glass wall surrounding motherhood could shatter.
