#which is the preparatory reading Nile cites

[victimhood]

The Beautiful Game chapter 107: Seven Nation Army (aka Nile’s ending)

Yet—there is no running from the inescapable fact of birth. To quote one of her preparatory readings: Birth is smelly bloody dirty messy bestial, and at the point of labor she comes to realize that the baby is her antagonist. At the point of birth the baby turns on their mother for the first time in their life, willing, fighting, to be away from her. They come into being by cleaving away from her being, with a force of life that could destroy her. At all costs this new life demands existence on its own, leaving the mother to reckon with what it means to be the bearer of fruit and pain, to withstand a revolution in each new human, to be the broken and shattered ground upon which this being takes root. In her darkest moments Nile finds herself crying for her darling cat Effie and her lost kitten. There is so much loss in the act of birth. Nile feels like she owes an apology to her mother and her mother’s mother and the whole line of mothers who birthed her. Nile knows now, how much she didn’t know, and how much is still unknown. And at the heart of it all, the echoes of some primordial code, to the drumbeat of continued existence, an exhortation, the relentless insistence that she should make it better, make it better, make it better.

(x)

#nile freeman #the old guard #pregnancy cw #childbirth cw #mother's day #side note for the anthology revolutionary mothering #which is the preparatory reading Nile cites #am i writing fanfic or an essay #who knows lol