A Letter to My Next Mother

Whoever You Are

That we began within our grandmothers’ bodies, eggs nestled into the wombs of our own gestating mothers, that we are matryoshka dolls one within the other within the other, has become a shared wisdom among women as we try to understand our embodied legacies of both joy and sorrow, love and trauma. Less acknowledged is that we hold, possibly, within our own bodies not just our potential grandchildren, tiny eggs inside tiny eggs, but also, more mysteriously, our own mothers to come.

When we lived within the cycles of belonging that preceded patriarchy, we still knew that everything that died was also reborn.