Crying for two: Matrescence

Pregnant Tears for the world

Dear Crying Angels,

There was a moment, back in September, with the last summer winds, that a quote by Ana Mendieta hit me like an arrow directly to my heart:

¨I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb —and by the cosmos—my art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe.”

Emotional.

Emotional.

Emotional.

Ana Mendieta, Imagen de Yagul, from the series Silueta Works in Mexico 1973-1977 (1973)

I suddenly felt my mother and my grandmother and all the women who came before me in the room with me. I was also pregnant with a baby girl and I didn’t know it.

I was never one who dreamt about having children. My art was giving birth to myself every day. Women are witches and I don’t think having a baby is the only magic trick, but I can understand now that is a very strong and special one—the reason why everyone on earth fears our powers.

Over the past six months, I have felt like more than one person. My body, once a quiet companion, now talks back to me. There is a second heart, a rhythm of life that pulses from inside and makes me feel like I’m creating the future.

I am pregnant with my first baby and I am crying.

Being pregnant often feels like swimming in the ocean, it gives me peace and big emotional waves often cover my head. I’m crying because the world is suddenly both sharper and softer. I’m crying because I walk the streets with magnifying-glass eyes and no one really knows I have a secret inside of me.

There is a kind of weeping that comes with total transformation, a shedding of the old self to make space for the unknown. This is a weeping of unknowing, of surrender, of expansion. I sit with my tears, letting them stretch me wider and wider, until I am no longer just me, but a bridge between what I was and what I will be—past-future infinite.

Louise Bourgeois. Maman.

I remember when I saw her: Louise Bourgeois' massive, towering sculpture of a mother—a presence both protective and formidable. Her arms were strong, her body open, her form a tangle of contradictions: love and ferocity, softness and power, stillness and transformation. I stood before her and felt the transformation of motherhood.

Louise Bourgeois, Maman (1999)

Pregnancy feels like this: like standing at the edge of something cosmical and unknown, holding tenderness and terror in the same soft hands. It is to be both creator and creature, to build a body while surrendering your own. It is to become a home.

Anthropologist have a word for the process of becoming a mother: Matrescence. The most dramatic transition in human life, often kept in the shadows by capitalism and patriarchal systems.

In pregnancy, your brain changes in ways similar to a Big Bang effect. Tenderness is not just an emotion; it is a daily practice, a state of being. It is the way I instinctively place my hand on my belly when I wake up, as if to say: I am here, I am listening.

This tenderness is also radical. It resists a horrible world that values speed over slowness, hardness over softness, logic over feeling. It insists that life—true life—begins like a mystery, quiet, in the unseen, the spaces between heartbeats.

Pregnancy teaches me that I am not at the center, I’m a part of the cycle. Creation is not linear, but circular. I, too, am being remade.

The same feeling I have as I create a new drawing, a new poem. The sense that even if Im not here, a part of me will be.

"Life is so beautiful as long as I am creating it! So painful when it is a given that must be endured. Live, act, be wholeheartedly!" Simone de Beauvoir's resolutions for a life worth living

Let me cry oceanic tears. Let the planet listen to the whispers of new life. Let us hold onto the slowness, the softness and the salt. Let mothers hold the world.

With love and growing tears,

Pepita