When I was 12-weeks pregnant, my midwife told me that my body was rearranging itself every day to accommodate the baby I was growing. My organs were happily squishing together to make room for the little human, my brain forming new pathways in preparation to nurture, nurture, nurture. It was truly a team effort. Shout out to my body.
At the time, I didn’t think much about the ways my body would change once I was no longer pregnant. But it turns out that birthing a human leaves a gaping, internal void; the space that used to home a baby is now empty. My organs had found new, temporary homes under my boobs, and now they’re on their journey back. I don’t know if they’ll find exactly where they used to live. I suspect not, seeing as my body isn’t the same. Even if they find the same locations, the walls are different: linings etched with echoes of life, with grief, with someone else’s memories of home. At least, that’s what I imagine.
Conduit. Digital collage. Aug. 2023
This internal void where my baby once lived has left much more than a physical impact. I feel… open, and I haven’t quite had the words to describe it until recently.
One morning, I pulled The Magician out of my tarot deck, and as I looked upon the card’s red-cloak and placid face, the quiet voice of my intuition hummed: conduit.
The word conduit comes from root words meaning pipe. It is a channel that things pass through.
The openness that I’ve felt since giving birth feels like the hole of a pipe. And while that imagery is neither beautiful nor aesthetic—and, quite frankly, leaves a lot to be desired—conceptually it fits. I feel an openness that I didn’t have before, rendered agape by life that left my body. I experience it as a sovereign entity the way it hungers for knowledge, for information about everything from baby-led weaning to good running shoes to opening the Akashic records. What passes through is information: it receives and digests and synthesizes or releases. As a result, I am ravenous, reaching to learn new, useful information wherever I can find it.
Conduit is also a French word. It is a conjugation of the verb conduire, which means to drive. This word has roots in Latin, meaning to lead, to bring together. In this tender postpartum time, I feel like a conduit of information. And as much as I’d like to be a passive student—the one who sits in the back and loves the material but doesn’t care about homework or tests—I am committed to being an active mother, an active life-liver. A leader. The knowledge my internal void subsumes guides praxis. In this sense, the hole my baby left behind drives me. It pulls me towards the knowledge I need to survive, to care for myself and my baby, to build a future for my family.
Perhaps my internal void is programmed to keep things alive, its very cells imprinted on by the memory and practice of sustaining the life of a baby. As this black hole within me gets smaller, and as my organs return from their migration north, I wonder if I will still be able to hear its ache for life, its yearning to help me navigate the strange and beautiful act of living.
In his book The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin writes: “We are all antennae for creative thought... How do we pick up on a signal that can neither be heard nor be defined? The answer is not to look for it… Instead, we create an open space that allows it.”
Beautiful Ayu! So enjoyed this, deeply felt and smart, intuitive and embodied 💜