The black hole pregnancy left behind

And it's ravenous.

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.”