Matrescence: A Pause For Love

A WWKC Prompt

I was eight months pregnant when I graduated college. Weeks later, there began one long pause—like the space between contractions—between who I was and who I would become. When you are a mother conversations are happening all around you, like the narration track of a nature documentary:

Having given up a career.

Having given up solitude.

Having given up a social life.

Having given up on the shape of her body.

The mother has put her identity on the back burner.

There is talk of bouncing back. Talk of losing and finding herself again. And, I suppose, there was a time when I felt this was true for me too. Looking back at the before, there were plans. Something like advanced degrees and big money, but then there was that pause.

There was: breathe in, now, exhale the pain. One day, this will all feel like the blink of an eye. You’ll feel like yourself again in no time.

On this side, I don’t know. I’m not so sure I would have made it here without all the space in between, without the pause. And that person I was before I stared at a positive pregnancy test for the first time? I don’t know her.

In the span of a human life, there are these massive shifts we recognize with their very own names. We give them names because, for the most part, we’ve come to agree that some developmental leaps are a big fucking deal. Infancy. Toddlerhood. Adolescence. Until recently, we’ve failed to recognize that motherhood is more than subtle shifts a woman experiences because she is now taking care of other human beings. It’s more than, she’s tired and overwhelmed. 

Until recently, we’ve failed to recognize that what women experience during the process of becoming a mother is closer to puberty in the drastic nature of the changes that take place. Now we know that adolescence is the closest comparison to the massive hormone shifts, the body changes, the way our relationships completely transform, and the metamorphosis of identity. And, we’ve given it a name: matrescence.

This is something I wish I had known while it was happening. Because, while I was wrapped up in their becoming, while I was taking them for weight checks, potty training, and teaching them how to read, I was mostly thinking about survival. Mine and theirs. I didn’t realize I was becoming too. I didn’t realize I was undergoing a metamorphosis not in spite of the role of mother I was thrust into, but because of it.

There was a time when we didn’t know if we could pay the electric bill, when I had 25 dollars and hadn’t bought groceries for the week. Never have I felt so proud of everything I could do with a potato.  When I wrote four, 1,000 word articles every night for $12 a piece. Even when I was writing for a byline and adding zeros to the rate, I sat cross-legged, bra-unlatched, one breast dangling over the hungry mouth in my lap while I wrote and wrote like I was feeding myself, like I was feeding my family, the words on the screen. Who else would have done that except for a mother? 

Who else would have taken this decade-long pause for love? Here on the other side, I’m not returning to myself. I’m not bouncing back.

I’m something brand new. 

And, in the same way I have been so intertwined in their becoming, they have been intertwined in mine. That long pause for love we’ve been living in? It became a space where we could all breathe enough to grow.

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This essay began as a WWKC prompt on Wednesday night. You can read the prompt below:

Breve Pausa

By Martín Espada

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1957, Martín Espada is the author of more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator. Formerly he was employed as a tenant lawyer in the Greater Boston area’s Latino community.

—for Juan Antonio Corretjer and Consuelo Lee Tapia

Imprisoned many times, Puerto Rico independence fighters, Juan and Consuelo were political activists exiled in the U.S. They advocated working class power, an end to US imperialism in Puerto Rico, and across Latin America and freedom for all Puerto Rican political prisoners.

Breve Pausa

In the photograph, the poet leans over to kiss his wife. He wears a black

suit and a black tie, as if there will be a ceremony and a medallion hung

around his neck. His hair is white and crowns the back of his head. Her hair

is white in waves. She lifts her face to kiss him through his white mustache.

This is a despedida. They are kissing goodbye. The charge is conspiracy again.

The officers born years after his first incarceration lead him away to Castillo

de Ponce. The officers lead her away to the women’s prison at Vega Alta.

The evidence is in the poetry. As the convoy of the empire’s army rumbles in

the dark, past the mountain town where one day they will be buried side by side,

the poet says to his beloved: Esta es pausa / para el amor. Es sólo / breve pausa.

The poet watches her sleep. This is a pause / for love. It’s only / a brief pause.

Prompt 3: Write about a time you paused for love.