motherhood
I had some pretty powerful peer-motherly feelings last night.
I don’t quite know a better word for it. It’s not maternal as such – I do have kids and there’s a really distinct difference – but the feeling extends much further than I thought it would.
Struggling to work out how to express it now; when I was really deep in the zone I was pretty inebriated and it was much easier to just feel and be in the emotions than interrogate the feelings. But I’ll try.
When I decided to try earnestly to induce lactation (3 weeks ago now) it was just a bit of fun; I got a response here that really encouraged me. I never really saw the appeal before, but it occurred to me how validating/affirming it might be to actually use my body in that way. My tits really haven’t done much for me until now; I’m pretty flat-chested and it seemed like there’s no way that’d change without actual BE. Doing the regular work that’s part of inducing meant I was paying my chest a lot of attention, every day, and also meant they were sore a lot (which is good as far as I’m concerned).
(cw little)
[redacted]'s been getting into the little headspace more and more, and so more and more we fall asleep in bed at night with her suckling on me; come to half an hour later with the bedside lamp still on, change sides, turn off the light ..I’ve had another close friend talk about how my (one of my headmates’) energy makes her “want to curl up in your arms and be held for a bit” and lean into a little bit of being on the receiving end of caregiving-type energy, and it’s at that point – thinking about me enacting this role in more than one context – that I really envisioned myself as being a “caregiving-type” in a broader sense for the first time.
And it’s really nice?? I started thinking about the role outside a strictly cgl lens, in more of a “loving, freely care-giving, supportive mom-type peer-friend” energy; thinking about an ideal sense of communal closeness where I could be that to many friends; being something like an empowering, encouraging rock that close ones knew would be able to emotionally support and nurture them.
The right words are still not coming to me and the feeling is a little more distant today than they were last night.
One image that keeps coming back to me is kinda weird, but kinda conveys it. My mind kept flitting back to images of high school (!), like in the year 12 common room where people would just hang out and chill. I’m imagining some alternate world where intimacy wasn’t restricted to romantic partners or seen as something that had to be hidden away. I would totally have been the mom-friend in that world and in that common room, where friends could just lay down across my lap and I’d stroke their hair and listen to them, and maybe suckle them a bit too if they wanted. Maybe people could do that for each other more freely and be responsive to each other’s emotional needs and play different roles as the situation called for it. (The specific setting isn’t really important but the image really stuck with me for some reason.)
tl;dr im mom