Sometimes in the midst of mothering, in the flow of a regular day, when the baby has latched on greedily for the fourth or tenth or fifteenth time, I think in amazement: I am feeding an entire human with my body.
It’s so regular that I forget to be awed by it.
It’s so shared that I forget that my body used to be my own. Now that I am in this stage of life, I experience it as a gift and a blessing. My body was inhabited by another; my time is fully dictated by the hunger of said inhabitant; the human race will continue.
Christ said to his followers: take, eat, be comforted. This is my body and precious blood shed for you.
Is the feminine in the godhead calling to me now in a way I can finally understand? This life/death, this death/life of the one who alone can be eaten alive and yet live again. The mother who alone can feed another and yet thrive.
My hungry creature came to this life in a splash of precious blood. He finds his life in a most efficient system: my food becomes me, I become his food, his food becomes him.
My bald baby revels in the ecstasy of milk. His every smile is for me. His hands batter me now, frantic with desire. They will pummel me later, in play and impatience, in anger and frustration, as he learns the way of gentleness, a feminine way.
But what else can he learn from the feminine way? Roaring strength and a rushing wind, for: our bodies feed the whole world, the world which we have made. And our spirits give life forever.