MAKING BABIES: An Essay in Comics by KATE LACOUR
What happens to you inside when you become a parent?
Having a child is a kind of death. It’s a death of certain freedoms, certainly, and of a certain kind of romance. It’s a loss of your time, which is no small thing.
But there’s another loss there, which is a kind of ego death. The limits that defined your personality are systematically eroded by meeting the needs of another person without reservation.
I had a lot of existential fear after giving birth.
The struggle to hold on to that self becomes too difficult. You break down, or at least I did. You surrender to what’s happening to your life, which is not, as it turns out, your life after all.
Love for a child envelops and includes this grief and fear. And it forces you to grow enough to accommodate it. Something is born inside you.
No outsider can appreciate what has happened inside every parent, however unremarkable; a small, invisible death and birth.
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