She’s on my chest, skin to skin, and I can feel my body doing what it was built to do. I am leaking. She is warm and heavy and new in the particular way newborns are new, like they arrived from somewhere that still has its own weather. I am exhausted in a way that doesn't have a word yet. And I am choosing not to latch her because I don't want to.

That sentence took me a long time to write.

Not because it isn't true. Because it is true and it sits beside how much I love her, and I haven't figured out how both things get to exist in the same body at the same time.

Everyone told me breastfeeding was natural. They didn't tell me that natural and wanted are different words. They didn't tell me about the latching and the cracking and the way pain can make you dread the thing you're supposed to cherish. They didn't tell me about the pump, the two-hour intervals, the way you finally get her settled and lie down and feel it start again because your body didn't get the memo that you were done for the night.

I have a thing about paying for what you can get for free. I don't buy the Hatch when I can open a window and hear real birds. So there is something that sits wrong in me about the formula, choosing to buy what my body is already trying to give. Except I wasn't doing it well enough, and I didn't want to invest what it would take to improve, and so I made the choice, and I lie here with her on my chest while my body makes its case anyway. Still producing. Still insisting. Still telling me what he needs long after I have stopped listening.

I wonder when my body will feel like mine again. Whether the stretch marks will soften, whether things will even out. I don't say this out loud because it sounds vain beside the miracle of her. But it is there, underneath the love, which is its own country with its own weather.

I've spent years trying to build a love for myself that sticks. Trying and, honestly, not quite getting there, setting it down, picking it up, setting it down again. And now there is this person I would burn the whole world down for without thinking twice. The love for her arrived complete. The love for me is still a work in progress.

That is the sentence I didn't expect to write when I became a mother. That my capacity for love would be revealed to me as bottomless in one direction and still under construction in the other. That I would be capable of total devotion and still not have figured out how to show up the same way for myself.

I don't think that makes me a bad mother. I think it makes me a very recognizable one.

She is still on my chest. Still warm. My coffee is cold. My body is still making its case, quietly, patiently, the way bodies do when they know something the mind hasn't caught up to yet.

I am trying to learn from that.