This is My Body, Given for You

Postpartum thoughts on being someone's home and the Eucharistic self-gift of motherhood

Photo by Wes Hicks on Unsplash

I’m writing this early in the morning. The rest of my family is asleep, but I’ve spent almost an hour resettling our two-month old back to sleep. She often wakes around 4:00 or 5:00am, cold or hungry or gassy. She squirms, cries, eats, sometimes farts, and eventually settles back into a quiet slumber in my arms. I wait fifteen or twenty minutes longer, hoping to ensure that she’s sleeping deeply enough for me to transfer her back to her own bed, before slipping out of the room.

THIS IS MY BODY, WHICH WILL BE GIVEN UP FOR YOU.

I’m a cradle Catholic. I’ve heard those words, with rare exception, every Sunday for almost three decades. My brother and I were well-catechized on the mystery of the Eucharist, and our mother brought us to Adoration regularly as children. I’ve taken graduate-level theology courses on the Gospels and studied the ways in which the Last Supper was a fulfillment of the feast of Passover and the Crucifixion a fulfillment of the prophecies of Israel. All that to say, I am very familiar with the theological context of these words in the Mass. Even so, they’ve taken on a new depth of meaning in my experience of motherhood. My knowledge of this radical self-gift is no longer merely intellectual, but physical and experiential as well.

I love to hear mothers talk about mothers’ bodies. Perhaps it sounds strange to say, but I find immense beauty in maternal femininity, as uncomfortable as it can be to live. I recently finished reading Abigail Favale’s The Genesis of Gender. The entire book is worth reading, but for now I just want to share a quote with you:

I have given birth four times. Five, if you include the tiny body, no longer living, that was released from my womb at only ten weeks. The other four pregnancies bloomed to full term, my body stretched by a cumbersome metamorphosis, in which I am the cocoon. After the baby comes, once the chrysalis opens to unveil the face of a new human being, I feel shipwrecked, flung onto the shore in a state of limp exhaustion, not by the sea, but by my own terrible undulations. Thus begins the long season of postpartum aftermath, a grueling stretch of time that no one really talks about, that never appears on screen and is etched on few pages.

After each of my births, there is a moment when I am able to hobble to the toilet on my own, a massive pad pressed between my legs to catch the gush of blood that comes when I stand upright. I have to shuffle past a mirror to get there, and I can’t help but look at the stranger I see, as if she is a monstrous Gorgon and I am trapped by her gaze. I see a body that doesn’t look like me, that never matches how I appear in dreams or my own mental image. She has a dazed, half-crazed look, like she’s just crawled out from the underworld; her breasts hang down, already beginning to harden with milk; her womb protrudes, emptied now but swollen nonetheless, as it will continue to be, for months. She fills me with disgust, that postpartum Medusa. She is grotesque and excessive, bleeding and leaking and saddled with flesh. I try to forget her, but she is there in every mirror, staring back at me when I expect to see myself.

Her prose makes me feel things, y’all.

Favale goes on to describe her experience with postpartum body dysmorphia and anxiety.¹ My own experience is almost exactly the opposite - motherhood has taught me how to love and freely rejoice in my body - and yet these words resonate with me. My body, too, has been given, stretched, changed, and then hollowed. My body, too, bears witness to this radical hospitality. In stretch marks and joint aches and restless legs on restless nights, even the “easiest” pregnancy leaves its mark. Even the calmest, most peaceful of births involves the spilling of blood.

THIS IS … MY BLOOD, … WHICH WILL BE POURED OUT FOR YOU.

It’s difficult for me to describe the experience of looking at our (frankly enormous) two-month-old daughter and ponder the fact my body sustains her. I ask, “My body is capable of this?” and hers responds with a resounding yes. This truth is simultaneously hard to believe and the most natural thing in the world. After all, she found her first home in my womb, where my heartbeat and the soft “whoosh” of my circulatory system were the first sounds she knew. I saw the ways in which my body changed to accommodate her presence within me, long before my belly began to swell, preparing for the long months of pregnancy and breastfeeding to come. During her birth, I felt her working with me, wiggling into a better position for an easier exit (a mercy, I tell you what, given that she topped out at 99th percentile for both weight and head circumference). Her first moments outside my body were a perfect introduction to her gentle personality - laying on my chest quietly and peacefully, not crying or screaming, just looking around and taking everything in. And now, two months later, my body - still soft and squishy eleven weeks after her grand exit - is the place she loves best, smells and sounds and all. Whether it’s tummy troubles, hunger, or sleepiness, her every malady is remedied in my arms. I know from experience that as she grows, my body will be not just her comfort and her nourishment, but her bed, her jungle gym, her mode of transportation, and her safety net in new situations.

And although our toddler has grown past the phase of breastmilk and instinct, as her primary caregiver, I am still her rock: a bestower of band-aids, pusher of strollers, and provider of blueberries. Her space to feel all her big toddler feelings. Even when she’s upset with me, she runs to me for comfort and reassurance. The first words out of her mouth every morning are, “See mommy,” usually followed by, “Daddy baby, mommy hold me!” There are other adults in her life whom she loves, of course, but there’s still something special about mommy. Something about mommy feels like “home”.

And that’s beautiful and humbling and it calls me higher, but it’s also hard and frustrating and exhausting. There are days when I sit and just stare at these sweet, beautiful children, in overwhelming gratitude and wonder. And there are days when I’m in tears before breakfast is over because I don’t know how I’m going to make it to bedtime. I’m learning to hold space for both experiences. I’m learning to say, with St. Claude de la Colombière, “I embrace the beloved cross of my vocation, even unto death.”

I’m also learning that, while motherhood includes demands made by the children, fatherhood often includes demands made by the mother. While I am my children’s home, my husband often feels like mine. And in a certain sense, I dictate and define my husband’s self-sacrifice in the same way that my children dictate and define mine. I sometimes wonder if this is what St. John Paul II meant by this almost off-hand comment in his document on the dignity of women:

The man - even with all his sharing in parenthood - always remains "outside" the process of pregnancy and the baby's birth; in many ways he has to learn his own "fatherhood" from the mother.

- St. John Paul II, Mulieris dignitatem 18

While this is usually true in a literal sense - it is the mother who takes the pregnancy test and shares the results with the father - I think it goes beyond that. The witness of how a mother responds to her infant’s needs, even when they conflict or compete with her own, ought to inspire the husband to self-sacrifice, both for his child and for his wife.² Of course, the self-sacrifice demanded of the father by the needs of a new mother looks different from the self-sacrifice demanded of the mother by the needs of her infant. But because a new mother must focus so intently on meeting the needs of her infant and facilitating her own physical recovery, there are often areas where someone - ideally, the father, supported by the wider community - must pick up the slack. There have been many, many times postpartum where I have been unable to take care of myself and my family as I’d like to, whether because of physical limitations or circumstantial ones. My husband has stepped up to the plate, taking in stride a million requests for another glass of water, impromptu outings for our toddler to give me a chance to nap, and the hellish nightmare that is postpartum charting. If Christ loves his Bride even unto death, so ought husband do for their wives, and wives for their husbands, and both together for their children.

There’s something beautiful in this image of the family, vulnerable and storm-tossed as those first weeks with a newborn often are. We are given such a striking picture in this time of what it means to die to self, take up one’s cross, and follow Christ. We give up our bodies for our children, sacrificing our sleep, time, and preferences to meet their needs. We pour out our blood, sweat, and tears. In a very real way, our families demand our self-offering, and we must choose to embrace it, saying with Christ, “This is my body, given up for you. This is my blood, which will be poured out for you.”

And perhaps the most poignant part, the part that most deeply inspires me to hope for heaven, is that as our children get older and become less obviously dependent on us, we must continue to die to ourselves and let them grow up. Family life is, in many ways, a gradual detaching: in those earliest days of pregnancy, the relationship between mother and child is defined by radical bodily gift of self on one hand and radical bodily dependence on the other. When they are squishy babies or silly toddlers, we ask them to never change, to stay like this forever. But our children do grow. They age and develop, and as they do, that unique relationship changes and the dependence decreases. They grow up and pursue their own vocations, but we hope and pray we will always be a home for them, even as we point them in faith towards our ultimate goal, our mutual heavenly home.

Have you ever had an experience that changed the way you understand the Lord’s words at the Last Supper? Where in your life have you had the privilege and challenge of being someone’s home?

1. Favale shares her experience of postpartum body dysmorphia in the context of her discussion on affirmative care for transgender individuals. An excerpt from this chapter has been published at The Public Discourse here: https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2022/08/84063/

2. As an aside, I’ve heard a lot of people recently saying that there’s no such thing as maternal instinct - fair enough, I guess. I have no investment one way or the other. Having a newborn is hard no matter what, and I would be 100% willing to believe that motherhood comes more naturally in a society with stronger female ties and wider community in general. There’s nothing controversial about saying that you’d be better equipped to care for an infant if you’d spent your life around other women caring for other infants, and that caring for an infant is harder when your own child is the first infant whose neediness and helplessness you’ve really encountered.