All Purpose Flower

A tour of the cottage via strawberry 🍓

There’s a strange moment that happens in early motherhood when you realize you are no longer simply a person. You are food.
As a nursing mother, I am food. I am breakfast, lunch and dinner and every comfort snack in between. There is something deeply humbling about being reduced to the most ancient human purpose: feed the baby.
It is both sacred and absurd.
But beneath the comedy is something enormous. Food is never just food. It is comfort. Memory. Regulation. Love. It is the first language we ever learn. Before a baby understands words, they understand being fed. Warmth in the belly. A heartbeat nearby. Relief arriving again and again.
Maybe that is why humans gather around meals for every important moment of life. Weddings. Funerals. Births. Breakups. We feed each other because somewhere deep inside us remains the ancient instinct that nourishment is care made visible.
And mothers know this intimately. We feel it in our bones because for a brief season of life, our bodies become both home and harvest. We are exhausted and leaking and starving ourselves.
To nourish another person so completely is miraculous.
I am the source of nourishment.
I am Mother.