Who do you hold? Who holds you? 

 

Whether you foster, adopt, blend with, guardian, lose, prevent, refuse, or birth a child, parenting is an embodied experience that intersects with gender, sexuality, and identity in infinite ways. The experience of pregnancy, for example, entails critical healthcare and identity issues for transgender men and genderqueer folks as well as for cis-women.

 

How do you juggle it all? How do you help others bear the load? Invisibility or hyper-visibility during parenting can eclipse the deep personal meanings and needs of the persons involved, not to mention distort full and equal access to care for one's body.

 

"Full arms," like "full of grace," is meant to imply core bodily and spiritual satisfaction, in response to the fierce longing for more. Yet in what sense are our bodies always already whole and full of grace?

 

Very, very good and very, very difficult, bodies – pregnant, infertile, expansive, guarded - are nothing if not sacred.

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