No one was talking about pain; about birth as an emotional process; about how it felt to have grown another human, to be two people at the same time, and then to be vacated, to push a person into being. I knew nothing about the emotional and psychological transition that follows birth. I had no idea that something was happening to my brain—that it was literally changing shape. I had no idea what was coming: the anxiety, the life-exploding romance, the guilt, the transcendence, the terror, the psychedelia, the loss of control, the rupture of self.
