When I was pregnant, I goaded my mother into talking about the pain of childbirth, and she told me a story that also involves mirrors. She said, matter-of-factly, that giving birth is so painful you feel you’ve been torn in two. “They should put mirrors in the labor ward,” she advised, as if putting it in a suggestion box. “So you can see you’ve not been broken into pieces.” I wondered later if my mother was recalling the pain of labor or actually everything that comes after, because later I understood that is exactly what motherhood is. The “shattering” is what the writer Sarah Manguso calls
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