Empathy is the daughter of vulnerability, and among all the things no one can explain to you about parenthood no matter how much they try, the extremity of its vulnerability is paramount. Especially (but not only) when pregnancy and birth make the physical metaphor of transformation real, becoming a mother takes you apart piece by piece and rearranges you entirely. You cannot make a goal of getting back to where you were before — not physically, not emotionally, not logistically — or you will always be disappointed. And to turn away from that disappointment which is only the past is to turn toward the present. Motherhood has forced me to exist in the real, where we care too much and feel too much, where the house is always a mess, where we are suspicious of falsity because we simply lack the time for it, where we have all been decimated and remade so many times that not all the cracks can be soldered. This kind of presence is, as Adrienne Rich writes in “ Diving into the Wreck ”: “the thing I came for / the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth”.