Motherhood. The deeply innate ability to care for someone you’ve only just met, and yet be compelled to shower them with profound love. Love that runs so deep it brings into question how it is possible to love someone as if they’ve been a part of you your entire life.

And in fact, in the case of my eggs, I suppose she has.

It’s incredible to think of it—to think that the egg that created my daughter was once inside my own mother’s womb. This generational connection, this interwoven connectivity between generations, carries beauty, trauma, and grief. Three lives joined upon the creation of one.

This sense of being interwoven, this love for something larger than myself, has been a theme that has unequivocally showered my postpartum experience with raw energy, exhaustion, and a deep sense of responsibility and duty to care for my daughter.

It’s difficult not to draw the same metaphorical comparison to our Mother Earth, and us, her children.

There is a sacrificial nuance that perhaps only mothers may understand. To love so deeply, even at our own expense. The long nights. The agonizing, toe-curling pain of that first latch. The kind of exhaustion that somehow feels replenished with only four hours of sleep. All of this for the love of her. My daughter.

What does our Earth have to endure?

In some ways, comparing my child to humanity may sound cruel, as though she is burdensome. But it is, in fact, the opposite. I love her so deeply and so much that nearly any personal expense feels worth it.

Is this what Mother Earth feels about us?

Not that we’re cruel, bothersome, or a burden, but rather that we are young, somewhat hopeless, and deeply dependent on her. She doesn’t resent us. She doesn’t punish us. But she does offer us guidance, hints, and assurance through co-regulation that we can find interdependence.

When I see my daughter grow, learn a new skill, or even grin with all her love, I feel a deep sense of satisfaction and contentment knowing that all that I’ve given, all that I am, and sadly, all that I have lost as well, is somehow worth it to witness her happiness.

Perhaps humanity is still in an infancy where we are dependent, oblivious, and entirely consumed by our own needs. An infancy where we have yet to learn how to love mutually—to reciprocate the love that is so unconditionally gifted to us.

Motherhood is the most beautiful and exhausting experience I’ve had the pleasure of enduring. It has reminded me of how strong I can be, while also revealing the places where I am vulnerable. The cracks that activate old wounds. The places that need more tending, more healing, more empathy.

Perhaps there is something in those cracks, too.

A reminder that love does not make us inexhaustible. That caring for something does not mean we must disappear in its care. And perhaps that is another lesson Mother Earth has been trying to teach us all along: that love, at its fullest, asks not only for sacrifice, but for reciprocity.