I just had a new baby. It’s a she. She is my fourth child and I named her Frances Gale Red, we call her Francie Gale. Gale is my maternal grandmother’s name…actually Gail Wood is my grandma’s name, I changed the spelling a bit… and this piece of information is not at all relevant to what I’m writing about.

But my grandma is, she is relevant. I named my Francie after her because Gail Hilton Wood is a woman that I so much admire and a woman that so much inspires.

This is most likely my last baby. I never thought I would get that finalized feeling, but I feel it. And I’m mourning a bit, this end of an era.

And pained a bit to realize its only now that I’ve finally gotten it. I’ve finally recognized, uncovered, the unbelievable miracle of it all, this bringing new life into the world.

Like all the dull fog has been lifted and I see now how extraordinary a thing it is to beget life. To feel the flesh of a human being lifted into my arms, flesh that was enlivened within my own flesh, flesh that moves and beats and respires and feels and even connects with not just my flesh but my most entire inner self, to the point that my most entire self would continue to give up all, just to keep this other being alive and beloved.

And to witness this transformation of soul, my soul coupled with the transformation of my flesh, all in support of continuing life, giving life to this new human, has, in a word: astonished. I’m astonished with the life women are capable of giving and sustaining.

I walk around with new vision, seeing women so differently than I used to see them. I walk around with this overflow of gratitude and pride for the female sex and more than I anything I want our sex to see and feel of themselves what I see and feel for them. I want women to actually see the reality of who they are. I want them to be astonished with themselves and with one another.

I am in especial admiration for the women who surround me, the women who’ve sacrificed for me— women like my mother and aunts and grandmas and mother-in-laws and sister-in-laws and intimate friends, and even my women ancestors I’ve not met, who’ve gone before me. I feel their encouragement, their support, their past experience, urging me forward, forward to partake of the cup woman have access to, the cup that foretells that they who lose their life, shall surely find it. That sacrifice of both body and soul, and of time and mind and effort and sleep and desire, all that sacrifice ends up filling us full of so much life. Of so much love. A cup that truly has been filled well above its brim, running well over. We who lose our lives, gain so much life in response.

And I’m saddened that for quite awhile I haven't seen this web of interconnectedness that lives amongst us women. There are times we compete and collide and critique one another as women, but that's all farce and futile when pertaining to the truth of how we really are bound.

But now that I’m so aware, now that i’ve been astonished, I hope to convivially encourage and conjoin the woman in my path, pointing to our incredible life giving abilities and praising our soul sustaining efforts. Our experience has indeed collected us into a sisterhood that has not only been earned but is absolutely essential.

There is a secure power found in the comfort of communion with those women who have led us, those who endure with us, and those who follow behind.

And to my own that follow, my Margot and my Francie Gale,

I am eager to expand upon them the noble courage and warm approbation that accompanies a woman’s ability to beget and sustain life;

and I am eager to receive them into this marvelous fellowship of those who overcome, those who partake, and in return, those who become overwhelmingly and graciously filled.