I've been thinking a lot about motherhood. All shapes and sizes of it. Maybe because of my age?

Because of a lot of things.

I spend time at work around women younger than me who care for not only babies, but toddlers. They are younger than I am and they act and seem younger than I am in ways and older in others. Like in the way they say I used to freak out about everything he touched, and now I figure it just builds his immune system.

Michelle writes to me and says, Mothers are the hardest relationships most of us have, as women. One direction, or both.

Aylee and I are driving and we are talking about 23rd birthdays and ways of spending them. What was I doing when I turned 23...she mused...I was pregnant with Sage! Riding horses to try to get her to come out.

In the farmer's market, Emily and I note that there seem to be more pregnant women than in most other places. Because it is autumn? Because it is a place of fertility? I don't know.

I've been reading guerilla mama medicine and other radical doula blogs.

Maura and I talk about what it is like to think you are pregnant, at our age, in our life situation. I think about options and choices and how I would fit a baby into my life right now. It's a complicated thing, when you grow up badly wanting children, when you reach a point in your young life when you feel like you might find a partner but you're not going to actively hunt for one (though have I ever)? What would you do, if you were faced with the possibility of a child? On an Americorps budget? So many questions. Keep the baby? Have it and put it up for adoption, the gut wrench of that, if you've always wanted children? Abort, because there would be no money or resources? There is this question of having grown up and always having been fervently pro-choice, and yet feeling ill at ease with the idea of abortion for myself. There are other questions. Money. How much to involve the father in the above decision making process, or how much to tell him at all, or when, or how.

Whitney's friend Kasia believes that every woman should have a pregnancy plan, that she formulates and sticks to.

I am very far away, right now, from my own mother.

Thinking about these things, birth, the birth process, how sex can weigh differently for men and women, the reproductive capacity of my own body and how I might treat it and want to treat it, makes me feel uncomfortably and biodeterministically Closer to the Essence of Womanhood. Everything gender-bending and non-essentialist in my makeup is fighting that shift. Everything else...mostly is just having an interesting/interested time noting the fact that this keeps coming up in different conversations and venues and moments, and organically processing the thought-mess. And feeling some pretty serious Sisterhood in the process.