The High Priestess

The High Priestess is not the ice queen you think she might be. She’s the girlfriend you video chat while ugly crying that your D&C is scheduled for tomorrow and you’ll never be a mother, or who you text the pics where your toddler puked mac ‘n cheese on your curtains, or Jackson pollock-ed the bedroom door with his own shit, or other various and sundry bodily fluids that ended up on your faux-adult possessions that you still haven’t even finished paying off of your credit card.

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Or when your four-year old says he hates you, and you see in his eyes, he sort of means it, and you still have to tell him to go back to his own bed in the dark even though he was just doing skin-to-skin with you while your placenta was still throbbing inside of you and the midwife’s hands were stitching your vag, like yesterday. She’s the stone cold voice whispering your name through the cacophony of postpartum hormones and narco, after gloved hands took your baby from your uterus like reaching into a purse. And somehow you have to zip it all up and sound that bitch out, letter by letter, over and over again, so you can summon the strength to willingly attach a mechanical pump to your nipple.

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She’s the grandmother’s hands showing you how to clean a green onion. The friend telling you she likes your hair better curly. And meaning it. Or saying your thigh cellulite adds character and to take your kids to the damn pool anyway because nobody gives a shit. Because they don’t. She’s the little girl inside of you who blows on dandelions and believes in what she wishes for without hesitation.

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When did we stop doing that?