As I reflect on the year that we are leaving behind, I visualise my body as a ship from which gratuitous cargo has been off-loaded. There is a feeling of lightness, like when all the apples have been harvested and the tree is left bare and its leaves can gracefully fall to the ground so that the roots can conserve its energy and simply be, lie still. This is also plenitude, I have come to learn, this fact of seeming emptiness, or weightlessness. On New Year’s Eve, at the cusp of 2022, my mother-in-law had looked into my eyes and wished me luck for everything that was to come my way. I was in my final trimester, and I could feel our child moving constantly, announcing his aliveness and his growing readiness to emerge. I still remember processing the aftermath of his arrival…the long minutes focussing on a clock on the wall while my organs were being re-assembled. I had felt this weight lifted from the core of my spinally anaesthetised body, and soon after I had witnessed the flushed red face of our child who was placed near my face. Everything changed in that moment.

When I consider how much I have evolved as a person, I feel sure it is because I internalised the life lessons I learned along the way. As a young mother, you are frequently infantilised. Total strangers and their relatives will offer you all forms of unsolicited advice, and if you are insecure or wrestle with self-doubt, it’s easy for your confidence to be shaken. For this reason I’m a bit unsure about passing on the insights I have encountered while coping with the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life—reparenting, which involves healing oneself from various intergenerational traumas while establishing healthier patterns of communication and behaviour. Identifying as a queer feminist involves its own forms of un-conditioning, decolonising one’s mind from the clutches of patriarchal thinking.