by Maggie Downs posted in Life

Amber Tamblyn -- the actress, writer, director, and new mom -- wrote a poem for her daughter Marlow on Mother?s Day, and it shook me to my very core. It might have even healed me.

The poem, "Y for Yes," published on Amy Poehler?s Smart Girls, is a rendering of Tamblyn?s experience having a cesarean section -- but it?s also a thoughtful musing on what it means to be a woman and mother in a troubled world. Her descriptions are poignant and insightful, finding the miracle in a sterile, grisly procedure.
Yes, my abdomen opened
like an eye and I blinked you
into being, sweet little tear;
My single shed rose,
daughter of the body?s equator,
a spit of hope from my gut?s duct.
Yes, after you dripped loose, they stapled me closed
with two dozen metal eyelashes
batting into my skin.
Tamblyn posted a link to the piece on Twitter by saying, ?Here is my body, and here is my body?s poem to my daughter. I dedicate this to women and mothers everywhere: You are incredible.?
Yes. I carried you in my world
as the outside one
crumbled.
I carried you
my entire life,
never knowing you
had been there all along.
I still harbor complicated feelings about my own c-section. Yes, I have a healthy child. But I didn?t want the surgery in the first place, a part of me still wonders if it was superfluous, and I carry this visible reminder of it each and every day. Even when I forget, my body remembers.
?I?m a filleted fish,? I told my husband about six months af...