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My husband is a biologist who studies resilience in ecosystems. Throughout my first pregnancy, he talked incessantly about the topic. He talked, on end, about invasive species, fires, drought, and man-made destruction, and marveled at how, despite the odds, these environments can recover. After my son was born, the concepts of ecological resilience spoke to me in a very different way than I could have imagined. After experiencing cholestasis in pregnancy, a failed induction, three days of labor, and an emergency C-section, I looked over my broken body and was not sure how I would ever recover. I was too broken open, too tired, and too raw.

Yet, little by little, I found my way out of the black hole of those early days of motherhood. My muscles stitched back together, and my body became my own again. My view of myself, however, was fundamentally changed. What I did not know was how much we, as birthing people, are our own ecosystems. The most important lessons I have learned have been from the first mother, Mother Nature, and from what we know about how we, like nature, are made to overcome.

Lesson One: Let It Burn

For years, we thought that if we stopped forests from burning, we could protect our homes and protect ourselves. What happened instead is that, through fire suppression, we created forests that were explosively flammable because we did not allow seasonal fires to clear out the understory plants that supercharge wildfires. Out West is where this suppression was most common, and now we see the results.

Entering motherhood is one giant,........

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