I.

Wring out this row of wombs and watch the pulp run down your arms. Rinse yourself off— really get in there, scrub gore from beneath each fingernail with damning patience. Hours later your hands reek, still, of amniotic fluid. Lodge this truth in the base of your throat: there is a grandmother who had to watch girlhood trickle down a kitchen sink, and a mother who had to wipe down the counter afterward so she could start on dinner, and skin on my body that isn’t mine. There is a small piece of me that isn’t me, but a row of women who had to learn to swallow. There is a small piece of me that was alive before my mother went into labor; it lives in the apex of each cheekbone, in the bridge of my nose, in girlhood that I watched run down the side of each arm like juice from a wretched fruit. Procession of placentas, girls who learned to swallow. There are daughters who make promises: I will scrub my skin of this blood. I will never feed another this fruit. There are always promises, and there are always mothers who learn to break them. Every womb is a mirror too heavy to hold— they face one another, braided fractals that echo endlessly in either direction. Every girl is a daughter is a grandmother is a mother is the flesh of this fruit is an embryo over the kitchen sink, struggling to rinse the amniotic fluid from its wrists.

II.

Here is a fun fact. When a fetus develops in the womb, its growth is dependent on the clear liquid surrounding it inside the placenta. Amniotic fluid — housed in the amniotic sac — is a combination of hormones, nutrients, and antibodies providing a host of necessary protections and pre-birth development to the baby. In the womb, the fluid is safe for the baby to inhale and then expel, allowing for the development of its lungs and breathing. 

In labor, this cocktail of fetal fluids is expelled from the placenta, and the baby takes its very first breaths of air upon leaving the womb. After being submerged in liquid for nine months, the switch from inhaling air for the first time is one that is abrupt and very distressing. It’s the reason infants always cry shortly after birth— apparently, the sensation feels a lot like drowning, despite the fact that liquid is leaving the lungs rather than entering. Most babies will adjust quickly and then be able to breathe air normally throughout the remainder of their lives since leaving the womb. 

Here is a secret. I was my mother’s first child, and she had me very young, not uncommon for a Pakistani woman in the early 2000’s. She was engaged at eighteen, and I arrived nearly three years later— a healthy baby straight out of the womb, and a healthy child throughout my development. Never even so much as a cavity until my late teens. The older I got, though, the more I started to suspect something was irregular about my body: I don’t think all the amniotic fluid ever drained from my lungs. 

Not completely, anyway. It’s not really something you notice until you’re around thirteen at the youngest. Maybe all the girls in your class are planning on going on the week-long school trip out of the country, and you’re the only one who was never allowed so much as a sleepover. I could feel it then for the first time, almost like acid reflux, fluid leaping into the back of my throat like bile. Sometimes, I can swallow the uncomfortable taste and move on. Other times, like when my mom would joke about getting me married, or demanding I give her grandkids by twenty-three, I might find myself hours later bent over the toilet, sputtering and heaving what would feel like a gallon of the sweet-smelling liquid, the faucet running on full blast next to me. 

I was too young to notice any of this bodily malfunction when I was younger, around when I first started school. Perhaps it hadn’t been long enough from birth for the amniotic fluid to feel unnatural in my lungs— a mere four, maybe five years from leaving the womb, compared to the twenty now where I may as well taste it on every other breath. One of the first friends I remember my mom making lived nine houses down our street— a tall, well-built Pakistani lady who I called Fatima Auntie. She had a husband and a daughter a year or two younger than me, and the memories I have about her and their house are, like most images from childhood, few but vivid. The homemade french fries she’d make us whenever I went over to their house were nearly identical to the ones my mom would make for me at home— thickly cut, covered in black pepper, and soaked through to the napkin underneath with canola oil. I remember the way she’d speak to her daughter: “Jee, channi?” Yes, dearest, in a voice dripping with rosewater— the mother and daughter script only they shared, that I was given a curious glimpse into amid playdate squabbles and snack breaks. 

And, of course, I remember she was a doctor— or at least, my mom told me she was. Sometimes, when I had a sore throat, a cold, or some other ailment that didn’t require immediate medical attention, my mom would take me nine houses down the street to see Fatima Auntie. There, in the corner of her kitchen between her microwave and the hum of her fridge, she might tell me something like how you can soothe a sore throat with dark chocolate at a high enough percent, the cadence of her honeyed, motherly voice dipping and rising with enthusiasm at the fact. 

Trips to her house were unlike any other doctor visit I’d ever experienced; Nobody had ever even informed me that you could be a doctor that spent the workday in the house and not the hospital. When I brought this observation up to my mother, I was confused by her response: that, although Fatima Auntie was technically a doctor, she didn’t actually work as one because she had to stay home and look after her daughter. My mom remained a stay-at-home mom and wife for all the years I’d known her; never having previously encountered someone who was somehow both a doctor and a mother, these juxtaposing titles perplexed me. Perhaps, in my young mind, I’d perceived it as a temporary arrangement, some form of a maternal sabbatical, until her daughter was old enough to stay home for a few hours each day while Fatima Auntie went back to work at the hospital, in a white gown and stethoscope instead of her house slippers and shalwar kameez. I could really only comprehend one identity at a time. I wonder if I wasn’t the only girl whose body struggles to forget her womb, if Fatima Auntie knew she loved the title of “mother” but coughed up amniotic fluid for weeks after having to decide she preferred practicing in shalwar kameez and not a long white lab coat. 

I was never great at math or science, and never had much interest in pursuing something in the medical field— on the contrary, I lucked out with my career prospects; as my mother never failed to emphasize, it’s easy to work from home as a writer even with a kid or two running around the house. I do wonder: if in another timeline I’d decided I wanted to pursue medical school, how long would it be before I reached my arms a little too far above my own head, and felt the umbilical cord finally tighten around my throat?

───

Understand this: it was never about you. You’re a word in a sentence. You’re punctuated by the lifetimes that come before and after you, and they carry as much of you as you do of them. You do not get a choice in this matter. 

I was eight when my mother showed me how to read a full sentence using word magnets on the fridge, and I realized I’d taught myself to read all wrong. The cold from the fridge door was still playing across my fingertips as I watched her place herself between me and my father’s mother, a semicolon where I’d always read a run-on sentence. Deftly, she’d snapped each magnet patiently into place as she told me stories about her mother in law from when she first got married at nineteen. There were patterns my grandmother was never given the chance to unlearn, things she was fed that were never properly digested, only swallowed. There was a cycle to be upheld, and then it was my mother’s turn to bear the brunt of it. And suddenly my grandmother was a glittering prism, impossibly smooth glass that had never been picked up and held to face fluorescent kitchen lights before, until my mother had rotated it on its side to refract light in a way I’d never been shown before. 

“I don’t want the way she’s treated me to change your relationship with her,” my mom had said in a low tone. “Despite her actions, she’s still your grandmother. Your father’s mother. You should still get to love her.” Maybe my grandmother’s children knew her husband’s mom as just a grandmother, too, and never an abusive mother-in-law. There is a possibility their mom ensured their perception of the women in the family endured as one dimensional— un-prism-ified, unyielding to uncomfortable truth— and that the distinction never existed for them like it did for me in front of the fridge, word magnets in one hand, prisms in the other. 

It was never about you; this is basic biology. Parts of your genome sequence made their first home in your grandmother’s body— the other one, from your mom’s side, whose girlhood was two wartimes, who braided this truth into her hair with fingers sticky from mango peels. Lahore, over half a century ago: she was smearing the windows with earth to shield a family of three from a bomb threat, and a piece of you was there. You don’t remember, but it was larger than you are now. It doesn’t matter if you don’t remember the buzzing in her chest or the damp dirt clumped between her trembling fingers. Your body will remember for you. 

If you have a daughter, her body will remember. These truths will burrow and linger just underneath her temples, find themselves a home in each collarbone, and she’ll have endometrium to periodically scrub from beneath each fingernail. You don’t have to tell her everything. You don’t have to tell her anything. And still, she might feel the occasional chill on the skin of each fingertip, as though just having pulled away from the fridge door. She’ll be barefoot on the kitchen tile as she rinses girlhood running down her wrists like mango pulp and watches it stain the counter, liquid gold.

───

There was a time between the ages of thirteen and sixteen when I wasn’t allowed to sleep anywhere but a mattress on the floor of my parents’ bedroom. I had my own room, and my own bed, but my mother would always tell me she had horrific anxiety about me being, as she perceived it, alone and vulnerable in another part of the house. She’d be kept awake by endless scenarios of someone breaking in through my second story window and her not being there to protect me. She’d grown up sharing a room with three sisters out of a family of eight; the idea of me sleeping in my own room all by myself was, evidently, one of the countless aspects of my upbringing completely detached from what my mother’s childhood looked like. 

It took me a few years to realize I’d recognized all along the sweet taste coating the back of my throat every time I woke up on that mattress on the floor of her room. The scent of motherly paranoia, the shelter of a walled womb, like a placenta that never fully detached from both bodies. I gasped and choked for hours, the realization spilling from my windpipe; I’m not sure how one pair of lungs can hold so much liquid and survive. I guess some bodies just never really forget their wombs.

───

When I’d asked why I couldn’t have more than one piercing in each ear like other girls my age, I was answered with a solid point: what would I do if the boy I marry didn’t like it? It wasn’t like I could just take them out and trust the hole to close up— they don’t always do that. 

There were countless other Pakistani girls I knew whose parents had gotten their first ear piercings done as newborns. My mom detested this practice: “Why the rush to make your newborn look like a woman?” By the time I was in high school, I had plenty of Pakistani friends with two, three, even four holes punched along the side of each lobe, with any number of studs, rings, and dainty gold chains running up and down their ears. It was… pretty. Despite what my parents thought, they somehow made it look elegant, feminine— at least, I’d always thought so. 

I was only ever allowed one earring in each ear. My parents didn’t mind my extensive collection of fake studs that could be secured with magnets on either side of your earlobe, or the clip-ons that would never actually stay on properly. For the most part, they all looked identical to a regular piercing, and that was fine— for whatever reason, my mom’s only hard boundary was limiting the number of actual, physical holes in my skin to one in each ear. That felt just a bit too permanent to them; I wasn’t born with multiple piercing holes in each ear like I was with other things a future spouse might not be partial to. I got my high nose bridge from my grandmother on my dad’s side, and the widow’s peak in my hairline is identical to my mother’s. If it was any of those things a future suitor had an issue with, he could take it up with the row of women who came before me— but if he was put off by something I’d done to my own ears, then, well, that one’s kind of on me. It doesn’t matter that no serious marriage prospect would ever actually be hindered by such a thought process, and it doesn’t matter that the hypothetical, piercing-aversed man I’ve been describing exists only in the realm of fantasy— the reality is this: It doesn’t matter that they’re my ears, because at the end of the day, I am my parents’ daughter. 

There is one simple loophole to this dynamic: get married. You can do whatever you want after that, is what I would hear nonstop growing up— along with the second, unspoken part to that sentence I always heard suspended in the air: as long as your husband’s okay with it. The secret to becoming an adult as a desi female is to find a suitable male and a mother-in-law willing to act as the surrogate for your parents, sign the nikkah papers with the hopes that they’ll be a little more lenient than your parents were growing up, and revel in your newfound independence as an adult— within the bounds of what they’re okay with, of course. 

 I like the idea of marriage. It’s always an aspect of my future I’ve looked forward to enjoying someday. This fact does not negate the image of marriage I’ve developed as I’ve gotten older: An abrupt and inevitable metamorphosis; a transition from “daughter” to “wife” which leaves little room for simply “woman”. A messy breakaway with ragged edges, to the tune of blazing red lehengas, and what it feels like to frantically choke out your farewells to girlhood in all the time five dholki songs sung back-to-back will allow. I can have all the jewelry I want that day, in places I would never even think to put jewelry when I was seven; heavy bejeweled earrings, a tika running down my forehead like liquid gold, even a thin wire ring on my nose larger than a quarter. The thing is that it all just looks different on a married woman. Elegant. Feminine. It’s different on the one day that’s all about you— the one day in limbo that bridges daughter and wife. 

And what no one tells you is that every wedding may as well also be a funeral. There is an invisible casket present in every reception hall that only the bride can see, wherein girlhood rests. The rukhsati is the celebratory ferrying to the afterlife, the husband acting as the psychopomp who makes it all possible in the first place. The Elysian fields of womanhood at last permit a girl all the indulgences her earthly being could never dream of, with as many piercings in each ear that her heart— or her husband— could conceive of.

The amniotic sac isn’t just a thing of motherhood. It makes a home in girlhood just as it does in gestation. We never really leave the womb— or rather, it never really leaves us. I haven’t been able to pull the damn thing from my skin since my mother’s blood became mine, and I know by now that it’s staying with me until I’ve been appointed a husband to ferry this fetus into womanhood. I know marriage won’t be the end— girlhood might die, but will I really ever get to pierce my ears in womanhood? The shedding of your mother’s womb at your rukhsati is only to make room for something else to take hold, and I don’t know what that something else is going to be, and the thought makes my skin feel foreign.

I stand over the kitchen sink. I am twenty— as old as my mother was when she was pregnant with me, her first daughter. I am twenty and leaning over the sink. I am learning: The umbilical cord doesn’t leave you when it’s severed in the delivery room. That only happens when you sign the nikkah papers, and the amniotic sac breaks, for real that time. I steady myself with one trembling hand on the counter while the other grips the handle of a knife, preparing to pare this fruit down to its pit.

III.

I was thirteen and my mother was pissed at me. After a week of not speaking to me, she woke me without warning from her bed at five in the morning. We’re going for a walk. She led me silently to a room flooded with sunrise. She’d spent the last five days preparing me something— maybe it was a meal her mom had made her choke down when she was my age. And she yelled— dished out everything that had been stewing over the past week and I had to eat while it was still hot, and I couldn’t leave until I’d cleaned my plate. I cried through the whole meal, choking down rosewater, saffron, cardamom, and all I could taste was metal in my mouth. She wiped my tears as I wiped mango pulp from my lips, and finally said that I was a good girl. 

I love my mother. We have a good relationship and she doesn’t look through my phone anymore. We spend evenings on the couch watching cooking videos till four in the morning. She asks about my friends, tells me she loves me, that I’m a good girl. I love my mother, but she altered my taste buds when I was thirteen. I had to develop a palate for everything she’d served me that morning, and now it’s all I have the stomach for some days. I learn to make do with the knot in my gut from when I hear her tone shift ever so slightly, from when she’s distracted, or busy, or distant, and the amniotic fluid rising in my throat won’t leave until I figure out what I did wrong. I can’t tell a regular silence apart from the one that comes before a sun-filled room at five in the morning.

I’ve been spending my nights since I was thirteen clawing at the flesh of a mango until I can’t tell the pulp from blood caught beneath my fingernails (what is self mutilation if this placenta doesn’t even belong to me?) What’s a throat lined with endometrium and rot? Nothing, not if this body is nothing more than a pause in a sentence. There was too much sun in my eyes to see that I hadn’t done anything wrong. I don’t know if this bodily malfunction really is just that— a malfunction— or if amniotic fluid makes a home in the throats of all daughters and mothers after birth. I don’t know what was supposed to happen in the delivery room, but what I’ve always known is this: I’m twenty and there’s an umbilical cord wrapping itself around my neck, and I don’t know if it’s mine or hers.