It took me 25 years, 11 months and 18 days to write these lines. I started at six-thirty in the morning of a bright Thursday in May, Corpus Christi day to be more specific, when this first-timer, stranded on her side in bed with a nine-month-old tripon, was awakened by contractions of a Charolais cow that threatened to imminent delivery Even so, prey to what some call the nest syndrome and I call fucking self-love, I became obstinate in leaving the dinner pottery collected, and the legs, the mustache and the armpits shaved to zero in case I didn’t have time to lie down later. account to myself. I did saintly, because, after giving birth bareback to my first suckling pig, since at that time the public health system did not pay for anesthesia and the poor things gave birth as God intended, with as much or more pain than Eva, the only three months of my life came in the ones that I stopped biting my nails, because I didn’t even remember having them at the end of my fingers. Later I had a bit of postpartum depression, replaced by the euphoria of a lover and an infinite tenderness as for my child, the colic of the baby passed, I mean breastfeeding, and she let me sleep six hours straight. What am I going to tell about the next quarter of a century that any neighbor’s mother doesn’t know. The joys, the sorrows, the days in suspense, the sleepless nights, loving someone more than yourself. The anxieties, the I already told you, the massive intake of your own words, the guilt, guilt, guilt for being there, for not having been there, for saying, for not having said. The tongue fractures from biting her so much before her mistakes and the falls in a stream of drool before her successes. Well, this is how far we have come.

The devout and endocrinologists say that God, the hormones, call it X, makes you forget the pains of childbirth after the quarantine, because, if it were not so, no one would go through them again and we would become extinct. The one who signs, in fact, went through the trance again. But little has been written about the grief that comes when the chicks leave the nest. Maybe that’s why, to put me in my place and put things in perspective, providence and my proverbial clumsiness wanted me to break my neck the other day and hardly mention it. So here I am, half groggy between seams, bruises and diazepams, relativizing. Tomorrow, my eldest daughter takes an AVE and flies from the nest with a white coat and a phonendoscope in her suitcase. She is going to give epidurals to women in labor at the hospital where her mother was born and to help others to be born, live and die without pain. That yes, that already, that is worth. That it is for your good, that it is here next door, that the world does not end, that it is the law of life. Let go of my arm, gentlemen. I shit on the law of life. How bad I have it.