The Worker Bee

What is motherhood? A woman coming out of a woman coming out of a woman coming out of a woman coming out of a woman coming out of a woman coming out of a woman. An unbroken chain of births. A literal, bloody set of Russian dolls.

Grab any woman you find near you. Start nesting her backward. Tuck her into the woman who birthed her, and then that woman into hers. Keep going, layer by layer, until you reach the largest doll. The first one. The one that contains them all.

You arrive at Eve. Massive. Primordial. Containing every mother who will ever split herself open. Queen effin’ Eve. 

But what the hell happened to Eve?

Eve was the body performing. Before we had words. Before we had language, or metaphors, or pain scales. No word for contraction, no word for labor, no word for birth. No word for the thing she was becoming—no word for mother. The concept didn’t exist until she bled it into being.

Just flesh. Cervix dilates 10 centimeters. Uterus contracts every 2–3 minutes. Infant head crowns. Perineum tears. Placenta detaches. Body writes scream. Body invents push. Body delivers body. Body designs blueprint.

Eve, the original guinea pig. Beta-testing what it means to be a mother. Just a woman in paradise, inventing pain.

I’m not deeply knowledgeable in divine engineering. I don’t know what other options Eve had. Were there more civilized methods: babies under rocks? Delivery by fairy godmother? Could she have sneezed one out? The logistics are murky and well outside my area of expertise (which is early-stage climate investing).

But here we are. Every female who has ever given birth is still Eve.

The woman in the Himalayan village. The one in the Sahara. Your neighbor. Your neighbor’s cat. Even the Russian woman in Moscow herself—we all crack open like Matryoshka Russian dolls. One inside another. Each emerges to deliver the next.

And yet, somehow, that grand, brutal, solitary performance has become one of the most universal human acts. The smaller doll slips out of the larger— slippery with blood. And before the room even cools and before she even learns life, the smaller doll opens her eyes, wipes herself off, and walks down the hall to the other delivery room and this time gives birth to the next smaller doll.

It’s swift. Natural. Instinct. That’s life. The loop. The urge and capacity to reproduce.

But what if I never make it to the next room?

What if I drift out of sequence—past maternity, past the nursery—and just keep walking? Out the sliding doors. Out of the hospital. Out past biology. Into uncharted territory.

The last doll. The one that doesn’t open. Equipped with the all-powerful life-giving machine inside me, but don’t use it. Not in the company of all that vibrant, insistent biology. Not among the pain and glory of motherhood.

Just… somewhere very, very quiet. There are only a few of us here. Mostly me. And the worker bees. Freaks of biology. We are still female. Just not the life-birthing type.