Within one year, my ninety-eight-year-old grandmother died silently in a sterile hospital bed. My mother went back to work and slept for the first time in probably decades. My daughter sprouted her first armpit hair, and the doctor told us breast tissue had already begun to build itself, spreading over her fragile ribcage foundation. Gave us a count-down until the first menstruation. I dreamed my tiny girl child crept out of her bedroom one morning and stood frozen at the top of the stairs, distraught about the blood running down her legs, because she had started earlier than anticipated and in the night while we all slept. I ordered an ancestry DNA test and told both of my parents about it. I thought it would give my mother and me some answers about vague illusions my grandparents once gave us without a proof I assumed had been discarded in this rebirth dance called survival. I told my Haitian father it was a shot in the dark because we both know he was once a soft-skinned, newborn hope wrapped in Sunday best then abandoned in the literal trash bin of a ravaged country the world keeps willing into collective forgetfulness, and he never once met his birth mother, who is a wound which never heals–a severed umbilical cord still pulsing, hanging fresh with spilling blood. This year I finally felt the inevitable death of a desire I had decided months or years or decades ago to abandon, discard like black and white photographs upturned in a dumpster. I once said, “enough with all of this birthing,” but still felt the wound of that placental tear and wondered when it would scab over. It never has, but this year I have turned and turned until I have become the monster mother chasing me down so many alleyways. I have become a birth–a rending, bleeding wound itself; an opening of flesh and fear; a valley through which newness barely crawls, bruisingly close to death; a raw, scraping scream squeezing the life straight out of itself. I have become the beginning again. I have become the precipice of grief’s great and terrible blessing.