First Food Equity: A Reparative Approach

I was a twenty-three-year-old student working hard in pursuit of my master's in public health when I chose to carry a pregnancy to term for the first time.At that age, I naively thought I had all the tools necessary to embrace motherhood.I had earned my bachelor's in child development and had worked in Reggio-Emilia preschools, afterschool programs, and camps, not to mention years of baby sitting.Furthermore, I had been raised with a South Indian reverence for the identity of motherhood.In fact, my name, Chellamal, means "sweetness of motherhood" in Tamil, one of the several South Indian Dravidian languages.After learning about what Harvey Karp, pediatrician and child development expert, called "the fourth trimester," defined as the first twelve weeks after birth, I felt that I had found my calling (Karp n.d.).I have always been my best self in the zero-to-three world, finding more joy and ease with our youn gest community.But despite my significant theoretical and practical education in early childhood, I found myself ill-prepared for the emotional trajectory of motherhood and surrounded by adults wielding a combination of se niority and inexperience in the fourth trimester.Nine months of pregnancy and thirty-six hours of unmedicated labor made me a parent for the first time.I met my new baby with a combination of love, amazement, bewilderment, and fear.Soon after his delivery, an exhaustion that I had never experienced before set in; my whole body hurt, and yet the work of navigating the first latch was ahead of me.Adoption and youth coalesced to create an emotional isolation; as a transnational adoptee, I did not have parents who had experienced pregnancy or childbirth themselves, and because I was the first of my peer group to have a baby, I did not have the support of experienced women around me.