I remember the day I decided I was still a person. I had spent months as a milk-machine, a soft, damp thing in a bathrobe, and then I put on that silk blouse—teal, expensive, crisp—to go back to the office. I wanted to be seen as an intellect, a professional, a mind. But the body doesn't care about your promotions or your spreadsheets. The body is a stubborn, leaking animal. It doesn't listen. It just doesn't listen. I was in the middle of a quarterly review, sitting across from three men who smelled like expensive aftershave and lack of sleep. I felt it first—that pins-and-needles let-down. A sudden, warm, heavy flush. I looked down and there they were: two dark, spreading circles on the silk. I’d forgotten the nursing pads. In my rush to be a "career woman" again, I forgot the basic mechanics of my own biology. I just sat there. I sat there and watched the wetness bloom while I talked about profit margins and year-over-year projections. We like to pretend we’ve transcended our animal selves. We humans think the suit and the tie and the office chair make us something other than mammals. We are fools. Every one of us is just a heartbeat and a collection of messy fluids held together by pride. I didn't even cover my chest with my folder. I let them see. I felt a strange, jagged kind of power in their discomfort, even as I felt my own soul shrinking. It was humiliating, and yet, it was the most honest I had ever been. Fight me on that, but the truth is usually found in the things we try hardest to hide. That was the beginning of the end of that version of me. Eventually, the guilt of wanting to be in that room—and the equal, crushing guilt of wanting to be home—just ground me down. I became the stay-at-home mother everyone expected. I traded the silk for cotton and the boardroom for a kitchen where the walls felt like they were slowly moving in. Inch by inch, day by day. You lose your name. You lose your name and you become a utility. You become a ghost in your own house. I'm seventy-two now and I still think about that teal blouse. I think about the shame I was supposed to feel but didn't quite manage. We spend our entire lives trying to hide the fact that we are leaking, aging, dying creatures. We hide it behind manners and we hide it behind "productivity."