...it occurred to me that I could use the energy I had been putting into endurance to change my life. Yet the concept of brunt, of accepting and endu… - Anne Truitt

By feeling their pain, I protected myself from my own.

We tend to mix genders when we arrange ourselves around a table for meetings. A sort of accommodation is made by the men for the women: they make space for us. they are ever-so-slightly polite, we are ever-so-slightly grateful. When we stand up at the end of a meeting, we all give ourselves a metaphorical shake that is only partly the relief of having concluded our business: we are all released from the effort of fitting ourselves together.
When men speak in these meetings, women relax; when women speak, men grow tense. I have the impression that they never know what a woman is going to say, whereas they are reasonably sure what a man will address himself to and how he will do it. So are the women; for them, too, men tend to be predictable. Women listen to women with a different kind of attention, and part of it may be loyalty to our gender; we want all of us to do well, as if we have the esprit de corps of subalterns among generals.

The first birth is documented. A doctor stands by; physical facts are readily available; literature abounds in accounts of birth. Folk knowledge hammocks the pregnant woman; she sways in the gentle wind of attention.
Not so with the second birth into adulthood. That is a solitary business for the parent. The course of events is not documented — cannot be, as each child tears the connective tissue differently.