Eve Ensler—Dylan Ensler mother-son relationship

Eve Ensler’s relationship with her adopted son, Dylan Ensler, connects private family experience to the book’s inquiry into women’s bodies and the knowledge surrounding them. Ensler adopted Dylan when he was nearly her age; years later, his invitation for her to be present at the birth of his daughter, Colette, gave her investigation of vaginas an intimate, newly embodied dimension. She closes by thanking him for teaching her love.

Adoption and Family

Ensler writes that she adopted Dylan almost twenty-one years before the passage describing his becoming a father. He was very close in age to her, an unusual detail she places plainly within the account rather than explaining or interpreting it. The relationship is identified as mother and son, but its beginnings are adoption, and the chronology gives their later family milestones particular weight.

Dylan’s family expands when he and his wife, Shiva, have a baby. They ask Ensler to be present for the birth. The invitation places her not as an observer conducting interviews, but as a mother welcomed into an intimate family event; the passage names the baby as Colette, her granddaughter.

Birth and Understanding

Ensler observes that her work contained no pieces about birth, an omission she calls bizarre. A journalist’s question about the connection between birth and the subject of her work sharpens the issue, but the family event supplies an answer through experience rather than argument: attending Colette’s birth changes the terms of Ensler’s understanding. She says that, despite all her investigation, she had not really understood vaginas until that moment.

The change is expressed as an intensification, not a conversion from indifference. Ensler says she had already been in awe of vaginas; after her granddaughter’s birth, she is in deep worship. The movement from investigation to witnessing matters: the knowledge accumulated through inquiry is not dismissed, but the birth reveals a dimension it had not given her. Dylan and Shiva’s invitation makes that experience possible, linking the mother-son relationship to the book’s reconsideration of birth as a central subject.

Acknowledgment and Significance

In the acknowledgments, Ensler thanks Dylan for teaching her love, and thanks Shiva and her granddaughter, whom she calls Coco there, in connection with birth. The main account names the baby Colette, while the acknowledgment uses Coco; both passages place the granddaughter within the family story of birth. Ensler’s closing thanks gives the relationship a reciprocal dimension: Dylan is not only the child she adopted, but also someone whose place in her life has taught her love.

The relationship therefore frames a personal arc within the book’s broader exploration of bodily knowledge. Ensler’s earlier account recalls never hearing the word clitoris and growing up without accurate language for an unmentionable part of the body; she later turns to interviews with more than two hundred women and describes looking at her own vagina with a hand mirror in a workshop. Against that history of silence, being present at her granddaughter’s birth becomes a moment of understanding grounded in family intimacy. The book does not present Dylan as the subject of an extended personal narrative; instead, the few details it gives—the adoption, his invitation, the birth, and Ensler’s final thanks—show how the relationship intersects with the work’s central concerns.