another birth story

"if birth is not a story worth telling, even when all goes well, then I don't know what is" -- thoughts on birth stories, and a new zine

Before the newsletter essay: I have a new zine out called Second Birth! It tells the full story of the birth of my second son, revisits my first birth, unspools many feelings about matrescence and change, and includes a number of illustrations drawn from photographs of my labor and delivery. It’s available in the United States as a limited edition 28-page print zine, and available to everyone as a digital/printable zine as well.

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I really, really love birth stories: as a literary genre, as a conversation, as a metaphor. But birth stories seem to be tucked away in a bit of a niche. This makes sense, but feels like hidden treasure to me. Like most people, I think I first encountered birth stories and began consuming them in great numbers (mostly via podcast, but also a handful of books) when I was pregnant for the first time — treasure box opened, riches exposed. I had only heard a few birth stories before then. I’d heard about my own birth, of course, but not in great detail. I wonder how much of the story any given person knows about their own birth? I knew I was a c-section baby, but it wasn’t until I was pregnant that I asked my mom why I was delivered via c-section. When I asked her, I learned many more details: I was stubbornly transverse, it was a happy pregnancy, she was in early labor when she went in for the scheduled c-section, her blood pressure tanked shortly after the birth but she was too euphoric to notice, lots of visitors at the hospital, some arriving before she felt ready. That is the way I was born, the story surrounding one of the most significant moments of my life, my very beginning. I wish I’d heard more about it sooner, asked more questions earlier. I wish I’d learned more about birth through the stories surrounding me, that it was as much a part of our storytelling culture as marriage and romance, as death, as coming-of-age. Isn’t pregnancy and birth a hero’s journey too? Shouldn’t we all feel curious about our origins? Our birth, our babyhood, our childhood? Or is it too vulnerable to consider that we were born, that our mother was pregnant and gave birth to us, that we were cared for when we could do nothing on our own, that there is a very real part of our life that we depend on others to remember, outside of our conscious memory? Maybe it’s easier to forget or ignore the story of our birth. But what is lost in that forgetting?

It’s because of that vulnerability (and cultural compartmentalization + misogyny), I suspect, that most birth stories go untold, or are told only with the broadest brushstrokes. Those birth stories still exist in the bodies and minds of the women who lived them, of course, and in the bodies of the babies who were born, but they’re locked away, some rather tightly. Our births remain true and impactful even if we don’t talk about them. The body keeps the score, doesn’t it? But we don’t learn much about birth at all until we are pregnant or about to have babies ourselves, and even then you have to seek out a wide variety of birth stories if you want to hear them. The wider world would much rather sell you things than tell you true and nuanced stories. I think it takes a certain closeness to birth to develop curiosity about it — but, for me at least, once that door was opened I did not want to close it. I wanted more for everyone than the birth announcement consisting of a photo of a clean, swaddled newborn captioned, “mom and baby are doing well!” There’s a huge and cataclysmic experience behind that! Who did that mom get to tell about how it all went down? Has anyone asked her, really?

The first real birth story I actually heard was Sophia’s. That’s a really sweet full-circle, because she became a part of my second birth story by serving as my doula — but that came much later. Sophia was my first close friend to have a baby, offering me my first opportunity to encounter birth through the eyes of someone I cared about and knew well. I remember sitting with Sophia, asking her to tell me every detail from her first birth. I was still a few years away from my first pregnancy. We were in an upper room of the house she and her husband were renting in Philadelphia. She was nursing and then holding her 4 week old daughter as she told me the whole story, every little detail that came to mind. Her birth story made me curious about all of it, about my own future births and the birth experiences of everyone around me. I remember listening to her birth story with such relish and amazement at how intense it was, how interesting. I had so many questions, and loved sitting inside of the story with her, hearing her talk about how it had felt and what it had meant to her. It wasn’t an easy birth, but I could tell that it had been a means of transformation, and that transformation was incredible to witness. Her amazement at what had happened within the boundaries of her own life, her own experience, was infectious.

But I’d always been curious about birth and motherhood. I wonder if I would have been so interested to hear the story if I wasn’t nearing that stage of life myself? I can’t tell because I can’t separate myself from my own life’s trajectory — but having heard many birth stories now I think I would argue that we all would only benefit from hearing more of them! For one, birth just makes for a good story! There’s drama! Suspense! Emotional range! Of course it can get repetitive if you hear birth stories over and over and aren’t so tuned in to the nuance within it — but the details are luminous. Birth is a human story, and human stories are interesting. Birth might be one of the most human stories of all — families growing, new people joining the world, life, death, pain, joy, everything in between. Great love and great suffering.

There’s a new book out called Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth by Jennifer Banks, the executive editor of Yale University Press. I read an essay from the book’s author somewhere online that referenced the book and immediately requested it from the library. I just picked it up yesterday, so I’ve only read a little bit, and I may only ever make it through the introduction given my track record with reading at the moment (still having a two-month old baby and toddler nearly always near) — but even if I don’t get to give the book the time I’d like I’m still so happy it exists. The first line of the book’s introduction reads, “Birth is humanity’s greatest unexplored subject.” This is exactly what’s been nagging me ever since I gave birth the first time. The most intense and significant thing I’d ever done, and I still felt completely taken-by-surprise by it. Why isn’t birth everywhere? I remember thinking. While I was waiting for my library hold to come in, I read a review of the book by Cassandra Nelson that really got me stewing.

“There is a case to be made for reticence when all goes well. And perhaps it even helps explain why birth is such a stubbornly hard subject to write about or to prepare anyone for. The ingredients are similar enough from one birth to another that a narrative account quickly becomes boring, and different enough to make predictions impossible. Birth can’t be abstracted or distilled; you kind of just have to be there to get it, and even then (take with a grain of salt my assertion here, based on a sample size of one) you never fully get it. I could tell you what I remember, but to whom, aside from my daughter and me, would it really matter? Birth is an experience that happens over and over and yet never repeats, and one that somehow grows both increasingly mundane and increasingly ineffable with time, as it recedes into memory and wonder.

Sunsets are the same way, come to think of it. Maybe every moment is. And when one somehow makes it through our thick human skulls and our muffled senses, we see reality as it truly is: a miracle, a gift.”

Cassandra Nelson, from this review

This take feels cynical to me. The review as a whole isn’t bad, but these paragraphs stopped me in my tracks. So, because it’s hard to write about birth, we shouldn’t try? Because it’s common and personal, it wouldn’t matter to anyone outside of the experience? I can’t tell if that’s what she’s actually arguing (her argument here feels a little murky, tbh), but if it is, then sheesh! I don’t agree at all with the first sentence, and the rest of it feels not untrue, but somewhat ungenerous or unimaginative. She argues that maybe we should be reticent, keep our birth stories to ourselves “if all goes well.” So we should just say to our children, to all of humanity, “you were born, you were fine, it was fine, it hardly mattered enough to talk about” and then move on? What?! I like the sunset metaphor, but for the opposite reason that she shares it. It makes me think about poetry — some of the best poems, the ones that move me the most, that help me “see reality as it truly is,” are the ones that take the sunset that I’ve seen a thousand times and give it back to me brand new. That say, “have you seen the sunset?! isn’t it incredible?!” That make me take a second look and let the sunset cover me with light, even for the thousandth time.

But we haven’t all seen birth a thousand times. Many of us will only encounter it a small handful of times. And it’s more incredible than a sunset, more worthy of attention and articulation, I would argue, for its personal rarity, and huge significance for both parent and child, and, ultimately, humanity. Birth is ordinary, of course, it happens everyday, everywhere. It’s how every person gets here. But personal particular experiences of birth? Those are both communal and private, like a sunset only one little duo, mother and child, can see. That is special. We need to hear about it. If birth is not a story worth telling, even when all goes well, then I don’t know what is.

“I could tell you what I remember, but to whom, aside from my daughter and me, would it really matter?” Oh, this question makes me so sad! I’d like to hear your birth story, Cassandra! If it mattered to you, it could matter to all of us! Isn’t that how art works? Isn’t birth as worthy of the dignity of storytelling as every other human experience is? Why in the world would we exclude something so pivotal from our canon of stories, deem it too common or too ineffable or too both to share? I’d listen to anyone’s birth story if they wanted to tell it! I pretty much have to stop myself from asking every new mom acquaintance the details of her birth for fear of seeming weird or dredging up a hard memory she doesn’t want to revisit. In my opinion, that’s the part of birth stories that feels tricky now that I’m a mom — birth isn’t simple, and it isn’t easy, and to tell a birth story is to step back into the experience at least a little bit. Maybe birth stories are rare because it’s hard to revisit our births. Not hard to remember, but hard to re-enter the room. But surely that’s because there’s so much trauma and powerlessness baked into the system we have to have babies in. Or because no one is asking us! Because we don’t feel safe to share how we really felt! How hard it really was! How scared we really were! Maybe that’s the problem. But I’d bet that in a circle of women, even the hard stories could be shared with safety and acceptance. I’d bet that those hard stories would matter. And I’d bet the “boring” ones would matter too.

Maybe it is too archetypal, too abstract. Maybe one birth story is too much like another one. But, if there’s anything I’ve learned from listening to literally hundreds of birth stories while I was pregnant, it’s that after a while what you are hearing is the people. People talking about birth. People talking about their life, their life changing, their way through a really hard thing, their hopes and fears and ways to cope with pain and doubt. I don’t mind hearing the same story over and over if it’s people telling it. Even moreso if it’s interpreted, connected to other ideas, spun into art. Because isn’t life the same story over and over too — with variation, but still a general common rhythm? We are born, we are children, we are adults, we work, we raise families, we grow old, and we die? If we can hear that story over and over and over from so many different people and never grow tired of it, see it spun into such a kaleidoscope of art, then we can hear birth stories and not grow tired of them too. Can’t we?

I’ll get off my soapbox now, but all of this does make me feel angry. I know there are circles in which it is not radical or out of the ordinary at all to share a birth story — but in the greater culture it really still is. They’re not just for moms, they’re not just for doulas and midwives or “birth nerds”, they’re one of the most human things we have. Maybe it will always be a niche, a literary genre only to be read by other interested writerly moms, stories told between close friends, hushed conversations in an upper room, a file on someone’s computer. But I really do think that the way we are born should matter to all of us, and is as worthy of the dignity of storytelling and art-making as any other human story. I wish more birth stories for all of us, more memory of where we come from and how humblingly vulnerable and exciting and hard and beautiful and interesting it is to be born and to give birth, both.

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All of that to say, I have a birth story to share, and I hope you’ll read it! It’s precious to me. And, as a writer and mother by vocation, I knew I needed to write about it — not skip past it, or leave it behind me unexamined in my art practice. Giving birth again felt like one of the hardest and most important things I have ever done. By writing the full story, I was able to see how my second birth had changed not only my life, but my interpretation of my first birth as well. Birth really is a portal, a threshold between one world and another. So I wrote my birth story and made it a new Imaginary Lake zine, and I’m so excited to share it.

It’s called Second Birth, and it’s available in print here, and digital/printable here.

I share a lot of my writing for free (and am planning for this newsletter to remain free for the foreseeable future!), so purchasing my zines is a really great way to support my work as a writer and artist, and to read writing of mine that you can’t find anywhere else! I love artist publishing, and I am so excited to be building a body of work via my small press, Imaginary Lake, and practicing the art of book-making. It feels really fruitful and exciting to me as an artist, especially as an artist-mother working within the boundaries of taking care of little kids and making things at home. You can buy this zine and others on my website! A few of my zines are currently out of print (I’m hoping to restock print versions at some point, but I don’t know when), but they are available as digital downloads anytime!

This zine is the first in a six-zine series I’m publishing this first year after my second baby was born! The project is called “A Year Postpartum” — you can buy a subscription and get all six zines over the course of the year! I don’t know what the other five will be yet, but they’ll all have to do in some way with the aftermath of having a baby, and will be sent straight to you as they are published — this birth story zine included!