broken waters
the book I wrote when I was pregnant for the first time is out tomorrow!
A first pregnancy is such a singular experience — I think about mine all the time. Your life is changing dramatically, but in strange slow motion. The feeling of suspension, standing on the shore of a big water knowing you are about to cross to somewhere new. Experiencing your own body as pregnant for the first time. It’s you — but different. Sometimes nearly imperceptible, sometimes like you’ve been horrifyingly body-swapped. The otherworldly exhaustion, the symptoms that make normal life feel like an old dream. The first time you feel quickening, a separate body moving inside your body. The way you feel pried open emotionally, a crowbar separating your spirit. The waiting, the endlessness. Counting time in weeks. The fear that the baby won’t make it, intermingled with the stranger fear that you don’t know what it will be like when they’re here. Sorting through stories and advice and research and information from every which way. The change, everything changing, your whole existence dripping change. And the baby! They’re in there! Complete! And then they are born and you are in the newness that goes on and on, and everything keeps changing, forever. Your child shape-shiting before your eyes, almost visibly growing. Your own soul, altered. No subsequent pregnancy is like it, there’s no going back. Your life now has a new “before” and “after,” one that defines so much about what will happen next. My whole life, I wondered what it would be like to be pregnant, to have a baby. Suddenly, it was happening, and it was rapturous and wild and mundane and terrifying.
When I was pregnant for the first time with my first son, I furiously wrote a poetry manuscript. It was 2020, I was pregnant and couldn’t leave my house. The world was changing around me as my life was changing too. That book is out tomorrow, and I can hardly believe it. That tender, tender book, written by the version of myself who was balanced right on the edge of motherhood. A stunning moment in my life, and the poems reflect back all the contradictions, all the anticipation, all the surprising wisdom inside of me as I waited for my life to change so completely.
The book is carried forward through time by confessional poems that travel through the weeks of that pregnancy, but it is also deeply in conversation with ancient literature — that ancient literature being the Bible. More than half of the poems in Broken Waters explore, imagine, and unpick stories about birth and fertility and sexuality in the Bible. Newer readers of mine may be surprised by this because I don’t write so much about faith or spirituality these days. But I grew up reading the Bible — it’s the book I know best, the text that leaps to my mind in free association with everything around me. When I was writing this book I was clinging hard to the faith I’d carried with me for my entire life, and as my life was shifting I needed the stories I’d been hearing since I was little to be my guide. I needed a great cloud of mothers to tell me what to do. And there are many mothers in the Bible. In fact, women for the most part only appear in the Bible if they are someone’s mother. Most of the stories of women in the Bible are either directly or indirectly stories about fertility, sexuality, and birth, with few exceptions. While I was pregnant and stuck at home and feeling suddenly unsure about everything, there was a kaleidoscope of old birth stories to find and wonder about, a secret heartbeat behind the more well-trodden male-centric narrative of the bible. Maybe puzzling over these stories could help me understand my own?
The whole time I was pregnant, I was deconstructing my faith. Not on purpose — it was just happening. I couldn’t go to church anymore because of the pandemic, and I was feeling relieved. This came as a surprise. My once-firm belief was shifting and sliding out from under me, and my long-held understanding of a paternal “father” god was fading away, seemed suddenly irrelevant and hard to even think about. This felt like it was because of my pregnancy, but I couldn’t put a finger on why. It felt like my brain was changing. I know now that it was. Pregnancy and early motherhood, matrescence, is one of the points in a person’s life with the most neuroplasticity. You are able to change your mind in ways you weren’t able before. Did you know that?! I am fascinated by this fact. I tend to be quite set in my ways, naturally cognitively rigid. But my whole structure of belief was falling apart underneath my feet as my neurons stretched and rearranged to make space for my new life as a mother. A soft, quiet, mystic, and soft universe of big mother love was replacing what used to make sense, a womb around me that I can only perceive if I let everything else fall away. I can picture it. It’s outside of my cognition. If my belief in god used to be a solid wood tower, now it is a wild tangle of green and growing living vines. I don’t know where I stand now with religion, but I think I believe there is something like everlasting arms underneath me, holding me up, keeping me from falling into a chasm of despair.
But, still, the wood tower was falling apart and it was terribly scary. And everything else was scary too. Change is hard for me! I think about this moment of my life all the time. The moment before, the precipice. I think it’s one of the wildest moments of any mother’s life, because it’s such a true hinge. Your life does change, and deeply dramatically! And, even though this is the moment when I started feeling weird about all things Bible, what has happening to me felt, frankly, biblical! In scope, in intensity, in the blood, tears, stone, fire, flesh, dirt, life, death of it! It makes sense though. The Bible is full of stories like this, where you see a character’s life change dramatically. Often it involves the appearance of a crazy angel delivering a crazy message, telling the character to do something or move somewhere or that something is going to happen to them. Conversion. Transformation. Your life is something one minute and the next minute everything has changed. There is no turning away, no saying “no.” Now, nothing actually crazy was happening to me. I was just pregnant, just having a baby. But within my life, the change I was undergoing was cosmically giant. The Bible was the place I knew to look to for giant cosmic stories. And I think writing this book was my way of allowing the transformation to happen to me, and recognizing it as huge, and maybe even mythic — at least in my own personal universe. To say, “yes,” respond to this small private annunciation, the angel in the room.
So, this book is a diary of a pregnancy, but it is also a true account of a mind changing, a life turning on its hinge. I was waiting, week by week, and meanwhile reading the mothers and women in the Bible carrying the world forward with love, shouldering stories that were never supposed to be about them. I read women doing desperate things, unleashing their rage and sorrow, consenting to wild change, healing and begging and running and cooking and lying and hiding and loving and birthing babies and mothering children who would do good and terrible things — and I understood them. I was standing in solidarity with them. I was them. Their stories layered on top of mine and held me up. And, at the end of my world as I’d known it, I could see that others’ lives had changed and gone on, that after the transformation the story was only more powerful and clear. Maybe I could go on too, weather change that felt too big, allow the bush to burn.
Now, almost four years later, I can say that what began to shift then is still shifting in me. It has been wild and thunderous and huge. Maybe even moreso than I expected. Reading this book now, I feel so proud of myself, of the amount of raw devotion and love I have been able to give away to my family every day. It started here, in these poems. I can read the seeds of that devotion being planted, I can see myself resolving to mother with as much muscle as I had inside of me. These poems were written in the moment before, but I see now that even then I could see the future, the future where love wakes me up in the morning, keeps me up at night, a future I couldn’t quite imagine but knew was the story I needed to allow. The ancient mothers taught me how.
BROKEN WATERS, published by Fernwood Press, is available tomorrow, July 25th!
Here’s the official book summary:
In Broken Waters, poet Amy Bornman navigates the uncharted territory of a first pregnancy and an unfurling crisis of faith by turning to confessional poetry and the text of the Bible in alternating turns. By following themes of fertility and birth in the Bible, Bornman finds a deep and wide guide through unfathomable change, responsibility, and love. As ancient mothers affirm and challenge her embodied experience, Bornman stands in the tension of all that shifts around her — global pandemic, climate crisis, marriage, friendship, body, faith, and fear. Broken Waters is a bold and bewildered prayer, and a raw shout on the edge of new motherhood. “I think I want to be transformed.”
You can buy it most places you like to buy books online. Here’s a link to Bookshop!
And, just for fun, I made Broken Waters a companion playlist, and I’m actually quite proud of it, it’s perfect.
(here’s a link to the playlist if the embedded player is broken!)
Much love! And big hope that this book will find its way to the readers who need it — that maybe you will read this book, or ask your local library to order and shelve it, or tell your friends about it, or have a book discussion with your friends or moms group or at your church, or give it to your friend who is pregnant for the first time, or interview me about it for your podcast, or make a little instagram story about it, etc. etc! I am so happy that this book is making its way into the world, and I hope it will feel like a little shout of solidarity and love from me to you, as we all try to change and love with as much muscle as we can gather.
If you have any questions or thoughts to share, leave a comment or send me an email! More soon!
I can't wait to buy and read your book, Amy!!