Our second baby Ben was born four weeks and a day ago! I’ve spent every day since then nearly thoughtless, which has been both necessary and strange. For the past week or so, I have been feeling my wits coming back to me, slowly, and only piecemeal. Re-reading my strangely fragmented notes app file of random postpartum thoughts. Starting to parse my birth story in a google doc (to become the first zine of my A Year Postpartum print zine series). Trying to retrace my steps through the last weeks so as not to lose them forever, without stepping anywhere that would have me fall through the floor to some under-place I don’t want to go. I don’t know if it’s been hard, I don’t know if it’s been easy, I don’t know where I am now, or who I am, really. All I know is that my life moving forward from here feels distinctly impossible, which must be because I am expecting it to be the same as my life before and it cannot be. I need to invent a new life. I haven’t invented it yet. To quote Lucy Dacus’ generous poem-lyrics, “the future is a benevolent black hole.”
As I sat down to try to write my way through some version of my birth story, I finally gathered up the courage to really examine the photos my doula/friend Sophia took throughout my hours laboring at the birth center. I have almost no photos of my first labor because I didn’t have a doula or a photographer, and my husband was too busy experiencing the birth of his first child to snap a bunch of pics — so the sheer existence of these photos is shocking to me. They were hard to look at at first — a photo is so unflinching and honest. The birth was hard, and I can see all the hard in the images. But it’s incredible too to see myself in the photos, my own body moving though an experience that was singular and has acted like a hinge in my life. A threshold. That is my body in the place between. That is my body in the hardest nowhere place. That is my body carrying me through, going places where my mind could not go, delivering me and my child safely to the other side. How quickly my brain forgot all of it, but my body remembers. My body was there.
I’m sharing some of the most peaceful photos here, because they’re the ones I feel like sharing. There are many grotesque photos of the birth. I don’t think I will ever show those to anyone. I may even delete them. Or put them in a special folder labeled “burn these” or something. I’m glad they exist, I’m glad I’ve seen them, and also oh my goodness they are hard to look at. Easier to try to remember, because memory is hazy and my body feels safer inside memory than it does inside the photos. Does that make sense? Wow, didn’t realize this would be a mini-essay about birth photos.
I was really scared to give birth unmedicated for the second time. I had every right to be, it was very scary and hard — but I also had a birth that I am really proud of, and that I’m grateful to have experienced. It was much more positive than my first birth in a lot of ways. I felt more powerful, more surrounded and supported, and more present. I felt very alive, and never lost. And pissed off that it was so hard! I’d say it was more painful than my first birth, like maybe twice as painful, which may or may not be true. It’s hard to remember pain. It was differently painful. I felt myself get “stuck” and then get “unstuck.” I’ll unspool the whole story in the zine, I don’t know how to get there yet. But our son Ben was born in the water after only like two minutes of pushing at 3:45 am, and I became a new version of myself, stepped into a new life, needing to reconsider everything.
I was in a very intense forty-person theater ensemble in college where we played a lot of “games” that were more like embodied communal poems (this is why I am the way I am, in case you were wondering). One of the games was called “Reconsidering”, and this is how you played it: everyone sits down on the floor in front of a fake theater door, like just a door frame with a door in it but no walls. If you wanted to play, you stood up and walked behind the door. Then, you opened the door and stepped through and stood in front of everyone for maybe thirty seconds or so. And then you would sit back down. The intention of the game was to be reconsidered — by the ensemble, by yourself, by the universe. The game involved a literal threshold, and the chance to say (without saying anything), maybe once and for all, “I’m different now than I was before.” It might sounds sort of cheesy written out like this, but it wasn’t cheesy in real life.
I don’t think I ever played the game. There were a lot of games that all had different functions and meanings, and I played many of them, but I don’t think I ever stood up to walk through the door and be reconsidered. I don’t think, at the time, I had any good reason to play. I think during that time, in college when I was doing theater and falling in love with my husband and surrounded by friends and mentors and community and straightforward work to do, and feeling so happy in so many ways, I felt a certain consistency within myself, like my life wasn’t changing in such a way that I needed to be re-regarded by the group or myself or the universe.
But, oh, I would play now. I would play over and over and over again. I would walk through the door and stand there for an hour. See me new. I’m different. Who am I? Where am I? What world have I stepped into? See how mothering my children is undoing me, how I feel like a little child, how I’m trying to be a gentle leader, how it’s often too hard, how there are twice as many of them as there are of me and they reflect my weakness back to me more than they reflect my strength, how I’m humble now I’m humble now I’m humble now, how it’s beautiful and changing me every day. I don’t know where I am! No part of me feels consistent, I feel porous and half-alive, and gone-to-pieces, and riven and strange!
But I can look at the photos. My body in the doorway. My own body passing through that threshold of birth. Even if I don’t know where I am, there’s a solidity to the doorframe, to my body inside of it. The sense memories, the feeling of holding my newborn son on my chest in the water when seconds before he was inside my body. His small slippery body not a part of me anymore. He never was. I just held him. And held myself. I walked through that door and now I’m standing over here bare and grotesque and it’s good not to know yet. I’ll invent my life again. I already am. And for now it’s okay only to know that I’ve passed through. To remember the door frame. To close the door behind me and stand in front of you again, new and over here.