this is not a birth story.

if I cared about it less, I could talk about it more.

standing in an important place.

They say you never forget the birth of your child.

I mean, you’re not supposed to. When I think back, though, it’s hard for me to recall what I said or how I behaved, especially in the first few hours afterwards. I know that I did not cry. I was too tired for tears. Those would come later.

I’ve rewatched the video of my daughter’s arrival many times. It was filmed without my knowledge or consent, but I’m so grateful to have it. It’s a short clip, in the grand scheme of my labor— the final eight minutes of a three-day-long voyage. It was taken on the sly, propped up behind a bag in an effort to sidestep hospital rules, so you can’t see much. You can’t see her come out. There are a couple lucky moments where you can steal a glimpse of her head full of dark hair, about to crown, and then someone blocks the view.

You hear everything, though. You hear the ringing, the beeping, the sympathetic chortles from staff as I tell them to wheel the mirror away. You hear the whispers, the strong words of encouragement, me. Most of all, you hear the silence. The silence of waiting for the next contraction. The silence of patience, of respect. But the part that really gets me— the part that has me squinting my eyes and dragging my thumb across the screen again and again, rewinding the clip, shoving the tiny phone speaker up to my ear— is the part when she’s finally out, soaring through the air, about to touch down on my chest. Someone is crooning feverishly, over and over: Welcome, baby! Welcome, baby!

Who the hell is that? I wonder to myself each time I watch, my face scrunched up. Is that my midwife? Is it me? I can’t tell. It must be me. But I sound like a stranger.

---

This is not the story of Adeline’s birth. Because that is a story I cannot write.

Believe me when I tell you: I have tried. Day One of motherhood, I sat barefoot on my storm-swept patio, hunched over a blue marbled notebook, anxiously plucking gossamer out of the ether, trying to weave the invisible into something resembling a storyline before my clumsy hands could tangle up the plot. It felt important. I’ve broken the whole thing up into parts and phases in my drafts, I’ve vomited it out onto a Google doc, I’ve shared it with a perinatal therapist, I’ve revisited it many a time in my morning pages. I have sat, pen poised, staring at the large section in the front of her baby book dedicated to her Birth Story; the treasure that I am supposed to encapsulate for her. Two and a half years later, it is still blank.

I have tried to capture the slipperiness of time, the way it bounced and morphed around the four of us like lava lamp goo. I’ve tried to capture the candlelit focus, the cold relief, the warm certainty, the trance-like haze, the choral swell of peepers and crickets floating in through open windows. I’ve tried to write about the water, the roil and the silence, the way morning came upon us, soft and sneaky, how it bore nothing but confusion and quiet gray light.

You’re being too precious about it, I tell myself. Too Cancerian. Write it like a recipe, or map directions, the way other women do. Try to tidy it up. Develop a clear timeline for us. Try to get it to abide by linearity:

First, the store. Park at sunset. Wet shorts at midnight. Sleep. Pink toilet paper. Phone. Couch, bedroom, living room, chair, belly cast, stairs, lunging, pool, presence, oblivion. Dawn. The tub, the bed, the shapes the body makes. Valerian, passionflower, aloneness. Evening. A new silhouette. Dog, orange onesie, car, thunderstorm, gown. Kind nurse, male doctor with sausage fingers, rude nurse. Catheter, catheter, catheter. “Nobody does that.” No crickets. Red popsicles, hospital-flavored. Morning, again. That specific kind of laughter that comes when you are confronting absurdity. The kind of delusional, white-flag laughter that comes from giving up. Afternoon, again. Can’t, can’t, can’t, can’t, can’t.

3:05pm.

I have tried to immortalize it. Stuff it and mount it on my wall, all captured and resolved. I have tried to collect the lesson of the thing and wrestle it into its neatly labeled gift box— only the lessons weren’t what I expected them to be, and the sublime doesn’t like being forced into symmetry. Neither did she.

I have tried to categorize and conclude something about it: This Is How It Was. It was a Good Birth. It was a Hard Birth. It was an Empowering Birth. It was a Traumatic Birth. I felt triumphant, dehumanized, powerful, weak, empty, full, proud, incredulous, exhausted, irritated, rocked, nothing, everything all at once. I’m angry. I loved it. It was confusing. It was fun. I want to do it again. That’s one thing I do remember saying: I did it. I want to do that again.

what am I supposed to do with this.

This is the part I forgot to tell you: I really like my birth story.

It’s a good story, and a good story deserves to be told. I just don’t know how to clarify the thing without skimming off the shimmery bits. I don’t know how to ensnare something so soft-bellied without killing it. I don’t know how, exactly, to find the words to describe the violent, beautiful, quiet collapse of the cosmos.

This truth is not sharp and clear like the truth of your childhood. This is watercolor truth, bleeding and blending and folding in on itself. This truth looks a little different depending on where you’re standing.

See, I could frame myself as a victim, and my midwife as neglectful. Or, I could laud her advocacy and laissez-faire attitude as the reason why I was able to have an unmedicated, vaginal birth, with all the stats stacked against me. Or I could credit myself with all that. I could tell it in a way that would make the nurses and doctors seem cold and cruel, or I could tell it in a way that shows how everyone was doing the best they could with the information they had; how the bulk of my decisions were respected and preserved. I could tell it in a way that makes birth seem scary and unpredictable, or I could show you how inherently trustworthy birth is. I could tell it in a way that shows how babies always come, that birth will rumble through your body whether you’re in a softly lit pool with familiar faces or splayed out on a hospital bed surrounded by strangers, whether your baby is optimally positioned or not. Or I could tell it so you’d see how easy it is to sabotage the flow of birth. How delicate the whole thing is.

It’s a goddess myth, it’s cautionary tale, it’s a poem, it’s a riddle— and no matter how I told it, you’d nod emphatically along.

I give up. I fear oversimplification and I can’t bring myself to shrink-wrap the narrative. Besides, the tender, shaky translation from the early days has already been passed around like a plate of stale muffins at church coffee hour; the adventure and mystery crumbled up into bite-sized talking points.

To paraphrase Jane Austen:

If I cared about it less, I could talk about it more. ¹

So for now I’ll keep quiet.

For now, I’ll let it live in my heart. I will let it live in my body, and her body, and every June, I will murmur it in her ear and it’ll never sound exactly the same. Every June, when the air gets sultry and the trees are abuzz and the magnolias sit, resisting their own unfolding, I will remember, with a hot stinging behind my eyes, how it felt to be on a precipice.

---

Recently:

1. Some of my husband’s photography was featured in the most recent issue of The Gardan Journal and I am very proud of him.

2. Cutest kids song, my daughter hates it:

3. Making: so many sheet pan dinners, healthyish flourless chocolate cake (so good so easy) cheesy pumpkin pasta (unfortunately not kid-approved over here but maybe you’ll have better luck), white turkey chili, and the only chocolate chunk cookie recipe I care about

4. “Quick sip” is a new and relatively successful method I’ve invented for shortening nursing sessions as we move towards weaning

5. I like the show Un-real and I like the show Detroiters

6. A beautiful talk from Tara Brach on “trusting your own sincerity”

7. I keep rereading this

   

1. “If I loved you less, I could talk about it more,” from Emma.