You can’t fail at birth

Or maybe you can, but then you revise.

10 years ago on Memorial Day weekend, I gave birth to my first bio child, under general anaesthesia, after a planned homebirth ended in an emergency transfer.

My son was pulled out like premier sushi while I killed time in a black hole. It took years to make tepid peace with not having seen him immediately after birth, not having held him first.

The baby went to the NICU, and I didn’t sleep for a week, moonwalking back and forth to his isolette.

13 years ago on Memorial Day weekend, one of love and war, I met my future stepsons, something our culture sadly has no rituals for, and Hallmark nary a single rhyming card.

Let me tell you all about stepmothering: it is just like mothering, but weirder!

That day, there was no emergency transfer of parentage. Instead, we hiked a mountain, ate pb&j sandwiches, and examined bugs. The latter I still can only feign interest in for short spurts, about 1mL of a spurt, despite loving all of life I swear.

This past Memorial Day weekend, I was too caught up in reflection and sorrow over the loss of my mom and the celebration of 10 or 13 years as a parent to post at my intended cadence. My 6 year-old taught my dad to play the world’s most onerous game, “Go Fish!,” which my mom always patiently played with her.

Instead I am sharing one of the versions of my son’s birth story that I’ve previously published (excerpt below), an experience which I have turned over and over like mala beads in a hand, a prayer that leads you right back to where you started. This marks our decade of being struck by obstetric lightning, and surviving.

With the birth of my three children, and with the merging into my life, if not my biology, of my stepsons, there seems to be always more up my somatic sleeve. I promise this is how any carefully considered birth and family narrative proliferates.

No matter how exhaustively you tap it, the well refills. And, yes, the step-well too (though you might have to wait for the cloudier water to settle, or filter the shareable version through the Brita of future hypothetical litigation.)

Inside the one story, thousands. Inside any one parent, the aggregation continues.

As intoned by the savvy instructor of my first childbirth class, when I was training as a doula, “You CANNOT fail at birth!” This was 7 years before I myself gave birth, so I could only nod along philosophically.

And now having visited the crossroads, body & psyche ravished and regenerated, I agree: anyone who leaves their birth feeling like a failure could use another POV to counter that. But despite knowing better, I definitely felt I’d failed 1000%, F++++.

This excerpt is From “Fail, Birth”(2017)- published at Manifest Station, a literary platform created by Jen Pastiloff and now curated by Angela M Giles- where maybe you want to send your work, too?

You can’t fail at birth, they tell you.

But you sure fucking can, and here’s how you do it.

It starts when your baby’s heart rate slows down so much that even a novice midwife, or, for that matter, even a four year-old, would know something was wrong.

In my case, you could think whole profound thoughts between those heart beats. You felt like John Cage, because the silence was as loud as the noise. You felt like a Buddhist Monk whose awareness is so attuned she can see through the holes in time and space to an eternal present where your baby’s next heartbeat never comes.

Well, it wasn’t that bad.

Yes, it kind of was.

My husband doesn’t freak out. Generally. But stooped in the desk chair by my bedside, he had the same look on his face I get when I burn toast, or when the baby (yes, there is a baby at the end of this) gets a little too pinkish red around the lips, or when my computer doesn’t save my hard-won revisions. Panic. In him, though, it’s only detectable by those who know that slight agitation in the corner of his eyes means the earth went off its axis to court Mars.

The baby the baby the baby.

By the end of labor, no complete sentences can completely describe the state you’re in. You’re diffuse and ridiculously one-pointed. You’re bigger than the entire universe because that’s how big your pain is– at the same time, you’re so small and useless you couldn’t roll a pebble down a kiddie slide. It’s a paradoxical state where you are about to do the hardest physical feat in the universe having already done the hardest. You want some teenager to take up a video game controller and do it for you, hike your legs apart, eject a baby.

No baby comes.

Read the rest HERE. But before you go….

And if you are missing your dead parent, like I am— the parent who heard CODE called on labor & delivery, saw a stretcher whip past, thought “that CAN’T be my daughter,” but it was—my mother who left the birth more traumatized than I was— if you have some weird family structure rising from the ashes of bygone conflicts, or can only feign fascination with a beetle’s carapace’s for up to 2.5mL of a spurt, consider upgrading to paid here. We will be doing a workshop on writing our most vulnerable moments in the fall, when leaves tumble and trees grieve, and you might secretly want to attend.

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Your turn

Are you - or someone you love— still feeling the impact of your birth experience in your psyche? Stored somewhere in your body? Join me to set it free in an intimate virtual tell your birth story session, and receive your written keepsake.

There is no way to fail at telling your birth story. The version you tell changes with you. You can return to it a million times like a prayer and it delivers differently.

Join me here.