Intimate Odyssey: Modern Motherhood and the Birth Narrative

"The good ones can be remembered like that, yes," the doula said to me. On the other hand, a traumatic birth, she said, handing me a cup of tea, usually has a beginning, middle, and end. There is no narrative arc to my son's birth.

Even a week afterward, sitting on the couch with the doula as she rubbed my leg with her confident hands, the discrete moments of my labor hadn't yet cohered into a story. Pregnant, I hadn't thought much about labor until its inevitability hung over the last month, and then it was all I could think about. Normal tasks receded into a haze, so consumed was I with this single extraordinary thing I was about to do. In bed one night, days before I gave birth, my toe-nail snagged on my sheet and I wondered at the fact that life went on amid my anxiety, that my toenails still grew and required clipping.

And then birth happened. I felt stomach cramps one evening, forty-one weeks and change, a dusky feeling of being wound-up tight at the center of my body. I was at home (thank god), folded over like an upside-down L with every contraction, embracing the pain, proud of it. To the hospital at dawn, and the pain changed. I had no room for pride. Everything hurt and I was afraid. Time slowed. Still the labor continued, with moments of grace. When I forgot how to breathe, my husband or the nurse reminded me. And then my son was on my chest—just a blink between all-consuming pain and holding a purplish crying infant. Within a few weeks his cries struck me as inevitable, I knew them so well.

I had little desire to tell anyone the story of my son's birth in more detail. It was a good birth. But in the months around it, as I had swelled enormously and then began to return to my own shape again, I saw birth stories everywhere. Some of this was gravitational, created by my own condition. Stories about birth were as attractive as they were repulsive to me, but they were never neutral.

Months and then a year passed, during which birth stories appeared by the hundreds. I still see them everywhere. Even now that I no longer seek them out, they remain. They proliferate on television and in books, from literature to thrillers to the vast and ongoing profusion of self-help. Birth stories have dedicated Reddit boards, Instagram accounts, websites, and pod-casts. Op-eds expound upon the luxury and lunacy of the birth plan and how it compares to the experience itself. Media outlets call our attention to childbirth crises around the world, to the racist imbalances in maternal-mortality rates in the US, to the coronavirus pandemic's impact on women going into labor everywhere. As the drumbeat of the pandemic reverberated around the country, and hospitals began banning loved ones from delivery rooms, the birth stories women had imagined for themselves were the first casualties. "I grew up in a generation of women where having a partner with you is a big part of everyone's birth story," one fearful expectant mother told a New York Times reporter in March, dreading the possibility of giving birth in a hospital among strangers.

Birth stories—the first story, the place where we all begin—offer a way to give shape to something that can never be fully controlled. Indeed, imagining a clean, linear narrative is a good preparatory exercise for an unpredictable event. But the current vogue for consuming and sharing birth stories raises just as many questions as it answers. Who gets to give birth, and why, and how? How much are we entitled to ask of our birthing experiences? The stories themselves have become a kind of repository of anxieties over what a woman is or should be in contemporary society.

To give birth and to want to talk about...