annihilation

The future is a benevolent black hole.

-Lucy Dacus, “Cartwheel”

Never going back again, the way it used to be is not the way that it is.

-Phoebe Bridgers, “Never Going Back!”

_{(Song lyric epigraphs for an essay! Why not? Also — shoutout to my enduring love of boygenius)}

I’m perched on the tipping point. Tomorrow, I’ll be thirty-seven weeks pregnant, early term, my baby big and strong enough to be safely born at the birth center where my other two arrived. I keep thinking about the word “delivered,” as it relates to birth. I don’t like the phrase, “the doctor delivered the baby,” or “the OB who delivered me,” because it swerves around the moment of birth as an experience between two people, mother and child, and makes it feel more like an action someone else entirely took. Birth is a relationship, and an event, not a job or task. I do like the cheekiness of saying “the midwife caught the baby.” But I like “the baby was born” best. All the words we use to describe this ordinary but indescribable thing. I will never get over the way the baby is inside at one moment, and out the next, the same as they were before but unchangeably different too. That moment acts like a slamming door between one life and the next. Never going back again, is right.

I try to understand that the baby who is inside me is the same one I will hold in my arms in days or weeks (much more likely weeks but who knows). This never really computes, never has. I can’t conceive of what my life will be, so soon. I’m about to have a newborn on top of my two lively sons. Can I manage that? I will have to! I look at all the things I have prepared, the stacks of diapers, sidecar crib, folded onesies and sleepers, sterilized bottles, the new diaper cream, never yet smeared on a tiny bum. Can I imagine using these? I will! I’m on the edge of a season of very intensive mothering, more intensive than I have ever mothered before. But is it really more? Or just different? I think it is always the most. The first baby takes 100%. The second baby with the firstborn in the mix takes 100%. I will not suddenly have more of myself this time with our third. I still have that 100% to give freely to my family. I’ll do my best to lay it all on the line again. I will give everyone I love everything as I always have. Myself included, I hope.

I have been thinking a lot about fate and trust, both. Now that the SSRI is kicking in and I feel a little less anxious, I can feel myself exhale a bit and acknowledge all that I cannot and never have been able to control. A few weeks ago, a gigantic tree limb that had been imperceptibly rotting fell down in our front yard while my kids were getting into my mom’s car in the driveway a couple dozen meters away. I dared myself not to think about what could have happened if they had decided instead to play in that part of the yard for a moment before leaving. That split second fact of the branch falling there and then — there is no accounting for that. That is the world, that is life. Reading the bit in Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet that describes the extremely specific chain of events that brought the plague to little Judith, I felt my whole body both shudder and relax. There was no misstep anyone took, there was just people living, just the unfolding story of the world, of fate. In so many cases, most cases it feels, there is no preventing what is true. There are exceptional cases, of course, but I mean the great chain of being in general. I don’t think the future is predestined or set, and I don’t think bad things happen “for a reason,” but I do think things unfold just as they must, somehow, both beautifully and terribly. And time marches on. The world holds both chaos and order, all mixed together. There is no way to escape contradiction, except maybe closing your eyes to parts of reality. But all of the best things in my life have arrived right on time, with such clear and obvious “this is next” truthfulness, almost as if given, handed down, set in place. What do I believe about that? I believe it’s all a great mystery. I sit in that mystery now, awaiting my third baby who will unravel my whole life yet again. Just as they should. Can I believe they are real? Not quite yet, and that’s ok.

Back to “deliver.” Having grown up evangelical, I associate that word most strongly with the Bible. Actually, as a millennial through and through, I associate it in particular with The Prince of Egypt, the voice of Moses’ mother soaring above the ensemble singing, “Deliver us,” over footage of her baby’s basket avoiding crocodiles and rapids in the Nile. Or the Lord’s Prayer, “deliver us from evil and lead us not into temptation.” All of this connotes being rescued, or safely carried through peril. People being saved from certain annihilation. I would guess that’s why the word became associated with birth. I can see how it would resonate in parts of human history where the maternal and infant mortality rates in childbirth were much higher, and how it might feel helpful for people who still feel that birth is dangerous, either in their particular case or in general. But as things are now, I think this terminology largely misses the true point.

I thought heavily about the text of the Bible as it relates to birth in my second poetry book, Broken Waters, including imagining birth as something similar to the parting of the red sea, walking through the waters on dry land. Here is that poem, which I wrote while I was pregnant with my first, having not yet given birth or held my baby. All the questions were still purely questions. I truly didn’t know yet how it all would feel.

I think I do feel differently now after all I have lived, but I honor these questions from my past self. They are honest ones. “But I know / I won’t know anything until I’m right / in the middle, standing in the space / the sea made.” That resonates even now. My relationship to faith feels uncertain, but all of these references remain embedded in my psyche, as I expect they always will. The language and stories you hear as a child imprint on you forever. Is birth a walk through the red sea with the waters miraculously parted? “Deliver” means to free or liberate. So the baby is freed from the womb? That doesn’t feel right. Birth is not a rescue, nor is it a liberation. The baby does not need to be saved from the womb, nor does a mother need saved from pregnancy. Of course we need helpers during birth, and I applaud skilled medical care, but in many cases it is not up to the helpers to make the birth happen, or to “deliver” us, or at the very least that is not the important part of what is happening in birth. What is important is that birth is a change, a revelation, a continuation of what is already true. When I feel a word rub me the wrong way, it is so interesting to press into why. I don’t want to be saved from this, nor do I want to be rescued. I want what is already true, and I want to feel it all. Along with that comes the recognition, scary though it is, that if the waters tumble down on us, then that is what has happened. Nothing more, nothing less. I can’t control what will happen in birth or anything else. I can only keep moving in hope, one foot in front of the other, and stay present to what is true and real. That is the posture I am trying to take as I wait.

One of my closest friends just had her first baby. Most of my oldest dearest friends don’t have kids — but every once in a while a friend crosses over to the isle of mothers. Hearing her describe birth, even briefly in a text message, I felt a big piece of myself unclench. It felt like relief, or release. I’m not overestimating this. I am not alone in believing that this, all of this, is extremely important. I never have been. It’s one thing to hear that from strangers and acquaintances, but to hear it anew from one of my people hit me harder than I expected. I mean, it’s why I became a doula, because I really do believe the childbearing year is one of the most intense and sacred things a person can move through. Hearing my friend bear new witness to that affirmed that conviction. Seeing a photo of my friend’s baby’s face, I felt both shock and recognition. That’s her child! Forever! A great mystery revealed! I hadn’t known how much I longed to see that face. How much more when I finally see my baby face to face, as I did both my sons? I sit here awaiting birth, feeling everything, and yet I am still unable to really understand what is coming for me. I just feel awash in mystery more than anything else. The magnitude of what is happening in my life is beyond my understanding or ability to put experience into words. I am about to meet my child, and I don’t know when or how or in what way that will happen. What can I do with that reality but revel in it, speechless and storyless?

I’ve been reading Lucy Jones’ Matrescence extremely slowly, savoring each chapter. I’m finally reaching the end. One of the final chapters is called “Recombobulation,” a word I instantly smiled at. One of the chapter’s epigraphs is a quote regarding motherhood I have long loved from playwright Sarah Ruhl’s brilliant 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write: “Finally I came to the thought, All right, then, annihilate me; that other self was fiction anyhow. And then I could breathe.” Reading that in an ultrasound waiting room, I realized sort of suddenly — oh, I’m about to be annihilated again. The self I am now will soon be fiction, or at least past tense. All this time, I thought that over the course of my first two births and postpartums, I had made it through a cycle of matrescence as if it were a graduation of sorts, not acknowledging that now I have entered a new cycle. There was no exit, just progression. There is MORE transformation happening, girl! It’s going to discombobulate you every single time! Get annihilated! I think in spite of myself I’ve been resisting that annihilation this whole pregnancy, telling myself the story that “you’re different now, you’ve grown so much” “it’s the third time,” “you should be taking this all in stride!” No. That isn’t how it works. It is always transformative, and transformation is extremely difficult and uncomfortable. What, did I think having a third baby would be chill? I think in a way I did! It isn’t. I do feel different this time, but it still is just me in here, astonished at everything. I look at my sons, so big and so small at once, and can hardly believe the sight of them, all that we have been through together. All those discombobulated days, slowly assembling into change and coherence — not perfection just living. Ok, let’s reinvent everything again. We can do it.

All this to say, I really can’t wait to meet my baby, and I also can’t wrap my head around the fact that it’s happening so soon. I don’t think I’ll really believe it till it happens. And then when it does, it will change everything, irreversibly. And isn’t that terribly wonderful?

Other things:

I anxiously awaited Phoebe Bridger’s new album. I listened to it this morning with noise cancelling headphones while my children shouted around me and couldn’t stop smiling. It feels like it’s an album about truly growing up, and that is really moving to me. Listen here.

I adored Maggie O’Farrell’s Land. One of my favorite novels in a long while. O’Farrell is one of those novelists who somehow manages to give every single character full personhood and richness. Every bit of this book, even the terribly sad parts, felt deep and wide.

Bought myself three pairs of these pajamas for postpartum and I’m really happy about it. They’re 100% cotton, don’t feel frumpy, and are seemingly always on sale?

I have admittedly done ZERO postpartum food prep, but I am planning to try to make a big batch of these oatmeal pancakes that my friend Margaret reminded me of on our friend-reunion in Chicago this July. They are SO hearty and good, the perfect postpartum snack, and they freeze well.

I finally bought myself some new baggu bags in a burst of what may have been low-key mania shortly after starting zoloft (lol). But now that I own a medium nylon crescent bag I truly do see the hype. It fits everything, it’s a delight to wear, and I can wash it whenever. Also looking forward to using my new everyday cloud bag as a diaper bag all next year. I topped it off with a purple bowler bag for fun. I know! Wild! I’ve been a baggu stan since literally 2012, so it felt good to add some new bags to the rotation this year. I miss the old leather stuff — sometimes I consider buying one of the og leather bags on poshmark but haven’t done it yet. I still use a baggu leather pouch (like this one) as my wallet, more than a decade running.

Deep in consideration about what my special postpartum sweater will be this year. Will it be another babaa? Will I branch out to another brand? Only time will tell! I really love Nikki Chasin cardigans, but they are FAR out of my budget, so I’d have to find one secondhand for an affordable price. LMK if you’re selling one! But I will forever recommend commemorative gifts to self for big life events, aka having a baby. It doesn’t have to be a sweater, that just happens to be my particular treat. But it feels so special to wear my postpartum sweaters and know I’ll keep them forever, always remembering these tender times in my life and how proud I am of all I’ve moved through.

I meant to get my new birth-prep zines out this summer but I don’t think it’s going to happen. I also really don’t know what work is going to look like after this baby is born. I might start a new zine series, I might not? I might focus on getting these birth prep zines out? I truly don’t know. But they really are pretty much finished so it won’t take much. I’ve been using them with clients and have gotten really positive feedback — but there are a few more zines I want to add to the set. Last time I was postpartum, I wrote and released SIX BRAND NEW ZINES. I don’t really expect to do that in such an organized fashion this time around, but I do hope I’ll write and release a few. Probably my birth story at least!!

I am hoping to be back to in-person birth work in Pittsburgh about nine months pp, which would mean next summer due dates. Reach out if you’re local and willing to work with someone who has a little nursling who may tag along to prenatal meetings (but not your birth, of course!) I love being a birth doula and I truly can’t wait to get back to it. Attending and supporting births is a deep honor, and I miss it already.

Thanks so much for reading. I love to hear your thoughts — please leave a comment with anything on your mind!

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xoxo, more soon