mother of
not a birth story
Welcome to the Sunday post. You can read more about Mommy’s El Camino here.
Thirteen years ago today I was dozing off on my couch in my apartment in Mid-City. It was around noon when I started feeling some unease. Like, new unease, distinct from all the myriad forms of mild unease that popped up during pregnancy. I called my partner and told her: I think something is happening. She left work that day and didn’t go back until six weeks? eight weeks? later.
She drove home that day and we planned our evening. I was in labor, but it was early. There were hours to fill before I would be on all fours bearing the worst pain I could ever imagine. We met our friend, who is our sperm donor, who is our family, at the Arclight Theater. We watched a political drama while clandestinely using the phone to count contractions throughout. We ate dinner after, as I realized it might be my last meal for a while. I remember an earthy carrot soup.
This was the date thirteen years ago when I felt pain that is indescribable and yet has also so completely left my memory it’s as though it never happened.
I’m so not into birth stories. The only time I ever was was in the months before I knew I’d be giving birth, and I asked a bunch of friends and peers who had already gone through it what it was like, wanting every gory detail. Beyond that I have no interest. My own story feels like one of those stories I’ll never tell in full to a reading audience—it’s just so . . . mine. It’s for people I love who ask me directly. Otherwise it’s something I hold to myself and with those who were there.
Roughly thirty-six hours of pain after holing up in my body for nine months, and then I met a remarkable creature. The remarkable creature is now about thirty-six hours away from being a teenager. I’m writing a very strange essay about mothers. I’ve held onto an email I can’t bring myself to answer because it’s good news and I keep feeling like I want to hold onto it without responding, to just feel it and live with it—mine—before I say anything about it or apparently even acknowledge it to the bearers of said good news. A class of undergraduate students compiled a playlist for me after reading, and in response to, an essay I wrote. I ate a deviled egg and caviar and butterscotch scones and more alongside a pot of tea in a warm garden. In roughly thirty-six hours I come out, fully birthed, mother of an adolescent.
Catch up on mini-interviews here. A new one arrives this Thursday.
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Did you read the excerpt from LJ Pemberton’s debut novel?
See you next week!