inklingfair A fist-shaped lump in my belly undulates downward, Alien chestburster-like, as Ravel’s Tzigane plays on a bluetooth speaker on my abdomen. Call it hokey, but at least I have his attention, all thirty-four weeks of him still stubbornly head-up.
I was born at home, with a midwife assisting Nanay, no numbing drugs. All things considered (even the pandemic) I ought to count myself lucky. If the baby refuses to turn after 37 weeks, I could ask for an external cephalic version under epidural block. Or a scheduled cesarean section.
But the anxiety is there, and when I’m anxious, I read. Yesterday I fell down a rabbit-hole looking up literary birth stories. Before I gave birth to my daughter I gnawed through my nails watching Call the Midwife, a BBC miniseries based on Jennifer Worth’s memoirs as a nurse in 1950s London’s impoverished East End. I now have two of her books to re-read, but I admit I am bewildered (though not entirely surprised) that labor stories are underrepresented in fiction. They are, after all, women’s stories, often either written as a political statement (The Handmaid’s Tale, written by a woman) or drawn out and dramatized (three chapters of Anna Karenina, written by a man).
Even all biblical accounts of childbirth were written by men. The textual interpretations are interesting, though: Tamar and Rebekah both were said to have given birth to twins, each with at least one baby lying transverse – an even worse presentation than breech – today they certainly would have been c-section candidates. Rachel possibly hemorrhaged to death giving birth to Benjamin in her later years. One Jewish exegesis scholar (a man) argues that the Tamar and Rebekah birthing stories are impossible, simply allegories, because (1) they are not consistent with medical reality and (2) the men who wrote them most likely got their information secondhand from the midwives assisting, because being present during the delivery would have had rendered them ceremonially impure.
I wonder how these passages would have been different if they were narrated by women. And I wonder how they would have been read by men, observed by Diane Johnson as unaccustomed to connecting women’s stories of “house, garden, madness” to the universal human condition. Novelist Flannery O’Connor echoed this sentiment, saying, “There won’t be any biographies of me for only one reason, life spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make for exciting copy”.
But I see no less suffering and violence, no less sacrifice and redemption in the apocalyptic vision of the sun-clothed woman in the pangs of birth than the passion of Christ. Sure enough, it makes for an exciting plot: a pursuing dragon, a rescuing eagle, a raging flood, a global war. War, the language of men (significantly, the vision was shown to a man, St. John).
Yet commentaries interpret the woman as the body of believers, and the drama of the church giving birth to the “shepherd of every nation” – bearing the image and character of Christ – plays out in history not exclusively in cataclysmic battles but also in “the house and the chicken yard”.
As I look forward to (or if I’m being honest, dread) my approaching labor, I hope to have a less romanticized, more holistic notion of the delivery process than what I had during my first time, when I approached it armed to the teeth with birth plans, breathing techniques, mom forums, lactation experts.
Perhaps what matters most is what comes next: the daily labor of raising children, of growing into parenthood with my husband, of not exasperating our offspring (my personal dragon), of accepting both life and death, both violence and grace.
And so what is it to me what emerges first: feet, bottom, head, or hands?
I will welcome him whole.
Image sources: Studies of the Fetus in the Womb by Leonardo da Vinci; Zarach/Perez from Corpus Christi Birth Center; Woman and Dragon detail from Mary the Virgin, Henley on Thames, Oxfordshire, England (unknown author, public domain)
