“I’ve been thinking a lot about birth lately.”
That’s how I started last year’s birthday essay. Later in that same essay, while talking about my love for a podcast called the Birth Hour I wrote: “I’m not pregnant, I have no children, I stayed far away from science classes in college—there’s nothing about me that makes me seem like a candidate for Birth Hour aficionado.”
That was only partially true. I mean I wasn’t pregnant, I didn’t have children, and I am certainly not a scientist, but when I wrote that essay I did have a white-hot longing for a child. It was an almost all-consuming thought and had been for a year. However, for various reasons, it was unclear to me if and when this longing would become a reality. Growing up, I think I had a vague desire to be a mother but also wasn’t sure if that would be my path, especially due to the pain of childbirth.
One morning in late August after my first year of law school, I sat high in a Midtown Manhattan office building interviewing for a summer position at a prestigious international law firm. I had made the rounds with several associates and was now meeting with the hiring partner. At the beginning of our interview, he had me turn around and admire a large map that was framed on the wall behind my head. “That’s an expensive map,” he explained proudly. “It’s from an expensive store in London.” Deep in interviewee mode, I gushed my admiration. However, inside I felt myself floating away from the interview and sort of watching the whole thing as a third party. An expensive map? What a tacky thing to tell me. Why is that so important to him? And then, more significantly: Wow. You know what? This man doesn’t care if I join his law firm, really. I am insanely replaceable. He won’t be bothered in the least when I reject this firm’s offer (which I did), he’ll merely pull another one of the hundreds of Harvard Law graduates scurrying about on the streets below and offer them the job. It was sort of a melancholy thought yet also a helpful one. And it was in that moment, sitting right there in front of that expensive map, that I realized I wanted to be a mother—soon—and I wanted it badly. It dawned on me it was the only job in the world where I wasn’t truly expendable and replaceable. Of course it takes a village, but in my role as a mother I knew I wouldn’t be expungeable in the same way I would be at this law firm or really in any job I would ever have in my life. This is not to say that I wouldn’t work as an attorney, but it was a healthy tempering of my ego.
This mid-interview feeling stayed around inside me—ebbing and flowing as I worked through law school and pelvic floor physical therapy. A year after that interview, the feeling became an intense desire. But it still wasn’t possible for us. So the feeling leaked out in other ways. I cried when I saw a baby waving their arms at church and scoured Reddit posts about how to be a junior lawyer and a mother during my legal history class. By the time my twenty-eighth birthday rolled around, I made a silent wish to myself that by my twenty-ninth birthday I would either have a baby in my arms or one growing inside me. It was a little bit of a pipe dream, and not really a goal either since so much of that wish was outside my control. After blowing out my candles, I started my first job and as I billed hours to a cryptocurrency company for filling out forms about the legality of various forms of the currency sold on their platform (not an assignment I chose), I thought about the meaningful work of parenting and how it compared to these glorified worksheets. And my desire grew.
And then, just like that it was December and I was getting sworn into the California bar and googling some odd symptoms I thought were my period. Driving home in my suit that night, I bought the world’s cheapest pregnancy test at Rite Aid and awkwardly took it to the bathroom without telling Alex. When it came back positive, I felt shock more than anything else. There was a baby inside me who was the size of a strawberry seed. I didn’t even want to refer to it as a baby for a long time, worried that the strawberry-seed-sized person would slip away without ever meeting me. But he grew and I grew and I wondered if I would love my son and I wondered about my birth story and I wondered about everything that would come after birth. I thought of a friend who had also been pregnant while working a hard job and who said that on hard days she would just rub her belly contentedly and think about the person growing inside. During long Zoom calls, I would rub my belly and think of something I read that said babies will reach out and try to touch the place where they feel someone from the outside world touching them. My mom told me that I was such a warm and loving person that it was inevitable that eventually I would feel that kind of love for my baby. I read some postpartum books and Alex read The Birth Partner and we met with our doula and I switched care providers at thirty-eight weeks to an amazing OB/GYN who wouldn’t force me to be induced before forty-two weeks.
And then it was August 24 and I was standing in my shower swaying against (and then with! Remember what they taught in prenatal yoga Katie!) contractions and realizing it wasn’t just in my head—the baby was actually coming. I placed my two palms flat against the white tile in our bathroom and felt the water streaming down my knuckles. There was a surge of energy and then a burst of shock and surprise and love and other emotions I can’t really place. I started to weep as I realized that it was probably that day I would meet our baby. Although I’m usually a pretty emotional person, I felt like pregnancy had numbed me to emotions in a strange way and so these tears felt unusual and somewhat out of place, but also like exactly what was supposed to happen. And then it was 9:26 p.m. and Jens was on my chest, looking up at me with dark eyes and a furrowed brow and Alex was weeping, his arm around my shoulder.
Tomorrow it will be Jen’s nineteenth day on earth and my 10,585th. So, more than last year, I’ve spent this birthday eve thinking about birth. Birth was what I dreamed it would be, but what I didn’t know last year was what comes afterwards. I didn’t know about the two hours between nursing, the bleeding, the inability to walk, the way your baby will look when he screams and how it’ll make you anxious but also achey for love. I didn’t know about the erasure of your old life, the way your baby would sneak a hand out of their swaddle in the middle of the night, the rhythm of tiny legs going in and out as they resist a diaper change. I love my son more than I thought I would; I love his perfect lips, the way his hair looks like he gels it back every morning, the soft weight of his head against the crook of my arm while I nurse. And yet this is all much harder than I thought it would be.
Last year I wrote: “Births and birthdays are moments where you can just about perish with the knowledge of loss and of having.” I didn’t really know the meaning of that sentence then, although I felt its echo somewhere deep in my bones. This year, this birthday, with a birth story all of my own, I’m starting to grasp it a bit more.