-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!

If you like this free newsletter, here are the best ways to support my work as a self-employed writer and artist who is also a full time caregiver:

1. SHARE WITH A FRIEND! It makes me so happy to hear when folks have sent my essays along to a friend who they know will resonate with it. That’s the best!

2. SHARE ON SOCIAL MEDIA! It helps! It really helps!

3. BUY MY ZINES! I’m really proud of my tiny publishing project, Imaginary Lake, and the zines I’m writing and hand-making. They are largely about pregnancy, birth, and motherhood — with new ones coming soon! You can find them linked above. This is the best way to keep all of this going!

xoxo, more soon

It’s rife with poetry, is what I’m saying, but the brain (or at least my brain) becomes somewhat artless. Instead it feels like mush. Any lucid or even profound thought I have feels disconnected from everything that came before and anything that will come after. Deep work feels near impossible. I’m just way too tired for any of that, too busy lending all my energy and calories to a baby who is methodically adding layers of fat to their body and doubling in weight. It feels hard to locate myself within my own life, or even my own being. Instead, I’ve been taken over by circumstance, what is happening to and in me. That isn’t all bad. It’s a relief sometimes to let life just wash over you, to do a little less meaning-making. Even the writing I’m managing right now doesn’t feel particularly connected through the layers of my life and all I’ve encountered, I feel like I am simply stating facts.

Here, at nearly 34 weeks, I feel preoccupied with materiality — nesting. Gathering things, making them just so. It feels very good to pack a bag for the birth. To fold all the little clothes. To gather things up and make lists. Thinking about objects is easy. Thinking about my whole life is not. As for the birth, I’m excited about it in a strange way. I feel like I understand that it will happen, and I want it to. I had a very vivid dream about my water breaking, and it thrilled me. This is a new feeling, positive anticipation. In previous pregnancies, thinking ahead to birth felt more like dread. I still see it as a journey to the underworld, but that underworld feels somehow darkly enticing. Does that make sense?

I feel challenged by being pregnant almost constantly. It’s hard to eat and drink enough, I feel like I am failing miserably at least once a day. It hurts to walk, it hurts to turn in bed, my digestion is terrible, the heartburn wakes me up. Still, I feel remarkably able-bodied, still able to crouch and pick things up, carry my three year old around, lift and move things, bring in unwieldy groceries, clean the house, do what I need to do, even with my belly measuring two weeks ahead and feeling sleepy all day long. I haven’t gained much weight in this pregnancy, which might be contributing to the spry-ness I feel. I feel a little concerned about that lack of weight gain, but, like I said, belly is measuring two weeks ahead. No one else seems concerned. I started medication for my anxiety for the first time ever, and I’m still waiting for it to reach its full effectiveness, but that feels like a meaningful challenge too, to do something about the mental health messiness I’ve been struggling with. I’m proud of myself for moving through this pregnancy in the way that I have, and I’m proud of myself for seeking help when I needed it. I feel like such a real mom. This is what moms do, we take care of ourselves so we can take care of our people. We ask for help. We suffer the aches and pains to get through the day, and we guiltlessly stay seated while the kids go romp outside with their dad. We let him deal with the dishes after dark so we can sleep a little more. We let people who love us take care of us too. I feel dignified in my pregnant state, like what I am doing is very important, and I do deserve rest and favors. How would I do this without my husband and my family, all of whom shower me with help and love? That women do this alone or with abusive partners or absent family grieves me deeply. I feel so lucky every day.

A big takeaway from this pregnancy for me is that it all really feels worth it. Loving and knowing my children has given pregnancy new meaning, has made it feel much less arbitrary than it did the first or even the second time. That’s my child in there! Who I will (and already) adore! For so long, forever even. Where there used to be ambivalence, there is new fervor. That doesn’t make it easier, but it does make it feel different. This is how I know for sure that I completed a full cycle of matrescence in the course of my first five years of motherhood, having and raising our two boys. This feels like the beginning of a new growth-cycle in my life, one with less “becoming” and more “I am.” The only times I wish the pregnancy away are when I want to meet my baby faster. I even consider doing it all again once more (maybe) just for the joy of it, the explosion of love and life that is a child’s presence in the world, in my world. I don’t want to decide whether this is our last child yet. The childbearing years are a door I don’t feel ready to close, and that’s a buzzy feeling too. More potential energy, more questions, more risk, more challenge, more joy. None of this is easy, but it’s so incredible, you know? It’s one of the most amazing and astonishing things in the world — feeling a baby get bigger inside of you, then holding them in your arms and loving them every day of their life.

Everywhere I go, I am the very image of pregnancy. The big belly, the waddle-walk, the tired eyes, the two boys in tow. There is no ambiguity, it is obvious what is happening in my life, who I am right now. I find other people talking to me out in the world more, saying hello. The health insurance customer service representative on the phone’s voice changes when I tell her I’m pregnant. We talk for ten minutes about our kids before getting down to business. The mom of two younger boys at the mall play place, asking about what it’s like when they’re older, and do we know the sex of the new baby? The nurse practitioner at the dermatologist telling me she just got married and she wants a big family while she does my yearly skin check. My dentist (who I went to high school with) knowing she is safe to continue using her wearable pumps while doing my checkup, sharing that she’s sad to be back from her maternity leave and that it’s been a hard transition. There’s a sisterhood I feel, a willingness to share, to chat, to ask strangers real questions. People light up when I ask after their children. We all love our little families so much. Our daily labor caring for our kids means so much to us. So often daily life requires that we downplay the massiveness of our love.

Maybe all of this sudden gushing is partially hormonal? I feel very aware of my mounting estrogen, which will continue to climb to astonishing heights until birth, then crash just as spectacularly. The lack of hormonal education offered to pregnant women is staggering. You’d think they’d tell us that at least half of the madness we feel is chemical! Everything that is happening to me right now feels extremely dramatic, because it is. The third trimester is rife with drama. I reiterate, it is one of the most inherently dramatic periods of a person’s life! All leading up to a big splashing eleven-o’clock number, the birth. Then, the applause, and everyone wipes off their makeup and goes home, and you just… live. That’s the part I’ll never get used to. You bring your baby home and life simply goes on, postpartum dissolving into sunday monday tuesday wednesday, not knowing what day it is anymore, days running into nights, losing that temporality, not looking forward to anything in particular, until the baby is big and suddenly shouting at you that they can’t find their “super fast running shoes” and you find yourself fantasizing about being pregnant again, surprising even yourself.

A lot of things feel unformed and unclear right now. Will I still be able to meaningfully contribute to our family’s income while I’m taking care of three kids (even with help)? What will become of my art practice? My writing practice? My birth doula work? My business? What about my new book? Will I finish my novel? Will I finish another poetry collection? Will my parents stay healthy? Will my husband’s job stay steady, will he get a raise? What is happening in our country, in the world? Will my kids grow up okay, stay happy and healthy? How fast will the climate crisis accelerate? Where are we all going?

And, will this baby be ok? So vulnerable to be pregnant, to love a baby before you’ve held them crying in your arms, to hear scary stories, to wonder and feel the fear wash over you. I ask my husband this frequently, and he always says yes. My husband is my lightning rod, he catches all my sparks. I try not to worry for real until he worries, and he isn’t worried. He’s excited, and calm, looking forward to staying up late with the baby cozy on his chest watching movies so I can sleep a nice first stretch. So I look forward too, trying to really imagine what it will be like to bring this baby home. It still doesn’t quite feel real. Birth always feels like cataclysm to me, always shatters my foundations. It’s hard to imagine that. So maybe instead I’ll just stay right where I am, in this day where I am so very pregnant and nothing else matters all that much. My boys are playing legos calmly together, a small miracle.

The fact that I am about to ruin this peace with a new baby does not trouble me. I think about “Being Alive,” from Company, possibly Sondheim’s most famous eleven o’clock number, which I listened to on a drive from Pittsburgh to Indianapolis recently, realizing all of a sudden that it could be just as much about parenthood as it is about romantic love. “Someone to sit in my chair, to ruin my sleep, to make me aware, of being alive.” My children have done this for me, and continue to. I feel distinctly alive right now, in the thick of my life in a way that is so real and satisfying and overwhelming. I’m thinking also about that quote from The Correspondent (which I loved): "We are born and grow through childhood in spring. We live those glorious, lively, interesting years of our twenties, thirties, forties in summer. We settle into ourselves in autumn, that cool but not yet cold time, rich and aromatic. And in winter we age (brutally) and die." Here I am in my glorious, lively, interesting thirties, the summer of my life. I feel that glow, the fecundity of my life as it is now. The true greenness, the fertility, the overgrowth of love and life. I’m in my wildflower years, everything blooming. It’s also sweltering, fragrant, over-much, too fast, too hot. All of that is well and good, just as it should be. I sit in the shade of it all, awaiting my baby. It is so good to be so alive.

A few birth-y recs:

Excited to try my new TENS Unit during this birth. I bought this one that is pretty new on the market because Elle Tens units were out of stock everywhere. Planning to use it with clients too once I return to birth work.

New ambient music from Saltbreaker is total birth vibes. The title!
Stream Ancestor Midwife

I’ll probably listen to my own birth playlist most though. I like music I can sing along to. Also the new Phoebe Bridgers album should come out just in time, thank goodness.

I’m also so excited about this very cool robe I bought on etsy for my birth and postpartum.

I’m sure I’ll feel crazier and crazier as the weeks go on and birth looms closer. As always, this essay is merely a snap shot of how I feel right this second, and does not intend to speak for all of myself or all pregnant people.

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

If you like this free newsletter, here are the best ways to support my work as a self-employed writer and artist who is also a full time caregiver:

1. SHARE WITH A FRIEND! It makes me so happy to hear when folks have sent my essays along to a friend who they know will resonate with it. That’s the best!

2. SHARE ON SOCIAL MEDIA! It helps! It really helps!

3. BUY MY ZINES! I’m really proud of my tiny publishing project, Imaginary Lake, and the zines I’m writing and hand-making. They are largely about pregnancy, birth, and motherhood — with new ones coming soon! You can find them linked above. This is the best way to keep all of this going!

xoxo, more soon

All of this struggle is in the best case, with no surprises or complications that take us down a different path. We are planning our third out-of-hospital birth center birth, in the same room where my other two babies were born. I was reflecting on choosing the birth center for our birth back with my first, realizing it was a little bit out of character for my risk-averse self to choose something with objectively more risk than a hospital birth. I can’t quite remember every thing that went into the decision, but I think it was mostly my gut, to be honest. I learned I was pregnant with our first baby just as the covid lockdowns were starting, so that was certainly part of it too. In that moment, a hospital felt scarier than a freestanding birth center. But I also knew enough about birth in America to know that I wanted to move toward a certain experience too. Of course I knew about all that could go wrong in birth (though I knew less then than I know now), but that knowledge didn’t sway my decision. I wanted midwifery care, and I wanted something different than what I assumed the hospital had to offer. I say assumed because I didn’t know. I wasn’t a doula yet then, I had no personal experience with birth either in or out of the hospital. But, I will say, with more experience now, that my gut feeling was fairly accurate for me and what I knew I wanted and needed out of birth. I wanted to feel everything. I wanted expectant rather than active management. I wanted to move through the experience in my body with full range of motion, with my husband beside me and the wise help of experienced women. You can do all of that in the hospital, but I also didn’t want to have to fight for the birth I wanted or “swim upstream,” so to speak. The birth center felt like the place where my own hopes for birth and the usual protocol aligned. And now here I am, the third time around, returning again to the same care team, same room, same hope. I think I carry more fear and more confidence, both. I trust my care team, and I know birth is not controllable or predictable. Birth always carries risk. We do it anyway.

I have had a much harder time in this pregnancy than I expected. I felt it coming immediately, looking at the positive pregnancy test. In one breath, I thought, this is going to be so hard. In the next I thought, I am powerful. That isn’t a fictionalized version of my thoughts, it is verbatim memory. That honest progression of thought has defined this pregnancy for me. The awareness of true difficulty, followed by resolve. It has been so hard, and I am powerful. I expect birth this third time will be similar. But how can you have expectations for birth?

This pregnancy has certainly been challenging physically (especially in the first trimester), but it has been even more challenging mentally. After a huge wave of perinatal anxiety brought me to my knees early in the second trimester and then never lifted, I decided to return to meeting with the birth center’s in house therapist. After our most recent meeting, these are the notes I jotted down:

This is so hard but I’m doing it because it matters to me and it is worth it.

I feel humbled.

Return to the underworld.

After looking at the pregnancy test, I told myself “I am powerful, I can do this.”

Inanna loses something at every gate she crosses.

The notes bring up Inanna and the underworld, two references to a story I’ve been thinking about since I started my doula training with Birthing from Within. Inanna’s stories are ancient. She is a deity of the ancient Sumerians, and the first goddess in recorded history, her myths predating the Bible by thousands of years. A certain myth, “From the Great Above to the Great Below,” is used in BfW’s framework as a sort of story-based metaphor for birth as a heroic journey. In it, Inanna journeys to the underworld where she is killed, hung on a hook for three days, and then brought back to life and slowly drawn back to the surface with the help of her family and friends. There’s much more to it than that, but that’s the gist. When I heard the story for the first time, I felt located. I’ve been to that underworld. I’ve come back up. I’m going down there again. Why would I do that? And how could I not?

There have been moments in this pregnancy where I have felt so bad, and so confused about that bad feeling. I think I thought this time would be easier, and maybe even exemplary, like somehow becoming a doula and being so immersed in thinking about birth and walking through it with others would exempt me from challenge in some meaningful way. I expected to write so much, so brilliantly, to come up with all kinds of new resources for my clients, to spin the straw of my pregnancy into some kind of gold. Instead, I’ve mostly felt flattened, hung on a hook to die deep in the dark and scary underworld — and I haven’t even made it to my birth or postpartum experiences yet. I have felt humbled to be perfectly honest, feeling like I don’t know anything at all. But could it be any other way? Talking with my therapist, who is so gentle and wise, I remembered what I know to be true: This is so hard but I’m doing it because it matters to me and it is worth it. Why am I doing this again? Not because it’s easy, and not because it’s interesting, and not because there is some gold to spin. I’m doing it because we want another child, and to me that is worth everything hard about pregnancy and birth.

That wanting a child feels different now than it did the first or even second time I descended to the underworld. The first time, I didn’t know why, and I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. It was raw newness, with no prior experience to lean on. The second time felt almost experimental — what would be different? How had I changed? In a way, I had not even left the underworld by the time I went back down. The second birth is what helped me climb back up. I spent a little time in the light, and now I’m back down again. This time, I know, with the full weight of knowledge, what it means to step into this experience of pregnancy, birth, postpartum, and raising this child into the future. There is a weightiness, an acknowledgement of all that is vulnerable and tender and unprotected on this path. The full weight of love is felt. Before her descent, Inanna gathers many precious items to take with her to the Great Below. A crown, her dark thick hair, lapis beads, a royal robe, precious ointment, a breastplate, a gold ring, and a lapis measuring rod and line. One by one, she loses all of these things as she crosses through the seven gates of the underworld, descending lower and lower — until she is naked at the bottom, unprotected. I have felt myself passing through these gates, losing all the things I’ve gathered, things I thought would protect me. Experience, conversations, book after book I’ve read, tools, tips and tricks, birth stories, interviews. I know so much — none of that will help me, not really. Did I think it would be easy? This is not easy. Did I think descending to the depths of experience to fetch my child would come without cost? Did I think that somehow I would cross over these coals feeling no pain? Even the goddess loses everything — and I am no Inanna, I am just myself.

All of this to say, I feel humbled. In this humility, I seek comfort. Will it be ok? What will happen in our birth? How can I protect us? There are no answers to these questions, for me or anyone. All of us scramble to sit with this uncertainty, all in different ways. I’ve seen this play out culturally and experientially, witnessing firsthand the way hospital birth can spiral out of control, and, on the flipside, watching closely the fallout of the freebirth movement, and everything in between. I’ve seen births go smoothly and births take terrible turns. I’ve heard people from every ideology of birth make their case for why their way is right. I’ve heard all the birth stories, watched all the documentaries, read book after book. Nothing changes the fact that, like all of us, I have to sit in that answerlessness and no one “doctrine” of birth will soothe it.

When I try to decide if I want to do anything differently, I try to predict the future. I don’t have a crystal ball! I only know what I know now, I have no way of knowing what will happen. At every appointment, my risk assessment is 0. By all accounts, my first two births were wonderfully uncomplicated births. Spontaneous labor, following normal patterns, within normal limits, everyone healthy and happy in the end. I wish this again. Why do I feel like I’m tempting fate? Do I know too much, have I heard too many stories, seen too many twists and turns? I think the hardest thing about my perinatal anxiety has been the sense of impending doom I’ve felt wrapped around my neck like a leaden weight. I guess I just want whatever is true, and I want to trust my team, the same as last time and the time before. And whatever it is, I know it won’t be easy. My births didn’t feel “textbook” when they were happening, they felt like getting dragged through stormwater and spat out somewhere dark and unfamiliar. A rough passage from one life to another. That is to say that though they were uncomplicated births, they were not easy. I don’t know what to expect this time. I resist the sense of impending doom, knowing it isn’t true. I feel the hormonal twist of my serotonin, everything in my brain askew. Anxiety is an underworld. Birth is too. In some ways, I crave birth’s pain, the crushing downward energy. At least then something will be happening. The waiting, and my brain’s tendency toward catastrophizing while it waits, is what feels unbearable right now.

I want to meet and hold this baby, and then spend our life together. I want to get there now, and feel less of the tension. The temporality of birth is so intense — this is a thing I can never get over. In no other time of my life have I been more aware of time passing than when I have been pregnant. On any given day, I know exactly where I am in the pregnancy, how many weeks, how many days, how much time has passed and how much time is left. I can’t escape the little metronome in my mind. The body becomes a clock, and it changes so rapidly and so slowly, both at once. With only ten weeks left, that feeling feels even more intense. So little time but I know it will feel crushingly long. I don’t want to wish this pregnancy away, though. In some ways, I have enjoyed this pregnancy more than either of my others. I have felt myself relax into it, feel curious, and proud. Every movement my baby makes feels satisfying — you’re really here. Along with the weightiness comes relish. This is so special, truly, and important. I don’t want to give all that is good over to fear. There is so much we don’t get to choose, even how we feel. But in any given moment I can choose to return to right where I am and what is true right now. Here is me, here is my baby, we are both here together now, and the future is still out there ahead of us, a “benevolent black hole.”

Anyway, I started this essay intending to write something about my birth plan or hopes for this birth, but I’m realizing I truly haven’t even thought that far yet. Or maybe I’ve thought about it so much that there is nothing left to think — I just have to live it. Practically, I am planning another birth center birth, where there is no anesthesia, but there is nitrous oxide and wonderful birth tubs, both of which I will use. I have a TENS unit this time which I’m excited to try in early labor and I will see if I like it. I hope labor will begin spontaneously again, I intend to labor at home until it’s clear we need to go, and then at the birth center things will get quite serious and intense and then we’ll have a baby. Ben was born in the water — I haven’t decided yet if that’s what I want for this baby or not. I expect it will be an in-the-moment decision. I have a whole other set of preferences for hospital birth and/or cesarean birth, but that feels like a hill to climb if we come to it. After experiencing hospital births as a doula, I feel less scared of the hospital than I did before, but I also feel more aware of the way things can go sideways. I carry all of that in my body, and I hope it won’t come up during my birth. I can’t know that yet. All I can do is keep traveling down and down and down to the depths of the underworld, doing what I know is required, one step at a time. All I can do is keep trusting what I know to trust, and to not get too far ahead of myself. I steer myself to beginner’s mind, to a sort of unknowing. I cannot control this, I can only keep taking it day by day.

Talking with the midwives in the midwife group I’m working with has felt different this pregnancy. Now that I’m here for the third time, I feel them regarding me differently. I feel them trusting me, just as I trust them. There’s less education, more curiosity. Because I’m a doula in the community, sometimes we even talk shop a little bit, which feels fun and good. I feel recognized, remembered, which isn’t necessarily a given. They see a lot of clients, they deliver a lot of babies. It’s not the same as a one-on-one midwife-client relationship like you might have with a homebirth midwife. The practice has seven staff CNM’s, and you don’t know who will be on call for your birth. In this pregnancy, I feel new agency in the room, new authority over my own experience, my own body, my own birth. I feel new confidence, like I can almost answer my own questions. In many ways I can. It’s a good feeling. But that confidence will only take me so far. Will it follow me into the birth room? Will it stay with me in active labor, in transition, in the second stage? I expect to “lose it,” like everyone does. I feel grateful for this safe space, these safe people, to do that with. That mutual trust is important to me. If I have any birth plan, it’s that.

It’s so funny, my thoughts on birth feel less clear than they ever have been before. I could give myself the whole spiel I give to my clients, all the education about the stages of labor and coping methods and comfort measures and self-advocacy and “next right thing” and leaning into the unknown, and, and, and. All of that is already downloaded into my mind. But what I really offer my clients beyond that preparation and a willingness to listen to what’s on their mind is my presence in the birth room. That presence is what really matters in the end. I pay very close attention to them, I bear witness, I stay by their side. My ideas and “expertise” feel like the least of my offerings in the birth room, though I offer those too as needed. But the attention is the biggest thing. Can I pay close attention to myself in my birth? Can I stay by my own side, can I bear witness? That’s what feels important to me, that this birth will be something that will really happen in my life, and I want to move through it with the kind of awareness that honors all I have experienced, all I know, all I fear, all I hope. I know I’ll lose my lapis beads, my measuring rod, my breastplate. But can I bring my whole self into that room, even the frightened parts? Can I welcome every part of me down in the deepest chamber of the underworld, hung on the hook? Can I trust everyone I love to draw me back up to the surface where the light touches everything? It will be so hard. I am powerful.

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

Birth photos are from my second birth. I’ll be back in that room in approx. 10 weeks, ahhh.

Writing about birth is a special interest of mine. I seek it out in literature and I have spent quite a bit of time doing it myself too. I wrote this essay shortly after my second birth. I also have published my second birth story as a zine, here.

I’m working on getting the birth prep zines that I use with my doula clients ready to be published this summer! They should be available soon. Believe it or not, I do think birth preparation is very important, it just looks different for everyone and for every birth! A first birth is different than a second is different than a third, etc. We need different things at different times.

More zines about birth and matrescence here.

If you like this free newsletter, here are the best ways to support my work as a self-employed writer and artist who is also a full time caregiver:

1. SHARE WITH A FRIEND! It makes me so happy to hear when folks have sent my essays along to a friend who they know will resonate with it. That’s the best!

2. SHARE ON SOCIAL MEDIA! It helps! It really helps!

3. BUY MY ZINES! I’m really proud of my tiny publishing project, Imaginary Lake, and the zines I’m writing and hand-making. They are largely about pregnancy, birth, and motherhood — with new ones coming soon! You can find them linked above. This is the best way to keep all of this going!

xoxo, more soon

This time, there is satisfaction in knowing what I like, what I will use, and how I will use it. That is truly such an overwhelming part of being a first time parent — choosing the stuff you want, acquiring that stuff, being marketed new stuff constantly, and then learning how and when and why to then use that stuff with your actual baby in your actual life. It really takes some trial and error and actual life experience to figure out what you actually want and need. I don’t think any first time parent will ever fully nail it, nor are you supposed to. That’s what that big first baby shower is for, folks are so eager to help you get what you need! And then some!

For our third baby, I do not have a registry. My closest friends and family and I will gather for a “sprinkle”/blessing next month, but it will be largely not about the stuff. We are pretty much set, which feels great. I don’t want any more baby stuff. I know what I like and I pretty much have it all, and it’s all broken in.

In terms of baby things, I am neither a minimalist nor maximalist. I’m never going to be the person who will claim that you need nothing to take care of a baby — I think that approach can get kind of holier-than-thou icky and make you feel bad for wanting or needing anything beyond a car seat, some cloth, and your boobs. But I also think it is real that most parents end up with too much, especially in our culture, especially the first time around. That’s part of the process though. You have to kind of discern your way through all the stuff and figure out what you actually like. It’s just hard that it happens all at once in such an intense way.

Rather, I think I’m a realist. I am happy to use objects to help me if they actually help. Nothing bothers me more than stuff I buy and then don’t use. But that isn’t the only important thing — I am frugal by nature, but I don’t want to only offer my baby leftovers or discards. If something is broken or too worn, I have no problem replacing it. And beauty is important to me, in addition to the function. So it all needs to be beautiful (in its way) and useful. I want to use everything I gather, and then be satisfied by that proper use. When I truly use something, it becomes dear to me — and even sacred, over time. “Matter matters,” as a priest of ours used to say. That phrase has stuck in my head long past our tenure at that church. Our babies are so precious to us, and these objects become some of their first sensations. Soft cloth, a bed to lay on, things to touch and wear and hold. We give that to them. Their first experiences of the material world are mediated by us, and it’s no small task. I want to surround my baby with softness and beauty. My body first, the world second. How special to imbue an object with sacredness by nature of offering it to your baby. Here, this is all for you, for us together. This is the stuff of our life.

What’s different this time:

The nursery days are gone for us. This baby will not have their own room at all, at least not for quite a while. Our house has three bedrooms, and, as of right now, my second-born still has not left my bed, so his room is basically a play room at this point. (Though he proudly still claims it as his room, even though he has only slept in there a handful of times.) Our older two will likely share a room eventually, but we aren’t there yet. I’m prepared for everyone to shuffle around in the next few years. And, my realist self has finally fully realized, my room is the baby’s room, so I’m planning to put my energy into making my room more beautiful, more comfortable, and better-suited for having a newborn as a roommate for a year plus. We will make a diaper changing area on top of our dresser, we will bring the glider (that my mom rocked me in when I was a baby) back in, we will clear space in the drawers for rotating baby clothes sizes. Otherwise — I also understand now that the whole house is the baby’s house too. I like to have a place to put the baby in all the most-used rooms in the house. The baby bjorn usually stays in the kitchen, we keep the moses basket in the living room, another little baby bouncer/chair in the bathroom, etc. Otherwise, carriers are essential tools, used off and on all day every day, and I like the ones I have (though of course I have my eye on a fancy new one). A basket of diaper changing stuff will live in the living room. I think our stroller situation is ok, but if we figure out we need something different we will scour marketplace or ask friends what they can lend. I really don’t want to buy stuff!

Baby-specific stuff I already own and know I will use for baby #3’s first six months:
(linking some things for convenience!)

1. Sidecar crib (we use an ikea sniglar clamped to the side of our bed)

2. Mini crib (we have a stokke sleepi we got secondhand that is lovely and small and on wheels — it just annoys me to have to lower baby down into it after falling in love with sidecar setups)

3. Standalone bassinet for living room (ours is a moses basket)

4. Various carriers of different function

   1. Ergobaby Embrace (mine is mesh — this is my personal favorite carrier)

   2. Solly Wrap

5. Zipper and velcro swaddles

6. Wipeable diaper changing pad (ours is three babies deep now — I like to put a cloth diaper on top for softness for baby’s head)

7. Bedside caddy for baby-night-care supplies (felt like a silly thing for baby two but actually felt nice to have a place for all the things)

8. Copious cloth diapers for burp cloths

9. Pacifiers

10. Sound machine / night light

11. Portable sound machine for carseat

12. Nursing pillows (My Brest Friend is my favorite, I have multiple and keep one in bed and one in the living room)

13. Light muslin blankets

14. Breastfeeding accessories

    1. Silverettes (I do not remember these being as expensive as they are now)

    2. Little in-bra milk collectors

    3. Washable nursing pads

15. Postpartum Peri-care

    1. Adult diapers for the first few days

    2. Maxi-pads

    3. Witch Hazel

    4. Angled Peri-bottle

16. Baby Bjorn Bouncer (these are so expensive new, and always available secondhand. we got ours on marketplace)

17. Designated floor “baby zones”

    1. Quilts

    2. Play mat

18. Simple video monitor

19. Bottles, etc. ( First two babies were exclusively breastfed, but we’re slightly changing our approach this time. I’m planning to mostly breastfeed but also keep formula consistently in the mix because I hate pumping and I really need this baby to take a bottle and not depend on my body 100% for all nutrition. Ideally, it would be like an 80/20 or even 90/10 split (because I do want to have a good breastmilk supply), but we’ll see how it works out irl. I’m really looking forward to combo-feeding! Lmk if you have any real-life tips!)

New acquisitions for this baby:

1. Evenflo Shyft Infant Carseat — this is my only splurge for this baby. This is the kind of carseat that has a little built-in stroller, and a friend of a friend offered to sell hers to me below normal resale value so I said heck yes. I will not lie, I am anxious about the logistics of getting three kids in and out of the car, and I have a feeling this kind of carseat will make it that tiny bit easier that I need, so I am going for it. And the friend said she really liked it for her third! So we’ll see if I actually like it or not! We always have our old infant carseat that’s gotten us through two kids (a nuna pipa, works great!) to fall back on if it isn’t great for us.

2. Select cute baby clothes for the oxytocin factor

3. New heirloom quilt I am making

4. I think we are literally completely out of baby socks (like they all disappeared) so I need to buy some.

5. Surely some other things will need to be replaced or replenished — we’ll see what the situation is when I finally unearth all the boxes from the basement

Things I want but, let’s be real, won’t buy unless I find secondhand for cheap:

1. Pretty new carrier. (It’s gingham!)

2. Babybay Maxi sidecar bassinet (could replace the mini crib on the other side of the bed because Ben might end up sleeping in the big sidecar crib — but we will figure out all the sleeping arrangements when we get there.)

Non-baby specific stuff that is essential to my own health and wellbeing during this time:

1. Reality television

2. AIRPODS

3. Special new heirloom clothing item (each prior baby I’ve bought a secondhand babaa sweater, my favorite clothes I own)

4. Undergarments that fit and function properly

5. New pants as needed (everyone deserves pants that fit)

6. Slightly fancier groceries and snacks than I would usually buy

7. Special activities and treats for big brothers during early postpartum

I’ve written about the way stuff interacts with the experience of parenting a few times over the years:

This essay is about sleeping in a family bed with a sidecar crib.

I wrote this about cloth diapering our firstborn (which I loved then but won’t be doing this time around)

Objects: an Inventory is a zine I wrote about the materiality of motherhood

This essay is about postpartum personal style

I’m feeling pretty well physically, and my anxiety seems to be letting up a little bit (it was truly terrible for a big chunk of the second trimester). I want to reflect more on my internal landscape as I shift into the third trimester, but I’m not qutie there yet. It felt nice to think about stuff instead. Hopefully I’ll have more thoughts gathered soon! So many things I want to do and think through and settle in myself before this baby comes, and time is getting shorter and shorter. We will see what’s actually possible.

Thank you so much for reading. As always, I love to hear from you — please comment with any thoughts you have! And I always appreciate likes and restacks, sharing goes such a long way!

If you like this free newsletter, here are the best ways to support my work as a self-employed writer and artist who is also a full time caregiver:

1. SHARE WITH A FRIEND! It makes me so happy to hear when folks have sent my essays along to a friend who they know will resonate with it. That’s the best!

2. SHARE ON SOCIAL MEDIA! It helps! It really helps!

3. BUY MY ZINES! I’m really proud of my tiny publishing project, Imaginary Lake, and the zines I’m writing and hand-making. They are largely about pregnancy, birth, and motherhood — with new ones coming soon! You can find them linked above. This is the best way to keep all of this going!

xoxo, more soon

I was doing really well mentally in this pregnancy until I wasn’t. Fear came rushing in, like a storm door being blown open by wind. It only surprised me because I thought somehow I would avoid my anxiety this time around, like somehow I had grown past it. The inoculation of doula work, maybe, or just… maturity? No. The ways we are vulnerable, our softest spots, stay soft, maybe forever. Pregnancy is not something to master.

Sitting vigil with one not yet born can begin to feel strangely like sitting with one about to die. You sweep the thought out of your mind, but it comes back unbidden. There is nothing I can do but watch and wait, and fear what could lurk around each bend. I want my baby out and healthy, their whole life ahead of them. I have every reason to believe that is where we are going, yet my disbelief holds. We are not there yet, and so I can’t know for sure. I crave certainty, 100-percents. There’s always that tiny fraction, the trapdoor that could open underneath us.

But everything is looking good. I have no real reason to worry, yet I still do. My baby feels impossible, too precious to me already. My sons didn’t really materialize for me until they were born (when I suddenly knew and loved them desperately), but I bonded with this baby early this time, and that’s part of the terror. We named our first two kids when we saw them on the outside, but this baby already has a name, when I say it out loud it feels like a hymn. I’m in the middle of an unfolding story and I can’t tell the ending, not for so long, forever maybe. Every ending is just a snapshot of the way things are just now. A birth is not a happy ending, it’s a bend in the labyrinth. We keep walking.

The problem is always knowing too much. I do know too much, and I have seen so much too. As of now, I am still planning to have this baby out-of-hospital at a freestanding birth center, but I do have to admit that that choice feels more tender this time, and that I am holding space in myself for my mind to change. I don’t know yet. I have seen blue floppy newborn babies now. I have sat with mothers whose babies were taken to the NICU instead of placed on their chests. All of those babies were ok pretty quickly, but still. Those kinds of scenarios are not even what my worries are most fixated on, but it’s all in the mix. My eyes have seen, and will not unsee.

I will be the first to admit that I went into my first two pregnancies and births with at least some naivety, but I also think that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I have also lived the safety of birth twice now, two uncomplicated birth center births with pink screaming babies born into my waiting hands, and I trust that experience just as much as my fear pulls me in the opposite direction. My two healthy boys are doing great. I just know more now. I know so much about so much. There are so many ways now to test and screen and monitor so many things — and I both want it all and don’t want any of it. It’s all great and fascinating until it’s you who are pregnant. What would I tell a doula client expressing anxiety like mine? I’d tell her there are no easy answers, that it’s so hard. I’d tell her to talk about all of this with her care providers, to seek therapy, don’t keep it bottled up. I’d tell her to ask all of her questions, again and again if needed. To be the squeaky wheel, the leaky faucet, when she needs to be. I’d quote Pam England, say “worry is the work of pregnancy,” which is affirming (this is normal, you’re not alone) but doesn’t make it easier. I’d tell her to text or call me anytime, I am always here to listen. So I guess I’ll try to take my own advice in the ways that I can. Who can I call? Who will listen to my great litany of strange fears?

I am so good at finding new things to worry about, and then catastrophizing my way to the terrible end of them. I won’t tell you the particular things I’m hung up about right now because the funny thing about them is that they almost definitely won’t happen. It’s the rarest things that short circuit my brain — I wish I could tell you why. I fixate on things that are hard to definitively avoid or rule out, but that are stunningly rare. Contamination OCD is my official diagnosis, mixed with generalized anxiety — not just in pregnancy, but pregnancy definitely makes my symptoms flare wildly. Because of course it does! I’d been doing so well for so long. It was worst in my first pregnancy, during early covid. I was a basket case then, and how could I not be? That was the perfect storm for someone like me. Maybe that’s another reason why I thought it would be easier this time, but it isn’t. I read this poem I wrote during that pregnancy, and shudder. I still feel exactly the same, still fear the same litany of troubles. Does anyone else think about “water that splashes back up from the sink”? I do.

As much as I wish I wasn’t, I am still here, in this poem I wrote the first time I was 23 weeks pregnant. I’m 21 weeks pregnant now with our third child. This has not gotten easier. Will I ever move through pregnancy not feeling like the way forward is littered with land mines? Parenthood feels the same, but at least I can hug my kids close and feel their safety more fully in the calm of them right there beside me. The womb is a liminal space, both real and not real. My kids have proven their hardiness to me, their resilience, bouncing back from fevers, falling and getting up. My baby hasn’t yet. Of course I’m still terrified, nearly all the time. We pulled a tick from behind my two year old’s ear before bed, then I laid awake for four hours that night worrying, imagining years of lyme disease, knowing that the tick wasn’t attached long enough for the PEP antibiotics but wanting them anyway — any certainty that things would be ok. So, no, it never goes away. Parenting children means years of exposure therapy to exhausting and near-constant fear. You can’t be afraid all the time, so you aren’t — but it comes back to remind you with a force that is startling sometimes. I’ve been here all along.

What I want is the faith I used to have, prayers that felt sturdy. I miss my old certainty, having a place to cast my cares! I’ve hardly written about faith or religion at all in the past few years. I haven’t known what to say. It was in my first pregnancy that my faith in God unraveled, something I never asked for or desired. My deconstruction felt like a tower of blocks crashing down very suddenly. Terrible timing, really, but also perfect timing as somehow it was about parenthood. It’s all intertwined, in ways I still can’t articulate or describe clearly. I’m still so confused and wish it could be easier to believe in an eschatology that used to feel so simple and clear. I need it, and I don’t have it. I have wisps of belief, broken yarn tied back together shoddily in some places but not others. I’m an imposter in church now, but I sit there anyway. I don’t think it will ever be simple for me again.

I read this Jane Kenyon poem this morning and it stopped me in my tracks. Kenyon is a poet I have always self-identified with, from the first time I read her — we must share similar minds. I feel her poems as if I have written them myself, which is not something I feel for many poets. It was reading her poetry that spurred me toward writing my own — spurred me toward many right-sized things, really. I remember reading some of Kenyon’s God poems in my mid-twenties and feeling sort of shaken up by them, uncomfortable with her comfort admitting doubt, disbelief mixed with belief, citing and then questioning the scriptures, and naming that same imposter feeling in her old local parish, but sitting there and being a part of it all anyway. I was fascinated by the way God showed up in her poems, and it also frightened me. Now I see it was because it was a window into my own future. Kindred spirits tend to show us the way, even before we are ready to walk it.

The God of curved space, the dry God. Jane making paths in my mind for all I still cannot say. The poets are here for our empty places, our own curved space. Jane was a step-mother, but she never had her own children. I wonder what she would have written about pregnancy. It wasn’t her path, so we will never know.

but the son, whose blood. So who am I speaking to now when I pray? I haven’t known lately, but I do it anyway. Like so many other post-deconstruction women of my generation (for whom a deeply patriarchal and domination-centered evangelicalism that was so big in the nineties and early-2000’s stole so much potential spiritual beauty and spaciousness from our most formative years), the “great mother” image of god is the only one that truly resonates now. So I suppose I imagine a god who knows exactly how I feel because she has felt it too and it tore her apart the same way. The torn apart god, the bleeding god. God of birth and stained garments. She held together though, holds all things together. I whisper my fears to her, and ask what I should do, knowing there is no real answer. God does not leave us comfortless, so let evening come.

And I hold together the best I can. My boys climb on my lap and I hold them while our baby kicks at their warm bodies from the inside. A surreal feeling, all three of my children in my embrace. We feel each other. Everyone safe and here together right now.

I will move through this. It is a notable pregnancy milestone, really. The second trimester is always hard for my mind. I remember now, it comes rushing back. The long, lonely middle, so close and so far. In the first trimester, my mind is usurped by my body, then again in the third. But now it’s free to roam, and that’s not a good thing, at least not in my case. Anxiety blooms like toxic blue algae on a pond. No, I am extremely not alone in all of these things I feel. I take solace in the due date forums, where I read but never post. I feel isolated but I am not alone. We are all exactly the same amount insane, just refracting that insanity differently, kaleidoscopic. Pregnancy demands reaction, and we definitely react. Reading other moms unload their fears on the message boards like little prayers sent up and away to the open arms of the internet’s great cloud of witnesses, we all bow our heads together and hope against hope that everything will be ok. I sit vigil with the moms who type out their test results, the hard news, the complication, the questions. No two of us are the same, but we are in this together, somehow, all unbearably moved by how badly we need our babies to be fine and well, and how hard it is to wait. I don’t know what to say, so I just listen, a hand on my belly. I know, I think. I know. I wish this could be easier. I know exactly how you feel. That’s all we can say to each other. Maybe that’s all we really need.

Thank you so much for reading. As always, I love to hear from you — please comment with any thoughts you have! And I always appreciate likes and restacks, sharing goes such a long way!

If you like this free newsletter, here are the best ways to support my work as a self-employed writer and artist who is also a full time caregiver:

1. SHARE WITH A FRIEND! It makes me so happy to hear when folks have sent my essays along to a friend who they know will resonate with it. That’s the best!

2. SHARE ON SOCIAL MEDIA! It helps! It really helps!

3. BUY MY ZINES! I’m really proud of my tiny publishing project, Imaginary Lake, and the zines I’m writing and hand-making. They are largely about pregnancy, birth, and motherhood — with new ones coming soon! You can find them linked above. This is the best way to keep all of this going!

4. LOCAL AND NEED A DOULA? I’m taking birth clients in Pittsburgh, PA through June! Then I’ll be on maternity leave, but I’m planning to be back to work at some point in 2027. More information on my website here!

xoxo, more soon

Is this really true? Do I not know what to say? Is there anything to say about anything else in my life, or is pregnancy really that all-consuming? It isn’t all consuming, but it is constant and pervasive. I never really forget that I’m pregnant. It has become the water I am swimming in, the subtext of my life as a parent, as a worker, as an artist, as a spouse, as a person. Plodding my way through some complicated tax situations this year, I kept thinking woefully, I’m too pregnant for this! But I’m not that pregnant, I’m not huge and teetering on the edge of birth yet. No, I’m in the long spacious middle. I’m almost exactly halfway, we’ll be twenty-weeks on Saturday. Our anatomy scan is coming up on Monday and I feel it loom, hopeful we’ll be told that everything is perfect, no more no less. What to even say before then, before we know more about this baby? Right now, and for all this time so far, my womb has been a black box with a little living (and now kicking) thing inside. I know so little about our baby, our kid, except that they’re with me all the time. They’re our third, so we pretty much have all the stuff we need — a place for them to sleep, a car seat, carriers, clothes. Not that much needs to happen in terms of getting ready. The work is waiting, and making space, and offering so much of my energy, my life force, to this baby who demands so much of me that I am not even aware of. Gestation is ongoing, and easy, and hard.

So what to write? What is different this third time around? What could possibly be new? What am I thinking, what am I feeling, what is coming up? A lot of quietude, really. A lot of comfort, strangely. Bodily, no, but mentally, yes. I feel comforted and deeply satisfied to be pregnant again, to sit in the center of my family with all this power to help us all grow. What I am doing is huge, and I feel comfortable within it, finally. I don’t think I ever felt comfortable in pregnancy before. I’m scared, for sure. I sense that I don’t and can’t understand yet what is changing in all of our lives. But I know what my work is right now, and it’s the quiet work that I am doing all the time, in spite of myself. It’s work I’ve done a long time, in many ways.

The work of gestation, I know it well. The uncomfortable, too-full feeling. The all-the-time of it. And the satisfaction, knowing something worthwhile is in you to do, and you’re doing it. Birth is the satisfaction of women, of humankind really. We birth babies, and we birth all kinds of other things too — homes, books, businesses, marriages, paintings, quilts, friendships. To carry something secret and inscrutable around within, to finally externalize it, to nurture its growth. This cycle of love is infectious, and it’s our natural pattern, our productivity. To gestate a baby makes the whole thing biological, so innate as to be almost silent. This quiet time of my life is deeply generative, and carries great impact on the future. Even if I do nothing else for the next twenty-weeks, I am doing so much. I call it all joy, and honor, really. This is more than enough.

I tell myself this, but of course it’s more complicated than that. There is still life swirling around, many demands, creative projects I am not completing as quickly as I’d hoped. I am so tired this time, in a way that feels inflated compared to my memory of pregnancy before. I go to bed before nine every night, I sit down every chance I get. My eyes feel heavy almost all the time. My mind feels foggy and quiet. Taking my kids to the playground is exhausting, even if all I do there is sit on a bench and watch them play. It’s costly, and there’s a lot of loss — of all the things I used to be, or was capable of without pregnancy in the mix. Pregnancy is hard and demanding, even if satisfying. I could sleep my way through the next twenty weeks, truly, and that almost feels like what I want to do, damn the responsibilities and projects and ideas and things I could be doing or accomplishing instead. My first pregnancy I wrote a whole book! Not this time!

But I’m ok with all that. Growing a baby is enough, and the other things really can wait. And I have already thought and written about it so much, for myself and for others as a doula, that there is something appealing about letting it happen quietly this time around. I feel so aware that this is a limited experience, one I will live maybe once more in my life, maybe not even. I won’t be pregnant forever, it’s a short time with so much change. It will go quickly, even if the days feel slow. Already half of it has slipped away.

Talk to me again in the third trimester, I’m sure I’ll be singing a different song. All sorts of urgency tends to set in then, for me at least. I’m feeling none of it now. Right now, I’m just satisfied to be pregnant, to not know very much about what life will be like in a few short months when this baby is born. I don’t want to work too hard, think too hard, create a body of work right now beyond the body of the baby I carry. I don’t want to worry any more than the moment truly demands. I don’t need to leap into action yet, I don’t need to move through birth yet, I don’t need to stay awake all night with my newborn or help my big boys adjust or figure everything out yet. I can just gestate this baby, let them grow, lend them all I have to share which is pretty much everything — my mind, my blood, my energy, my beating heart, my meals, my sleep, the rocking motion of my walking around, the sound of my voice and my body. This and mothering my other children, keeping everything moving, is more than enough. How wild that my womb is a real place where three people I love have lived! How wild to love a baby before they are born, to know that there is so much ahead for us, godwilling. And so much happening now. I’ll stay in this quietude a little longer, wait to see what emerges — satisfied by the gestation I am constantly living which is so much and so little, all the time.

a few little things:

The pregnancy brain fog is so real, so reading novels has gone completely off my radar — but short stories are PERFECT for me right now! I’m savoring Lauren Groff’s Brawler (oh my GOSH, the woman can write!), and I have Louise Erdrich’s new story collection Python’s Kiss on deck. It feels so good to read short fiction, just the right amount for this tired mind to swallow at once.

Pretty much the only thing I want to buy before this baby arrives is a new mom bag that I’ll haphazardly stuff diapers in, etc. Pretty sure it’s gonna be this one.

I made playlists for my doula clients and they’ve already proven useful to me personally! My pregnancy playlist has been getting lots of play in our house and it always hits. Also the Tarzan soundtrack, for the boys to dance to, which I obviously also enjoy because who doesn’t? They didn’t love the movie but the music is a hit!

I literally haven’t watched any tv in months because I go to bed too early, so I kind of feel like I’m missing out. I’m sure I’ll be able to catch up when I’m nursing a newborn around the clock in a few months — looking forward to Hacks Szn. 5 and finally watching The Pitt. Any other recs?

I did write a whole book when I was pregnant the first time (and I still love it so much!). I also wrote a series of blog posts about that pregnancy that I turned into a zine! It’s so special to revisit both of these works that feel miraculous and helpful to me now. I’m so glad I wrote them. Maybe you’d like to read them too!

Thank you so much for reading. As always, I love to hear from you — please comment with any thoughts you have! And I always appreciate likes and restacks, sharing goes such a long way!

If you like this free newsletter, here are the best ways to support my work as a self-employed writer and artist who is also a full time caregiver:

1. SHARE WITH A FRIEND! It makes me so happy to hear when folks have sent my essays along to a friend who they know will resonate with it. That’s the best!

2. SHARE ON SOCIAL MEDIA! It helps! It really helps!

3. BUY MY ZINES! I’m really proud of my tiny publishing project, Imaginary Lake, and the zines I’m writing and hand-making. They are largely about pregnancy, birth, and motherhood — with new ones coming soon! You can find them linked above. This is the best way to keep all of this going!

4. LOCAL AND NEED A DOULA? I’m taking birth clients in Pittsburgh, PA through June! Then I’ll be on maternity leave, but I’m planning to be back to work at some point in 2027. More information on my website here!

xoxo, more soon

But even being able to articulate that is a balm. I used to feel so able to define myself and my life, to place myself squarely in all sorts of categories. I don’t fit so well anymore, and I think that’s a good thing. At least, I wouldn’t have it any other way. The older I get, the longer I mother my children, the more children I grow in my body, the less I feel concerned with any of the things we do to try to fit into the categories. I have never fit well, and I doubt I ever will. I’m less willing to play the games now, I guess. It helps to feel so much belonging within the small universe of the home and family. My children know me, my husband knows me, my parents and sister know me. They don’t need me to be anything other than absolutely myself, and in their embrace I am allowed to change. It’s such a basic thing, but it took me a very long time and a lot of unknotting and unknowing to learn.

Anyway, my energy is coming back, and I can eat way more easily now than even two weeks ago. Such a relief. The first trimester was truly so hard, I was white knuckling my way through. It is so weird how all that un-easiness just vanishes. I already forget exactly how it felt. It was terrible though! This is how we do this again and again! We truly just forget! There were definitely moments in the first trimester when I was vowing I would never do this again, and now I am daring myself that I probably could, even deeper into my thirties! Ha, the bravado of pregnancy and birth! We’ll see how I feel in the throes of active labor. I’ll be cursing that bravado. I’ll be bearing my teeth at the version of myself that feels brave now, in the second trimester’s glow. And that’s birth, isn’t it. We contain all our parts, and use all of them to get our baby out, impossibly, terribly, powerfully. Yeah, I need to get pissed, get angry, and frustrate my baby out.

Oh I just hope they’re ok, that they’re whole and healthy and well. I don’t know yet. We decided against genetic testing again, so we don’t know much about our baby’s health until the 20-week anatomy scan coming up in a few weeks. I remind myself that the very bad things are so rare. Incredibly. Still, it’s hard to not know. The womb is a black box, and that’s my kid in there. We have made it safely this far. I learned in my first pregnancy that my mom lost a baby at 16 weeks, so it’s a tender milestone. Any loss is so hard, but the idea of a second or third trimester loss is unimaginably scary. So I don’t imagine it, I just watch and wait like every other pregnant person has forever. It was encouraging how clear and strong my baby’s heartbeat was the second the midwife laid the doppler on my belly, somehow right in the perfect place. A beating heart, that’s so much right now. My two big boys and their beating hearts. Who will join us now?

I feel sensitive and emotional, crying easily. I keep wanting to listen to Sufjan Stevens, exclusively. He’s never been pregnant, but he gets it! So much still to endure. Twenty-four more weeks! Ah, yikes. I did some gentle movement this morning and that felt good. I watched the trees. I still feel so tired, but less useless. I don’t want to force my way through this pregnancy. I want to stay soft and let the time flow forward as slowly as is right. A lot of things feel boring to me right now?! Things I used to enjoy! What is going on?! Almost unbearable sometimes to be inside my mind, and also awfully quiet. Pregnancy is so weird, so life-altering. It’s all these brain changes that I most want to talk about with others, but they’re so hard to track and articulate. Is it just me?

I love being a doula, and I love going over to my clients’ houses to chat with them about their pregnancy and birth. I love when they text me their thoughts and questions. I want to talk and talk right now, I want to be social and present and pass time sitting in living rooms and at dining tables with women talking. And I want to sit through the night at a birth, pressing my client’s sacrum with my palms, breathing labor’s rare air with them. The radical presence it requires of me snaps me right out of whatever preoccupation I’d been caught in before. It’s sort of a weird comparison, but theater was one of the first great loves of my life, and doula work feels the most like being on stage I’ve felt in a long time — not in the performance sense, but in the sense that you have to be all there, and ready to move and act and play your role. I feel activated is what I mean, and I think that’s what theater made me feel too, why I loved it. I want to be out there, and I want to be at home with my children, making muffins and doing the dishes and building duplo zoos, and I love that this job gives me so much of both. I feel unbearably lucky sometimes. I feel worried about taking maternity leave from my doula practice (will all the work dry up?) — but no use worrying about that now. It’s happening, and it will most likely be ok.

Counter-argument to the “belonging” feeling I wrote about before. I feel very financially vulnerable right now so I haven’t been buying anything unnecessary, but I wish I could wear a whole new wardrobe of beautiful clothes. I wish I could become beautiful, enviable, mysterious. I wish I knew how to put my makeup on and make my hair look good. I get more frumpy every day, it feels like, and I’m mostly ok with it but sometimes I’m not. I used to be very cute, in my first pregnancy and just after. I was twenty-five pounds lighter then (honestly an unhealthy weight, looking back at pictures), and I had way more time and money for messing around with my personal style. I took so many pictures of myself then, and was somewhat of a sewing influencer at the time. I struggle putting my own image on the internet now, still doing it sometimes as a sort of practice in letting go — but it feels so different. Still, there’s a beauty in my strong and capable body that is supporting its third pregnancy. I am healthy and able to do this. I almost blend in in the suburb where I live, but I will always be a little weird in my homesewn linen pants and my secondhand babaa sweaters that I will wear until they’re threadbare when I’m eighty, I hope. I long to be myself, I guess. I long to feel beautiful that way. Pregnancy brings it into sharp relief — my body is getting so weird, not quite detectably pregnant yet but bigger than before. I have to just allow myself to change and keep changing, age and keep aging. How can I wrap myself in love? It’s not a matter of a sweater, but a posture, and attitude. I want to feel good. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. The beautiful people on the internet do get to me sometimes. I don’t look like them! And I don’t want to — but wouldn’t it be easier if I did? Yes, and no. Mostly no.

I’m back to gentle movement after a very stagnating first trimester. My teacher, Kara, urges me on through the screen. It’s funny how we can have teachers now who we’ve never met, the age of the internet continues to fascinate me. There is still intimacy there, as there always has been, it’s just more one-sided than ever. It feels so good to move, and I dare myself to continue as pregnancy gets more and more extreme. Will I be able to? I’m older now than I was before, it will all be harder. I know this. Still, I dare myself. I will stay mobile. I will remain devoted to myself. I will spend the time, expend the energy. I feel the difference when I do. It is so easy not to, to make so many excuses. Pregnancy is the perfect excuse not to do things you don’t want to do, so I draw the want up from somewhere deep and primal. I will not sit on my phone watching short videos. I will move and stretch and lift instead. This morning, the movement was short and gentle, an introduction to qijong, which Kara has been training in. The movement of energy through the body, the energetic body being given shapes to move through. It felt so delicious, to whoosh and gather and tap and shake and swipe and glide. Not exercise, movement. I need my energy to be given safe passage through my body right now. Like airing out a house, opening the windows, letting the wind pass through. It felt like that. In pregnancy, more than ever, I need that. In these times, more than ever, I need that.

I had a day at home with my boys yesterday and felt my irritability hanging over me like a veil all day. Why is it so hard to stay calm and pleasant with your own kids? The demands all felt grating, their inability to play without ending up hurting each other, the whining, shouting, crying. It’s all so normal but I felt so overwhelmed by it. The kind of day that makes you think — why would I add another child to this mess? Parenting is so humbling, I felt humble and humiliated alone in my house with my kids. I tried to give them extra hugs and kisses to make up for it. I snuck them extra sour gummies at the end of the day. “I love you still,” I tried to say. “I’m not perfect but I love you so much.”

Still so sacred to feel my baby inside me, that subtle barely-there early quickening. “Hello baby,” I say tentatively, my hand on my belly, even though I know their hearing has not quite developed yet. A relationship begins. I think of this feeling, this soft confidence in my baby, so dissonant with the news I’m digesting. Evil men are destroying the world, starting wars for nothing, killing children who grew in their mothers like mine is. Everyone was a child who grew in their mother, who experienced that warm and real first place that we can’t quite remember. We are all so sacred. Nothing has made me hate war more than growing and bearing children. I am disgusted by the news I hear, by the uselessness of the violence, by the explosions that ruin our air and soil and water, by the death, and the money being made somewhere sinister and secret. It makes me sick. I can’t believe my ears, is what I’m saying. I can’t believe how terrible things are, and have been for so many generations. In all my bad parts, every evil thought I’ve ever had, I could never invent or desire this or anything like it. All the mothers grieve, truly. I breathe it out, try not to keep that horrible energy in my body, because what good will it do me now? My five year old is scared of vampires these days, and I am too — these energy vampires who are stealing our lives, our energy, with their choices. I won’t give it to them. I try not to anyway, rarely succeeding. Are you ok? I’m trying to be, in spite of everything. I don’t want my cortisol to rise so much, my baby feels it!

Pregnancy is such a temporal experience. Forty weeks are not that many, really. This time in my life is rare and fleeting, as hard as it is. I’m sorry that I can’t write about anything else, but how could I? Pregnancy is meant to be absorbing, not an afterthought. I remind myself to linger here, to spend this short time wisely precisely because I know it will pass. I don’t want to be obsessive, but I do want to learn what I can while I’m here, experience what is ripe here. There are certain things you can only feel, only learn, while you’re pregnant. You don’t have to tap into that, but it’s there for the taking. So I am lingering here, a little sheepishly, with my pile of books and my sorrow and my joy. What will I learn here? How will it change me? What do I need to know?

two photos my children took of me recently — portraits feel different than self-portraits, you know?

Thank you so much for reading. As always, I love to hear from you — please comment with any thoughts you have. And I always appreciate likes and restacks, sharing goes such a long way!

If you like this free newsletter, here are the best ways to support my work as a self-employed writer and artist who is also a full time caregiver:

1. SHARE WITH A FRIEND! It makes me so happy to hear when folks have sent my essays along to a friend who they know will resonate with it. That’s the best!

2. SHARE ON SOCIAL MEDIA! It helps! It really helps!

3. BUY MY ZINES! I’m really proud of my tiny publishing project, Imaginary Lake, and the zines I’m writing and hand-making. They are largely about pregnancy, birth, and motherhood — with new ones coming soon! You can find them linked above This is the best way to keep all of this going!

4. LOCAL AND NEED A DOULA? I’m taking birth clients in Pittsburgh, PA through June! Then I’ll be on maternity leave, but I’m planning to be back to work at some point in 2027. More information on my website here!

5. COME TO A VIRTUAL WRITING WORKSHOP! I am running my “A Poetics of Birth” poetry workshop THIS WEEKEND, and there are one or two seats left. Here’s the link to sign up!

xoxo, more soon!

Earlier this week, I supported a really difficult birth. It involved unwanted outcomes, heartbreak, fear, and big complications. Everyone seems to be ok now, but there were moments where we weren’t sure. It was really hard. I have a lot of support as I’m processing through that experience, and I’m continuing to support the family for whom it was much more life-altering as much as I can — but still. That was a big thing to pass through, especially while I am pregnant myself. In the middle of the experience, I felt eerily calm and steady. The unsteadiness has come in the days after. I made the list that became the outline of this essay before that birth, and coming back to it now to flesh out my thoughts feels newly urgent. Having babies is truly no small thing, and always invites uncertainty and risk. I hold new reverence and humility toward birth. Every birth I attend or experience myself builds that humility, but this one offered a huge dose. I can make no promises. Life is never simple, and birth is no different.

But I myself am not at birth’s threshold yet. I am knee-deep in pregnancy which brings different lessons than birth does. In walking through pregnancy with so many others, having so many conversations with people about how it feels and how those feelings shift over time, and now walking through it again myself, I am beginning to see something beautiful and true. Pregnancy is an experience unlike nearly any other human experience, different even from motherhood itself. Pregnancy is a distinct opportunity that many of us only encounter a limited few times in our lives, if at all. It holds inherent boundaries, it is time bound and transitory. It is limited by biology and circumstance. It is slippery or obvious, hard-won or a stunning (and sometimes difficult) surprise. It is as multiple as we are unique, and as universal as we are similar. It is, invariably, really hard — and yet life just keeps going, keeps demanding things of us even while we are pregnant. When I say I am pregnant, you immediately know something big about what I am going through. You picture me somehow — round-bellied, waddling, whatever else.

What special lessons does the experience of pregnancy bring? How do we all process these lessons differently, let them change and teach us, permeating our soft places, or not? I wrote this list in my notes app in a flurry, and now coming back to it I can feel the way each of these lessons are challenging me even now, deeply present in my life as a pregnant mom of two. It is hard to take in so many things at once. I find with my clients that one lesson tends to emerge as primary, very loud and strong — usually precisely the one they need the most to wrestle with or learn. It is different for everyone, and can shift over time. I can’t tell which lessons are loudest for me yet, which makes sense this early in the process. They are all here, symphonic in their influence. Not all of these lessons are unique to pregnancy, of course, but no where else in life are they “bundled” in quite this same array. Maybe I’m trying to see pregnancy with rose-colored glasses after moving through a lot of hard in the first trimester? I’m sure I’m extra eager about all of this because I’m a doula. But I’ll say for myself — it feels special this third time to come to expect some of this, and to feel like I want to learn these things, to feel them and let them change me in small and big ways. It is easy to see pregnancy as a hardship, an inconvenience, a means to an end (and I feel all those things on any given day, believe me), but what if it is also an opportunity? What special things is pregnancy offering to me, things that might be more difficult to learn or access in other seasons? What is unfolding in me right before my eyes?

nine special lessons of pregnancy

The body becomes a little clock.

When else in life do we count time in weeks? Pregnancy feels like a completely new relationship to time. You have nine months, forty weeks, three trimesters, give or take. Even the idea of “trimesters” is so bound to pregnancy. If you ask someone who is pregnant where they are in their pregnancy, it is more likely than not that they know down to the week or even the day. Even if time slips away a little bit, the milestones along the way serve to jog your memory. Office visits every few weeks, then every week at the end. The 20-week anatomy scan. Gestational diabetes screening. Not to mention the ever growing belly, shifting symptoms, and baby kicks to remind you that time is passing and something inside of you is growing stronger and stronger.

There is something really special about the new dimensions of time that pregnancy offers, layered on top of the ones we already know. Pregnancy layered over the seasons, pregnancy layered over special dates and anniversaries, layered over weather and work and all our usual rhythms. It gives us a new narrative arc, with a big bang at the end! I have found being inside of the pregnancy “story” to be comforting to me. Finally, I can give a shape to what is happening in my life, and I know what role I have to play. Time feels like an active participant in the unfolding narrative rather than a force I have to bend or wrestle against. Pregnancy has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But this is normal, this is grounding. We humans depend on clocks we can live inside. The world is one, of course, with day and night, summer and winter, these forces that gently usher us through the endlessness. But pregnancy is a new one, surprising with its own rhythm. The body becomes a little clock, and it’s a pretty special one.

Transformation is inevitable.

It’s one thing to say, “I want to change my life.” It’s another thing to feel that life-change quite literally growing bigger and bigger inside of you. You can’t not change. You can try really hard, I guess, but even physically there’s no fighting the shift. The body transforms, but the soul does too — sometimes in ways that are hard to detect in real time but become very obvious later on. I have felt this transformation twice already, and I feel curious about it once again. Who will I be on the other side of this? What is developing quietly inside of me even now? I can’t tell yet, but I feel the tide pulling already. It sounds like let things go. It sounds like see what comes.

I think personal transformation is the single biggest opportunity of pregnancy, beyond growing and meeting your baby. I also think its the one most easily resisted or set aside as unimportant or even inconvenient. The book about pregnancy I recommend most often (and have turned to so much myself, especially this time around), is Britta Bushnell’s Transformed by Birth. In it, she describes birth as a rite of passage and humans as meaning-making beings. We pass through experiences that bring big change in our lives, and then we unfurl the branching meanings of that change. This is in us to do, offered freely among the changes and chances of our lives. It has meant so much to me to allow the change the birth has offered me, welcome it, and see what meaning slowly comes. In birth, I truly have been transformed, and I will be again — and that has honestly been incredible to experience.

The stakes are so high.

They honestly couldn’t be higher. The moment you hold a positive pregnancy in your hand, you feel those stakes, sense the “what-if’s” rushing in. Something Louise Erdrich wrote in The Blue Jay’s Dance (another of my all time favorite books about birth) has always stuck with me: “Most of all, I worry over what I hold. I want perfection. Each day I pray another perfect cell to form. A million of them.” We want perfection — and the thought of anything less is terrifying. Where else in life do we demand perfection so adamantly? Almost nowhere. We are so used to compromising, finding our way toward “good enough,” making lemonade out of lemons. But not with our babies! The miracle of perfect babies being intricately grown in the dark of the uterus so very often is the one that truly keeps me believing that the world is still headed somewhere good. The fact that this works shocks me. I look at my two sons and they have everything they need, they are perfect. They grew inside of me that way, and I had no way to meaningfully influence that perfection beyond blindly trusting that they would we well. Frankly, that’s wild. The stakes are so high.

The grief that unfolds when babies die or when they are not healthy, when they don’t have everything they need to thrive, is so, so heavy. The chaos of life touches us here too. I send all my love and honor to those parents who hold and miss and move through that story. They feel the stakes most acutely. When we take the test, stand at the beginning of pregnancy, we all have no idea what will happen. We know we have so little control. And we know what we hope. We hope for perfect. In fact, we demand it. Then, all we can do is watch and wait and will each perfect cell, all million of them, to please, please form. All of this, quiet in the background of everything else we are responsible for in life, forming in the dark. It feels impossible. It happens every day. Of course I worry over this baby who is growing inside of me now. They are my child. I demand their perfection and I fear anything less. My love for them already covers any and every eventuality. I feel these stakes every day.

How do I cope with intensity?

This is something I talk about with my doula clients all the time. Pregnancy is a strange mix of ordinary and intense. It leads to birth, which is a mix of very extraordinary and very intense, then back to postpartum, ordinary and intense again. It’s all intense though. The first trimester of pregnancy tends to push most of us straight into intensity, giving us nausea and exhaustion and mood-shifts that startle us with their force. All of a sudden, you have to figure out how to reconcile these intense things with the rest of life. What still needs to happen, what can I set aside, how can I get through these big feelings? What helps, what makes it worse, how do I survive until this too passes? Who can help me, and how do I ask them to? This problem-solving coping mindset, the understanding that we can’t escape the discomfort but need to learn to coexist with it somehow instead, is an incredibly valuable skill. It’s a skill we need to cultivate for birth, for postpartum, for parenting, and for so much else that life throws at us too. Everyone copes with intensity differently, and finding what works for you, your own path through challenge, is one of the great lessons of pregnancy. Someone else’s magic bullet may not be yours. Only you can find your own way through.

An opportunity to learn.

It is very normal for first time parents not to know much or even anything about pregnancy, birth, or babies. Our culture is really good a siloing birth into its own realm that is easy not to interact with without a clear reason. This was not always the case — pregnancy, birth, and babies used to be much more integrated into community lifecycles, touching almost everyone’s lived experience. Now we hear folks loving to shout on the internet about being angry that there’s a baby seated near them on a airplane. (Sigh.) But then, all of a sudden, you’re pregnant! Time to figure it out! It’s so interesting to see people navigate this. It takes all kinds. Some people go deep into research mode (I was this kind of person), some people seek teachers, some people really want only the bare minimum information, some people would prefer to remain mostly ignorant, relying on doctors to just take care of everything. It all belongs! But learning something about birth before experiencing it is in everyone’s best interest, and I think we are all better for knowing more about where we come from and how birth is approached by our healthcare system, midwives, and other practitioners today.

Because I was one of the deep research kind of people, I have to say that it was so exciting to unlock a whole new world of learning when I was pregnant for the first time, and my interest has only expanded from there. For every new thing I learn about birth, I find new rabbit trails to follow into history and philosophy. You can go so deep with birth, and the thinkers, researchers, and teachers who are offering their genius to this field are pretty amazing. Birth will never go away, as long as there are people. Artificial intelligence cannot replace the fact that humans grow in humans and humans need humans’ help during birth. Capitalism’s commodification has stormed the birth world as it has everything else, of course, but so much of it still feels so grounded in reality and true altruism. There is something beautiful and true here, is what I am saying. I grieve the siloing of this information, because I feel that birth has so much to offer to pretty much everyone, parent or not. It is so deeply human, it is where we all come from! Everyone was born! How cool to get to learn all about it as we walk through it ourselves!

A new point of connection.

Being pregnant instantly connects you with so many people in a new way — people you’ve known forever and people you are yet to meet. I’ll never forget the way it felt to talk with my mom about her pregnancies and births once I was pregnant and experiencing it for myself. I suddenly felt so curious about the pregnancies and births of all the moms I’ve ever known, random strangers, anyone anywhere. Parenting extends this point of connection. Anytime I see someone out in the world who is pregnant or who has a little one tagging along, I instantly can connect with at least something about their life and experience. There is always something to chat about on the playground, gentle friendly questions to ask, a way in. The warmth of that connection with other moms has surprised me, and has felt easier than I expected. Of course it isn’t effortless or a given thing that just because someone else has moved through pregnancy suddenly you have everything in common, but still, it has surprised me how big these points of connection can be.

The way becoming parents and moving through pregnancy and birth together has deepened my existing friendships has been one of the best things of all. Just as pregnancy and birth have been transformative in my life, they’ve been transformative in my friends’ lives too, in so many beautiful ways. I have learned so much from my friends who are parents, and the conversations we have together feel so rich with new layers of experience and meaning to connect all sorts of things. Pregnancy and birth are things we experience in the isolation of our own bodies and lives, but we are not alone in them. We have so much to share with each other.

Building tolerance for uncertainty.

Much like the very high stakes of pregnancy, there is so little way to know what is going on for so much of the time. Likewise, there is no way to know what will happen until it happens. This is how all of life is, but pregnancy blows this feeling up to huge proportions. It’s so wild early in pregnancy to have an ultrasound or even to have your provider put the doppler on your belly so you can hear the baby’s heartbeat — affirming that there really is a baby in there, and they are doing ok! We go through so many of our days just not sure, hoping and praying. Again, I am so grateful for the movement and kicks we get in the second half, little reassurances. That is when the uncertainty about birth starts to build, so at least we can begin to relax a little about our baby, knowing that each kick is like a little “I’m ok!”

I spend so much time talking about birth’s uncertainty with my doula clients. We make birth plans that aren’t plans so much as they are preferences, or, really, dreams. No, there is no certainty. We slowly grow in our tolerance of this uncertainty, but it never really becomes comfortable. This is one of the hardest things about being pregnant. Many wise teachers say that preparing for birth means preparing for “the unexpected,” understanding that you can think about what you want all day long but sometimes what you get is something very different. I have lived this, and I have seen it firsthand in other people’s pregnancies and births, to varying degrees. Sometimes the unexpected is heartbreak. Sometimes the unexpected is joy. Sometimes it’s both mixed together in really surprising ways. But, at least we know that no one spends their pregnancy in full bulletproof certainty. We all are united in our not knowing. It’s what we do with this uncertainty, how we let it perforate us, that makes a difference in the end.

Living with limitations.

To invoke Rilke (as I am wont to do): when you are pregnant, “you must change your life.” Sometimes at the very earliest stages of pregnancy, before many symptoms have hit, we engage in some wishful thinking — things won’t really have to change for me, will they? Sorry friend, they will. I’ve done this twice already, and still I was so startled by how life-altering pregnancy has been this time. It’s a familiar feeling, one I guess I had shoved toward the back of my mind. Much like coping with intensity, I am having to learn to live with and around new limitations. 8:30 pm bedtime? Ok, I need to get everything done in fewer hours then I guess. Crazy food aversions? Ok, I need to figure out what the heck I can eat and then locate and eat it before the aversion shifts. All-day nausea? I need to keep the unisom and b6 stocked, carry my little emotional support barf bag around, cancel plans, and chew multi-packs of mint gum. And that was all just in the first trimester. None of these things on their own take up too much space in my life, but all together they’ve amounted to new patterns, choices, and rhythms in my days. The limitations throughout pregnancy shift and change, which requires even more changes to how life flows. Even going to so many midwife appointments is not a simple feat!

Then, there’s the huge looming black hole in the future of “life with our new baby.” I don’t dare plan anything past September right now, knowing that our entire life will be reshuffled like a pack of cards when this baby crash lands into our life. That is a wild limitation to live with, exciting but severe. I’ve declined needed work contracts, I’ve cancelled plans, I’ve cleared my calendar for most of the second half of the year. A baby is a glittering limitation, aren’t they? And what a gift that is.

We can do hard things.

Yesterday, I was sitting with my five year old at the doctor’s office where he was terrified about getting his very sore throat swabbed for Strep A. (Spoiler alert, it was positive.) He couldn’t stop crying, but I saw him visibly begin to pull it together when I quietly reminded him, “Hey, I know you to be a really brave kid. This is hard but you can do hard things, I know you can.” He worked a little while longer to calm himself down, then he finally did the swab and it really sucked but he was proud of himself. This “we can do hard things” phrase feels a little trite by now, but it still comes to mind all the time. Life is full of hard things. It is hard and getting harder for pretty much all of us right now. I really wish it could get easier, even just a little bit. I wish we all didn’t have to do so many hard things all the freaking time. But, we do. We just really do.

Pregnancy and birth are no different — in fact, they just raise the hard all the higher on top of everything else. But something that moving through pregnancy and birth myself, and especially walking through it with others, has continuously taught me, is that we are so strong and brave. Not once have I ever seen someone lay down give up instead of pull the strength from somewhere and keep going. Of course there are moments of defeat, times when we reach the ends of ourselves, true experiences of not knowing how to go on — but there is almost always life beyond those places too. Pregnancy and birth sometimes push us past all our boundaries, beyond hard even into “impossible.” At births, I see every woman in transition crash into this wall, and then I see them break through it, somehow. As a doula, I just sat with a woman in the midst of the kinds of impossible I hope to never live and that she hoped to never live too. I still don’t know how she did all those extremely hard things. But she did. She’s on the other side of it now slowly recovering, which also will continue to be very, very hard. I am amazed by her.

I was really scared when I saw the positive pregnancy test this time around, I won’t lie about that. I felt my stomach drop, because I have done this twice before and I know how it is and will be. A big part of me didn’t want to do it. But a bigger part of me did, because I know I can, and I know that so much good will come of it. In all my doubt, I just kept telling myself, “I can do this.” Over and over again. I’m starting to believe it. We don’t want to do hard things, but we can do hard things. And if pregnancy and birth can teach us anything, it is that. We can. We can do this. I can do this! I can! It’s hard, and it sucks, and it’s beautiful, and I’m so, so, proud of us.

Want to read some of my favorite pregnancy / birth books? Here are the ones I recommend to all of my doula clients!

Not much scares me more than artificial intelligence right now, and this essay was written 100% by me (beyond spell check). I do use em-dashes a lot, but I always have. Sigh. I hate to even have to be clear about that, but it’s the water we’re swimming in now I guess and I’m proud to be a person who writes. You can pry my mind from my cold dead hands! I won’t say this every time I publish an essay, but I had the thought that because this essay is more “list-y” than most, it might sound more like ai? Idk, it’s a weird world out there right now.

As always, I love to hear from you — please comment with any thoughts you have. And I always appreciate likes and restacks, sharing goes such a long way!

If you like this free newsletter, here are the best ways to support my work as a self-employed writer and artist who is also a full time caregiver:

1. SHARE WITH A FRIEND! It makes me so happy to hear when folks have sent my essays along to a friend who they know will resonate with it. That’s the best!

2. SHARE ON SOCIAL MEDIA! It helps! It really helps!

3. BUY MY ZINES! I’m really proud of my tiny publishing project, Imaginary Lake, and the zines I’m writing and hand-making. They are largely about pregnancy, birth, and motherhood — with new ones coming soon! You can find them linked above This is the best way to keep all of this going!

4. LOCAL AND NEED A DOULA? I’m taking birth clients in Pittsburgh, PA through June! Then I’ll be on maternity leave, but I’m planning to be back to work at some point in 2027. More information on my website here!

5. COME TO A VIRTUAL WRITING WORKSHOP! I am running my “A Poetics of Birth” poetry workshop again at the end of the month, and there are only a couple of seats left. Here’s the link to sign up! More information below!

Also — I’m considering turning on paid subscriptions to my newsletter since I will have to be on maternity leave and lose a big chunk of my existing income soon, but I’m worried no one would sign up. What would you want to see from a paid subscription to this newsletter? Free printable zines? More book recs? Extra doula thoughts? Other stuff? Let me know if you have thoughts. So grateful for each and every reader who finds their way to me, it’s honestly such a gift.

More soon, much love!

We’re having another baby! I’m pregnant for the third time, feeling myself wade through these strange waters once again. It all feels new, somehow. How easily we forget! But it also feels familiar, a path I have walked before. The first trimester will very soon come to a close and I am glad to see it go. I had forgotten how hard it is to feel so out of sorts, so exhausted, so sick and strange for such a long time. These have been some of the hardest weeks in my recent memory. I feel far from myself, caged up, held down in the chair in the corner. I look in the mirror and barely recognize myself. This pregnancy has quieted me. It is in this quietude that I watch and wait for all that will come to our family, all that I can’t yet imagine or understand.

This baby was a genuine surprise. Neither of our others were surprising, so it was a new experience to be so sure that we weren’t pregnant and then to see the test so clearly proclaim that we were. It was the day before new years eve, and I felt the year I had been expecting get whisked out from under me like a rug I had all of my weight on. It was really disorienting. I wasn’t happy about it for a few weeks. I wasn’t angry either, but the happiness felt covered over by shock and, honestly, fear, for quite a while. Having done this twice already, I knew what I was getting into. We knew that we wanted a third baby, but not quite yet. I hadn’t had time to mentally prepare, to feel ready or excited. I wanted to retrace my steps and not undo the baby, but warn myself. Don’t waste these months! They’re the last normal ones you’ll have for a very long time! Had I known I would be starting the year pregnant, I almost surely would have done at least a few things differently beforehand — but it is what it is, and I have come around to true happiness. This is our baby! This little surprise! It wouldn’t have been exactly them any other time! That’s the magic of it, isn’t it? It’s all kind of magic, truly.

Still, I’d wanted more time to build up my birth doula practice, which had really just begun to hit its stride. I’ll need to take a considerable break and lose all the momentum I’ve built, which feels hard and frustrating. I’d wanted to write more, make more, finish more. I’d wanted to focus on work unhindered for just a little while longer. Ah, well. “The impeded stream is the one that sings,” right? I feel that impediment now, forcing me to go to bed at 8 pm every night, weaving nausea into every hour of the day, making my limbs feel lined with lead weights. I feel like I’ve had the flu for six weeks. Yes, it’s even harder than I remembered it, and I remembered it pretty hard. I try to offer my doula mind to myself, soothing words of encouragement and affirmation. It turns out you can’t be your own doula. Part of the magic of having a doula to walk alongside you through pregnancy is feeling heard, feeling witnessed. I have felt almost ghost-like, unable to write about it until I felt ready to share, unable to articulate exactly how it feels without one to listen. Of course I have friends and people around me to see me, but you know what I mean. In cultivating this “alongsider” approach to doula work, I have practiced what I long for myself.

I’m twelve weeks pregnant now. Just this past week at a midwife appointment, my baby was evading the doppler, so the midwife used the handheld ultrasound for a quick peek. There they were! Wiggling, embodied, “clearly thriving” according to my midwife. I felt myself beam with pride when she said that, and exhale in relief. I have had my breath held for this whole first third of the pregnancy. Many stories of loss have made their way to me in recent years, all feeling more vivid in this first trimester than my others, or maybe I have always felt this worried and had just forgotten. Everyone knows that bad things can happen after twelve weeks too, but I feel ready to speak freely about this pregnancy anyway, no matter what unfolds. It was honestly hard to wait this long to share. It all just affirms how vital writing is in my life, and how vital sharing that writing is too. I’ve been logging thoughts in various documents for who knows what (mainly just cyclical complaints about how nauseous I am and how strange I feel), but writing words that will be read soon matters to me. It feels good to not keep this a secret anymore. It turns out I really hate secrets. But something in me felt sure I wanted to wait until now too. It all belongs, the push and pull. There is a time for everything, I suppose.

Oh, what will happen? Who will this baby be? How will my life change entirely again? What is waiting for me? Pregnancy is so vulnerable, so raw and clarifying. I enjoyed talking with the midwife, who treated me like an authority on my own self, my own babies, my own body. I am. I have done this twice before, I do know what to expect, I am deeply educated, very truly aware of what all of this means, and somehow that makes all of the questions burn even brighter. I remind myself: “worry is the work of pregnancy,” a Pam England quote that stuns in its simplicity. It is true. There is so little we can do but worry, and wait, and wonder, and watch. That is the work, allowing the worry to swarm my mind, then allow it to go out again with the tide and with time. It makes me think of the little poem I wrote while I was so anxious about America (still am):

I wear worry like a coat,
try to take it off when
I’m with my children.

The zipper is stuck.
Please, the zipper is stuck.

Pregnancy is the ultimate “zipper is stuck” experience. You can’t escape your body, you can’t escape your mind, you can’t separate from your children because there is one always inside of you, growing bigger and bigger. Here for the third time, I allow myself to feel how hard it is, how much I am giving, and how sure I am that I want to. It still feels like such a great honor to receive the gift of these children. I feel inordinately lucky. I want so badly to do right by them, to treat each of them so well, to surround them with love all the days of their life. And I do, but imperfectly. Pregnancy makes it so much harder. So I own that too. My boys know I need to rest more. They can see that what I’m doing is hard, that I’m different within it. They have offered so much understanding, in their way. I feel the warmth of my family’s unconditional love for me while I exist in this somewhat diminished state for a little while. My husband picked up all the slack with no complaint — I have barely touched a dish or a laundry basket in the past six weeks.

I won’t lie that after two boys I feel myself hoping for a girl, but I truly will be happy either way. We will find out at 20 weeks, so that tension of not knowing yet feels vivid right now. I don’t really have an inkling, and I want to hold it loosely for my own sake. Will there be more babies after this baby? Who knows! They may be our last, they may not be. There is a part of me that wants a huge family, and a part of me that feels my capacity (and our income) already straining at the thought of this third baby. I don’t want to decide anything right now. I want to be here, where we are, family and capacity growing at the pace of real life, no faster, no slower.

There is more to say, but I think this is where I’ll leave this note for now. I’ve been keeping a pregnancy journal that will likely become a zine. I have new pregnancy resource zines from my doula practice that I really want to release soon too. I’ve been using them with clients and feel excited about them. I’m considering doing another “a year postpartum” zine series this time too. That was such a joy after Ben’s birth, such a right-sized project that bore so much fruit for me creativity. For better or for worse, pregnancy and childbearing is very generative for me as an artist. I find it energizing and inspiring, there is so much to talk about. But, I also want to be gentle with myself. Not every personal experience needs to become something outward facing. I don’t need to write everything in my life. Or, do I? This is the tension I always live in. But I love writing birth and postpartum, so I expect I will, I’m just not sure to what extent. It will all depend, I guess, on how things unfold! So much curiosity, so much worry, so much hope! More soon, for sure.

I haven’t been reading (or doing anything) much in this first trimester, but I did revisit two of my very favorite books: Louise Erdrich’s The Blue Jay’s Dance and Lucy Jones’ Matrescence. Both are so brilliant, and offer such deep solace and understanding. The other book that I want to really spend time with in this pregnancy is Britta Bushnell’s Transformed by Birth.

I’ve gotten some mileage out of my pregnancy playlist already. I have birth and postpartum playlists too. (I know, I’m still on spotify, I’ll decamp at some point!)

Shout out to Unisom + B6, shout out to Chewy Sprees and mint gum, shout out to carry-out pizza, chick fil a, and Dr. Pepper for superceding the wild food aversions I have been stricken by. Hug your nearest mom and thank her specifically for surviving the first trimester as many times as she has, it is NO JOKE SERIOUSLY PEOPLE. Babies are worth it though. Also we so easily forget! Haha, cry.

You can read all my existing pregnancy, birth, and postpartum-centric zines here, and there will surely be more to come! I also wrote a book about my first pregnancy called Broken Waters. Highly recommend!

xoxo, more soon. I’ll just be over here growing a little baby day by day by day, keeping the hoping machine running!

When we read a library book my five-year-old enjoys, at the end of the book he says “this one’s a keeper!” That means he loved it, and he wants it not to go in the return pile by the door. He wants to read it again sometime soon. He wants it to float around our house in our various library piles, maybe forever. He wants to take a moment with it on his own by the window, turning pages very slowly. I love when he and I agree on keepers. Most recently, reaching the end of poet Donald Hall’s exquisite Ox Cart Man with tears in my eyes, I heard my kiddo say, emphatically, “keeper!” which made a huge smile sweep my face. The kids are alright, you guys.

I know a book I read is a keeper if I read the last page and want to clutch the book to my chest in gratitude. If I have the urge to immediately buy a copy to add to my own personal shelves (since 99% of the books I read are from the local library). Keepers are the books that I know I will continue to carry inside of me, the books I will unknowingly draw on when I write, the books that become part of the web of my mind. Keepers are startling and stunning, they make me want to write, they make me want to read another book immediately and also live inside of that book forever. They are both hard to part with and spur me onward. That is truly the sign of a book book — when they move you both inwardly and outwardly.

The world is changing rapidly in ways I don’t understand. Reading is a place where I can re-orient myself to what is real and true and always has been. Novels are empathy machines, offering us the inside of someone else’s head, where we can find that it is (shockingly!) so much like our own, and also so different! I love that I can’t do anything else while I am reading. That experience of singleness of mind is so rare for me. Reading offers it to me, keeps me off my phone, narrows the focus of my brain to a sentence at a time like a skipping stone. Tell me a story, sing me a song, make me listen and hear! The world requires so much of us all — a book only, humbly, asks that listen and that I keep going until the end. What a beautiful invitation. I could go on and on but I won’t. You know that reading is wonderful too. So, here’s what stunned me this year, my keepers. I will be carrying these around in my mind forever.

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer

I think this was my favorite book of the year. I’ve been telling everyone about it. I will be thinking about it for the rest of my life and will surely revisit it many times. I wrote a fair bit about it here. This novel startled me because it presented me with one of my biggest fears, and so carefully followed that fear so far past my own imagination that it became a great solace to read it. It is about one woman’s apocalypse and her life past it. I loved it very much. It’s an unusual book (it’s like at least 60% detailed descriptions of chores), and I want everyone to read it and tell me what it made them feel!

Fair Play by Tove Jansson

A perfect small quiet book about art, devotion, and love that I read on my kindle while holding my youngest over the course of a few nights. This was my first Tove Jansson book ever. I quickly followed it with The Summer Book which I obviously also loved. The kind of magic book that you just sigh and think thank goodness this was published just so I could read it here and now.

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell

I read this book while tending my sick kids, sitting beside their too-warm little bodies on the couch. It’s funny how you can remember where you were while you spent time with a particular book. This one is a novel about a poet who is suddenly very sick and then gets better. This book felt like music, had so much music inside of it. I recommend this if you love to hear from narrators who are complicated, moving through something difficult, and slowly changing in ways they don’t yet understand.

Foster by Clare Keegan

JUST READ THIS BOOK IT IS VERY SHORT AND YOU WILL CRY AND THEN FEEL SO GRATEFUL TO BE ALIVE IN THIS BEAUTIFUL WORLD FULL OF STORIES. (Ditto to Small Things Like These by the same author, perfect for Christmas!)

Practice by Rosalind Brown

This is a book that took me a little bit to get into and once I was in I was so captivated by its narrator and her strange life in college. It’s a campus novel, but not like any other you’ve read before. This one’s for my weird girls who feel too much. This one’s for my book girls. This one’s for me, actually. Maybe it’s for you too. It’s a little spicy in very surprising ways too, just to loop you in on that. The kind of book that could never have been written in any other way by anyone else — truly one of a kind! Reading it felt immersive and private and so intimate, which is such a testament to the writing. I loved it!

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Everyone was talking about this year and for good reason because it is SO GOOD OMG. I am still thinking about it. I couldn’t put it down. My friend was reading it recently and I sent them so many aggressive voice memos about how much I love it and all my thoughts, so activated, so enthusiastic. This book is the ultimate book club book, a read-all-night page turner, and also so beautifully written — so smart and tender and literary. I honestly do hope they make it a movie so I can relive it anew. Ah, even thinking about it now I feel all excited and emotional!!

The Antidote by Karen Russell

As soon as I saw this book was coming down the pipeline I started telling everyone about it because I was so excited, and it surpassed even my high expectations. Another book I will continue to think about for so long. Expert use of magical realism, expert historical fiction that doesn’t feel trapped by heavy historical narrative, expert everything. This is a Great Depression novel that is NOT depressing! Can you even believe that?! Russell is a master of what she does, which is indescribable. I can’t believe she pulled off this book, it is such a huge achievement, and such a treat to read. In awe, tbh!

Tilt by Emma Pattee

This is a high-concept novel that felt stunningly approachable and recognizable in the midst of its intensity. A 40-week pregnant woman has to move through the aftermath of “the big one” earthquake in Portland, OR. I loved the explorations of pregnancy/motherhood/matrescence, and I loved seeing how this author would get her mc through this big crisis. It all felt very unexpected and fresh and exciting and emotional. Ultimately it lost steam a little for me as it went on, but it still makes the list because I haven’t forgotten about it, and it was such a pleasure to read. Pregnant main characters are rare, so it felt so special to me to get to spend time with one in such a wild setting!

The Wilderness by Aysegul Savas

I loved this book length essay about the first forty days after having a baby. This is the kind of book that I want to read again and again, could never tire of, want to hear in a thousand different voices. Savas’ account of this experience so many of us have in common is raw, intellectual, revealing, and recognizable. It sent me spinning with so many new ideas and connections to keep following. It is literary and smart but easy to read.

Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich

I love Louise Erdrich, I find her work remarkable (how does one person’s mind contain so much?). Every novel of hers I read stuns me anew. But THIS one really stunned me because it felt like it was written especially for me. Birth! Faith/religion stuff! Weird dystopian stuff! I think this book is fairly polarizing, which makes sense because it is definitely unusual, but I loved it. I also loved her newest novel, The Mighty Red.

Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel

I adore books about reading and writing, and this book feels like the ultimate reading and writing book, I loved it so much. Not for everyone, I’m sure, but extremely for me. This book is about a woman’s obsessive Herman Melville research interwoven with her own marriage and domestic life. You might think I don’t want to read about someone else’s research — ohhhh yes you do. At least I did!

On the Calculation of Volume (Book One) by Solvej Balle

This is the first book in a seven book series about a woman who gets caught in a time loop, living the same day again and again (Groundhog Day style). The first book in the series is so quietly powerful, and drew me right in. Knowing that there are so many more books to come makes it feel all the more exciting — like a great long mystery to sink into. Series’ of books are not usually so literary, so a special treat for us who are drawn to literary fiction but want the pleasure of knowing there’s another book to come! Huge recommend.

Heart the Lover by Lily King

UGH! This book ripped my heart right out! In the best way! This was the best romance I’ve read in a while. Spanning time and life stages, I was so invested in this story and it swept me right away. The best kind of emotional page-turner, and my favorite Lily King. It all felt so recognizable and romantic and epic and human. Still thinking about it weeks later.

Wreck by Catherine Newman

A perfect novel — I inhaled this book. Catherine Newman is one of those authors whose voice is so singular, I never wanted this book to end. Her three novels have all delighted me, this one the most of the three. Some of the best motherhood writing I’ve encountered, from a stage that still feels far enough away from where I am that missives from it sound like letters from a far away land I know I will find my way to in due time. Yes, please, tell me what it’s like over there! I laughed so much reading this book! True laughing out loud, repeatedly! So lovable, so tender, so truthful, so raw, I could have read 100 more pages so easily.

And, stand out picture books we enjoyed this year as a family:

Ox Cart Man by Donald Hall
The Skull by Jon Klassen
Building Our House by Jonathan Bean
Henry’s Awful Mistake and other Robert Quackenbush treats
There’s a Ghost in This House by Oliver Jeffers
Pizza Day by Melissa Iwai
The Hideout by Susannah Mattiangeli
(there were others, those are just what I remember off the top of my head)

(All the links in this post are affiliate links so I will make a small commission if you buy the book using this link — a great way to support me in a tiny way! but I read almost exclusively library books, so I always recommend first supporting your local library by circulating books!)

I put all the adult books mentioned in this post in a Bookshop list for convenience! Find it here: https://bookshop.org/lists/favorite-books-of-2025-amy-bornman

I’m also on Storygraph if you’d like to see my full recent reading list! I don’t write reviews on there though, those are reserved for my physical “little book book” — I share photos of those little reviews on instagram sometimes.

I always love book recs! Especially if you can tell that we’re into the same things based on the thoughts and rec’s I’ve shared. Leave some in the comments! What are your keepers?

Thanks so much for reading! This newsletter is free, but there are lots of ways to support my work as a self-employed artist and writer!

Buy me a coffee/leave a tip! Here’s my Kofi page!

Share this essay on notes, like and leave a comment, and/or send it to a friend who you think would like it! All of this stuff truly means a lot, and makes it more fun to share writing here for free!

Read my books, Broken Waters, There is a Future, and How To Sew Clothes.

Check out my zines, all written and published during my first year postpartum with my second baby.

I love to hear from you! Leave a comment to share a thought, or send me an email in reply to this one!

to keepers!

Amy

Writing exists at the center of my heart and at the periphery of my career. That might sound strange coming from someone with three books — but I have never felt the kind of legitimacy in my writing career that I have painted onto others I admire. Does it ever feel real? Maybe at some point in history it did, back in the golden age when journalists made six figures and the average writer was making a living by just writing. I have quite a few jobs, and writing is barely one of them. As I’ve said before, writing books feels more like a very emotional and time-consuming hobby than it feels like a job — and I think that’s entirely the fault of culture + industry versus any sort of inscription of value (but that’s a conversation for another time). I hate to sound disillusioned, but that’s where I’ve found myself. My second poetry book especially felt so raw and tender to share, and it was so quietly received. I did all of the publicity myself, and felt like I did it badly. I did everything I could think of to do, which still didn’t feel like enough. I am so proud of that book. I know people have read and cherished it, but little of that feedback has found its way back to me. That’s ok. But as I try to keep writing and (hopefully) publishing books, I’d be lying if I said that that experience didn’t affect my confidence. You think you’ll feel a certain way when your book comes out. When it doesn’t feel that way, something I can honestly only relate to postpartum depression sets in. For me, that meant shaking off almost all of my ideas of having a “career” in writing, and simply carrying on, writing and shaping that writing into books because I love to do it. It meant making zines, to control the means of production. It meant investing in other career paths. It meant continuing to write what I love to write because I love to write. It meant un-tethering my worth as a writer from my career as a writer, letting those two paths go in very different directions. So much unknowing. So much release.

But, when I found myself with a full book’s worth of poems again that I love (as discussed in part one of this essay), I felt surprised by how deeply and truly I wanted it to become a book, and not just a book but a book. I looked at the book and could see it was beautiful. This is the one, I felt myself thinking, bewildered. Unleash the floodgates of unfettered desire and ambition! I wanted a bigger publisher this time. I wanted more money. I wanted HELP. I wanted a different experience, and I didn’t want to self-publish (despite my satisfaction and success publishing zines). All of those things together felt like a scary thing to want. It’s something I sent out into the universe as a little cry, like throwing an imaginary net. You can’t know which calls of the heart will get a response, but you call out anyway!

My response was a surprise dm. I shared a poem on Instagram about excercise of all things, tagging the movement instructor ( , you truly rock), who re-shared it to her followers. A few hours later, I got a dm from a literary agent, a fellow Range devotee. A magic door swung open. I had a contact, I had a chance. That felt truly huge. I couldn’t believe that happened! But I wasn’t through the door yet. I had to finish the book. And I had to not freak out and fumble the ball. Both of those felt like big tasks. I left this early exchange with the literary agent and her colleague with some big questions answered, an open invitation to send a manuscript when I had one, and a huge handful of glistening hope.

And then I just…kept writing. Nothing to do but the work! I gathered all the poems I’d written in 4.5 years. I shaped them into a book (outlined in part one). After compiling the manuscript, I sent it to two of my best friends and most trusted writing companions, and . If there is any advice I can give to anyone who wants to write and publish books in any capacity, it is to find friends who will read your work and give their honest opinion. Friends whose taste you trust, friends who won’t bullshit you, friends who are excellent editors, friends who know and love you and understand where you’re coming from and where you hope to go. I don’t know where you find friends like that (thank goodness I found mine in our college theater ensemble, which is not an easily repeatable equation!) but it is important that you find them somewhere!!! The feedback they gave me was SO valuable. It is hard (maybe impossible) to productively edit your own work, especially when that work is so close to the bone. My friends’ feedback helped me cut poems, helped me re-order poems, helped me figure out how to make the book feel like something cohesive and deliberate. Their feedback also helped me feel like the book wasn’t horrible — like it was worth moving forward with. That is a huge gift, one that I will never take for granted.

Then I felt a little frozen. I knew the manuscript was ready, or at least mostly ready. I read it half a dozen more times. I cut a few more poems, edited the author’s note. I revised a few poems that felt clunky, switched a few things around. All of this felt productive, but ultimately not that meaningful. It was time to just exhale and take the next step. A huge moment of truth. I sent the manuscript to the agent in a burst of bravado while I was in the waiting room at the ophthalmologist, feeling somewhat manic and terrified. Sending that email felt like ripping a bandaid off or jumping into a cold lake. I was holding the very real possibility that they would say “no.” This was the most fear I have ever felt as a writer — because I knew that that “no” was very possible, and that given everything, it truly might mean giving up. The idea of pursuing small presses again or self-publishing, or really any version of trying to make this book become a book without an agent, felt like something I didn’t have the resilience to do at this point in my career. In so many ways, sending that email felt like my one and only shot. I had no way of predicting what they might say.

And then I waited for a month. Waiting felt quiet and calm. I understood that it was out of my control, that I couldn’t influence their decision. When my book would float to the top of my mind I would feel a soft jolt of panic, and then I could let it go. It will be what it will be. I cannot force this to happen. I did my best work. I wrote the book that was in me to write. I love this book so much. It will speak for itself. Maybe it’s for the world. Maybe it’s just for me. I’ll be ok either way, I’ll be ok either way. Repeat that again and again.

And then I got an email back, asking to talk next steps with me. My agents (!!!) loved the book, and we are going to start working on some developmental edits soon. HOPE! HOPE HOPE HOPE! And the first time in a long time my career as a writer, as a poet, has felt like something truly real! I did a happy dance after that meeting and called my husband and my writing friends, gushing with joy. That magic door stayed open, and I stepped so tenderly through. (A + C, if you’re reading this, I’m so excited and grateful!)

Oh, my friends. I don’t know what to say except that I’m so happy and still scared. Obviously representation doesn’t mean the book will definitely be published by a major imprint — but it does make it feel much more like a real possibility worth working toward rather than a distant pipe dream. And, if nothing else, it is a very meaningful vote of confidence in a moment where my future as a writer was feeling so very uncertain. Is it uncool to share about all of this? Should I wait and coyly just post the Publisher’s Marketplace announcement when and if the time comes like everyone else does? It almost feels like sharing news about a pregnancy just after taking the test — so tender, so hopeful, no guarantees. But talking about the strange and winding road of book publication feels important to me — there is no reason why it should be such a black box! There is no reason to keep our careers and their twists and turns a secret. I know a lot of writers, and especially mother-writers, follow me, and I think I just want to re-affirm that this is all possible. My book is about motherhood, it is sentimental and emotional and written from life — and it really might become a real book! This is a dream that is worth dreaming, even if it feels far away! A lot can change in a few months in unexpected ways. I wish I could offer a quick how-to, but that’s now how this works. I think, unfortunately, it has to be a labyrinth, with something unexpected around every turn. All you can do is keep walking the path.

For some reason, writing about all of this almost feels taboo. Like I might get in trouble (???) for talking about how it all has happened and how it has felt. I wonder why — I think for some reason many writers (including myself!) have the impulse to keep all the business and publishing stuff a secret, as if discussing it will make it all fall apart. Is that true? I don’t want to keep everything a secret! Writing is hard, and it is often very lonely. Writing has mostly been work I’ve done alone, without much guidance. I have my friends, whose companionship has meant so much to me. I have had editors in the publishing process, but those relationships have felt limited to the project. I have been so lucky and it has still been hard. For the first time, I feel like I don’t have to carve every path out all by myself. In our meeting, I was joking with my agents that they are book doulas or book midwives, and I think the comparison really tracks. You could give birth by yourself, but do you really want to? Wise support is always a positive thing. I could maybe get this book to some sort of publication myself, but do I want to? No, I don’t. I actually really don’t. I want help! I want to do something different! I want more brains that just my own! I want professional advice, a sounding board, and gentle course correction! I want this book to beget more books. I want to find my way onto different roads I don’t have access to myself. I want expertise! And, after ten years of writing and sharing that writing diligently and in solitude, on the brink of some kind of exhaustion, that help is beckoning me onward. Ok! Let’s keep going! More is possible!

If I hadn’t gotten that Instagram dm from my agent a year ago, I really don’t know what I would have done with this manuscript. That’s the part that’s hard to communicate, and the grain of salt I really want to communicate along with this essay that might sound like someone bragging about their wild luck. I say that because my whole career (or lack thereof) up until just now was spent without an agent’s email in my inbox. That was a huge threshold to cross, and it doesn’t make the part of my career before this any less real — it was just different. And, in many ways, harder, or lonelier, more confusing. If you are out there writing books that you are so proud of all on your own with very little help, just know that you are not alone in that (even though you feel alone). What you are doing is hard and amazing. I wish help for you too! I wish I’d had more help navigating my first two poetry book deals, I wish I’d had the access and support then that my agents will be able to offer to me and my book now. But I didn’t. And I kept working anyway. And I wrote some beautiful books that were published with lovely small presses, and all of that felt so lucky too. And I am so proud of all of that work that I did with so little help and such murky paths forward. So I don’t know if this is encouraging or discouraging to hear, but all you can do is keep writing and keep sharing that writing in whatever way makes sense to you. Do it if you love to do it. Step back when you need to. I hope for magic doors in just the nick of time for you too. I hope you can write what you love to write, and I hope it can find its way exactly where it needs to go.

Thanks so much for reading! This newsletter is free, but there are lots of ways to support my work as a self-employed artist and writer!

Buy me a coffee/leave a tip! Here’s my Kofi page!

Share this essay on notes, like and leave a comment, and/or send it to a friend who you think would like it! All of this stuff truly means a lot, and makes it more fun to share writing here for free!

Read my books, Broken Waters, There is a Future, and How To Sew Clothes.

Check out my zines, all written and published during my first year postpartum with my second baby.

I love to hear from you! Leave a comment to share a thought, or send me an email in reply to this one!

to magic doors!
xoxo,

Amy

So this list is that — the stuff I truly use every day, tried, true, tested. This is my actual stuff, the things I take with me when I travel anywhere, and some of my favorite daily luxuries. It is truly nothing fancy, and that is what feels good about it. The daily things are the best things, after all. Was it Annie Dillard who said, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives”?

Ok, here are all my favorite things!

Babaa Cardigan (my actual one is blue wool, this is the same style in cotton! Babaa sweaters are admittedly expensive, but they are extremely worth the price. I have bought all three of mine secondhand — there are many out there! They will be in my closet forever!)

Hair Milk (this came in the incredible Liberty Advent Calendar my husband got me last year, and besides a perfume is my favorite new discovery. I love the way it smells and makes my hair feel!)

Classic Baseball Cap (a daily accessory for me anytime I leave the house. I have a few that I rotate. I don’t own this exact one — but this color is what I would want to add to my collection!)

Everyday Earrings (I never take these earrings out. They are comfortable because they create a full loop behind the ear, and they still look brand new in spite of the fact that I wear them literally 24/7!)

Cut Flower Seeds (it took me so long to start a garden, and now I will grow flowers until the day I die! Seeds make a great gift!)

Airpods (truly a ride-or-die tool for me, listening to an audiobook while my kids run around at the park or while I do dishes is a lifeline for my mind)

Laser Printer (listen, this printer works, it is quick, it is cheap to run, and it makes things from your computer become REAL! make a zine! once you try it you’ll be hooked!)

Kaweco Sport Fountain Pen (I love the size, weight and feel of these pens, and love even more how they write!)

Midori Notebook (favorite notebook many years running. I usually use the gridded one, but the ruled one is great too and a little more mainstream.)

Aura Frame (we have this in our living room with hundreds of photos loaded onto it, and my kids love to look at it and talk about the pictures every day! the screen is very high quality and the frame is pretty which makes the whole thing look less tech-y)

Book Light (I’ve talked about this book light before, I love it so much. It allows me to read at night in bed next to my sleeping kids. It’s dimmable, rechargeable, and folds up small. Very good book light.)

Excellent Fiction (This is my most recent fave — fiction has become my favorite escape this year. Books will always be my favorite things!)

Sunroom Flyer Club (My favorite little luxury! Every month Sunroom sends a new riso flyer and they are all so beautiful. I have them hanging all over my house and they make me happy every time I see them.)

East Fork Mug (First mug I reach for when it’s time for afternoon tea. It’s big, it’s beautiful, it’s perfect. I contemplate buying a second one, but there’s something special about just having the one and washing it over and over.)

Fanny Pack (I’m a fanny pack mom! It is what it is! I wear it slung over my shoulder, as is the style these days. I was an og baggu fan, so I feel a bit smug about the hype now — been here since the beginning! I have an old leather baggu wallet [this style but oxblood] that is like 14 years old now, and still going so strong!)

Milk Frother (Best milk frother I’ve ever had, used daily for afternoon tea lattes and very, very beloved)

These are the things I love and use. There are others too, of course, but this is the list of today. There is not much else that I need. I wonder what will get added to this list in the future? I’m in the market for a new pair of transitional shoes for medium weather. I don’t quite know what I’m looking for. I could use another bag as well, but again, I don’t quite know what I want. (First place I look for new things is Noisaf Bazaar!) I really have everything I need. All the items listed here are very high-touch in my life, used daily or nearly that often. Neither of these are urgent needs.

I want some nice socks, little wooden tongs, fancy beeswax candles. I will not buy these things for myself. Because of congress’ refusal to extend the ACA enhanced subsidies, our family’s health insurance is doubling from $300/month to $600+/month next year, which will really spread us thin. Everything is so bleak. I’ve honestly never been so anxious about money before, and I know I’m not alone in that feeling. Things aren’t great! So… I’m not buying anything beyond necessities right now. Even putting an extra little treat in my cart at the grocery store feels risky these days. How do we move through the precarity so many of us are feeling, especially during a season that is constantly trying to sell us new stuff we can’t afford?

Looking at this list of things I truly love and use everyday, I feel unbelievably rich. The luxury! The utility! The beauty! I am rich in love, rich in time, and I have everything I need and more. Looking at things that way makes the money worries seem much less important. These lovely things are woven into the fabric of my life, act as “givens” within the drama of my days. Objects matter. The things we touch and use and handle do seep into us, little by little.

A lot of these things I bought initially because someone else I thought was cool had them. That’s great! Influence is important, we are guided by our attachments to others, we seek inspiration everywhere. But it strikes me that over time these things have become my own. This assortment, this collection, it is distinctively Amy, and that makes me feel happy. Finding out way to our own particularity takes trying a lot of things on for size. What fits? What is right? How do you find what you like?

Could I walk into an incredible little shop today and walk away with something I adore? Absolutely. If I had an extra $1000, could I spend it in an afternoon? Easily! But that’s not what I want out of life, not really. I want to move slowly and deliberately. I enjoy limitations and deep time. I want things that travel with me through life. I want a small amount of things I truly use. I want to be very particular, to be distinctly myself. I want to feel good using the things I have. And I want to add new favorite things slowly and surely, when the time is right, not just because it’s that time of the year. It is so overwhelming to think that everything has to be new all the time. What about the old stand-by’s in your life, the things that are distinctly yours? That’s what I want more of, all year long.

What are your favorite things? I truly, truly want to know!

Thanks so much for reading! This newsletter is free, but there are lots of ways to support my work as a self-employed artist and writer!

Buy me a coffee/leave a tip! Here’s my Kofi page!

Share this essay on notes, like and leave a comment, and/or send it to a friend who you think would like it! All of this stuff truly means a lot, and makes it more fun to share writing here for free!

Read my books, Broken Waters, There is a Future, and How To Sew Clothes.

Check out my zines, all written and published during my first year postpartum with my second baby.

I love to hear from you! Leave a comment to share a thought, or send me an email in reply to this one!

raindrops on roses!
xoxo,
Amy

Just a quick note today to invite you to a virtual writing workshop called A Poetics of Birth. I will be facilitating this workshop on Saturday, November 22nd, from 1-4 pm est.

A Poetics of Birth is a virtual writing workshop exploring the birth stories we carry from various poetic angles. This generative workshop will include (optional) story sharing, somatic exercises, generative writing prompts, and the opportunity to share new work with light feedback / workshopping from the cohort. We will seek to generate numerous first drafts of poems or short prose over the course of the workshop.

This writing workshop is open to parents and birth workers, and will focus on lived experiences of labor and birth. It does not matter how recent your birth was — parents and birth workers at any age or stage are welcome. You do not have to be an experienced writer to participate. All are welcome if you are willing to dive in! The only prerequisite is a lived experience of birth either as a parent, a partner or support person, or a birth worker.

Learn more and sign up here

I’m really excited about this workshop — I’ve been planning it very carefully and thinking about this format for years! I can’t wait to offer it for the first time this fall and see how it unfolds outside my brain. I have done a lot of personal writing about birth, and birth appears in much of my published poetry as well (Broken Waters was written throughout my first pregnancy and birth, and I have a new poetry manuscript in the pipeline written throughout my first four years of motherhood). For me, birth is such a generative subject for writing. I feel that birth is an inherently poetic life experience — so intense, so set-apart and special, and yet so ordinary. We remember and mis-remember our births. We remain ourselves inside of birth as our life changes around us. We move past our boundaries, we explore unexplored terrain. We break apart. We endure extremity. We survive! So much there to write. Now, as a birth worker, I am feeling myself wanting to reconsider and re-write birth from a new perspective. Doing this writing in a safe and set-apart group space feels extra exciting to me. We can hold each other’s stories, reflect back what we hear and notice, and allow ourselves to be witnessed in the midst.

I hope to offer this workshop on a rolling basis (possibly quarterly?) — so if you are interested but can’t join this time, know that it will likely pop up again. It is capped at ten seats to ensure that sharing will be possible if desired, so sign up quickly if you are interested. Expect it to be a reflective, gentle, and generative space, almost like a mini-retreat. A special and set-apart way to check in with the birth stories that you carry around inside, and to draw parts of them out with tenderness and care. I’m so excited to see how it feels.

Sign up and learn more here!

Have questions? Leave a comment or send me an email at amybornman@gmail.com. Would love to see you there. Any other writing workshops you’d be interested in participating in with me? I have a lot of ideas and hope this will only be the beginning! Let me know!

More soon,

Amy

Knitting a sweater is a significant undertaking, much bigger than knitting a hat or other smaller project. You can expect to spend something like 20-40 total active hours on a typical sweater, sometimes even more. I might have more success with smaller projects, but the problem is that I find smaller projects less motivating because I feel less excited about the finished object. But apparently I don’t even find sweaters that motivating because this one has been languishing in its project bag for months. I blame motherhood — or really reduced capacity for following through on things that are not absolutely essential to our family’s ongoingness. I used to have much more momentum for all of my personal interests and projects, a much stronger internal engine moving toward completion. That engine is tired now. Still running, but tired.

I have finished two sweaters in my life as a knitter. Both were knit between 2016-2018, a very different moment in my life. In some ways, this was my creative heyday. I was on fire! This was the period when I conceived of and built many of the projects that formed the foundation for the work I continue to do today. I started sewing my own clothes and learning how to draft patterns (leading to , a sewing pattern business). I began writing daily poetry (leading to my first book, There is a Future). I started stepping away from other work pursuits and working for myself, learning how to run a business. I started making art in a real way. I created collaborative projects. I sold my work. And… I was knitting. I felt like a boiling pot almost all the time, simmering a million ideas at once and somehow tackling ALL of them. Looking back at that season, I feel amazed and bewildered — all that energy, all that hope, all that capacity, and I used it all so well.

My first sweater was the Agnes Sweater by Melissa LaBarre. I was extremely influenced by to knit this sweater, I think basically copying exactly a sweater they knit. I was seeking mentors everywhere in that season, looking to kindreds near and far for my next move. I figured if something was fun for Cody it would probably be fun for me too — and I was right. I even bought the yarn at their old shop, Have Company, while we were passing through Ann Arbor on a road trip, which felt really special and significant to me at the time. Knitting that sweater felt revelatory, and I think I did it pretty quickly, in just a few weeks. I wanted to know that I could do it, and then I really wanted to wear the sweater! I wanted to be a person who could knit a sweater, so I became one. I don’t wear that sweater very often anymore, but I know I will keep it forever. It’s an artifact of a very important season of my life.

My second sweater is one that I very much still wear all the time. It actually might be my most worn piece of handmade clothing ever — I’m wearing it right this minute as I write this, and I typically wear it at least once a week if not more. It’s the Cline Sweater by Julie Hoover, and it is perfect in every way. I love it, I cherish it. I should actually probably knit another one. This sweater feels like my greatest success as a knitter. It’s a special thing when a handmade garment or object becomes so deeply a part of your life that you forget that you made it. That’s how this sweater feels. It’s just my favorite sweater — but also I knit every single stitch of it with my own hands, over hours and hours, days and days. I have memories knitting this sweater — visiting Chicago during one of the many “snowpocalypses,” sittting on my friend Margaret’s couch in Berwyn watching cars skid and slide down a big hill, almost gracefully. That day, and so many others, is stitched into this sweater forever. There is something deeply incarnational about knitting, almost even moreso than sewing (beyond quilting perhaps). Handwork does that, or any project that you touch repeatedly over time. Spirit is infused in the physical object, so much that it becomes something different than what it is. I believe that deeply. A handknit garment is more than what it is.

But, ever since those two, I have never finished another sweater. There’s one project I worked really hard on and then abandoned. I still have it down in my studio, half-finished. I think I need to frog it (aka undo all the stitches) and turn the yarn into something else. But I have high hopes about this cardigan I am knitting now. It’s the Traveler’s Cardigan by Ozetta, and it’s simple and lovely and I really want to wear it. I’m very close to being done with the body at this point, which just leaves the sleeves and collar — so it actually feels possible to finish this year if I stay with it. But will I be able to? I wish I could say for sure.

Why all this talk of knitting? Well, because it’s not only about knitting. Any creative person has had the experience of falling deeply into a practice for a time, finding great satisfaction and success, and then gently falling out of practice. We leave these loose strands all the time. I’m thinking of my novel draft. I really thought I was going to hunker down and finish it last year — I wrote about it almost exactly a year ago, here.

A few days ago, I opened the file again for the first time in a year and started reading. I still really love and believe in this project. It’s good! I feel excited by it! So, why didn’t I finish it last year? Or in 2021 when I started it? I could make up a bunch of very real reasons why (parenting! burn out! other work! etc!) — but the truth is that I don’t know. Because there are plenty of things I have seen through and made happen in the past year too, amongst all those constraints. It occurs to me that writing a novel is a lot like knitting a sweater, actually. It’s a long project, with a big messy middle. When you start knitting a sweater or writing a novel, you know that you’re in for a certain level of endurance. Sometimes you are ready to meet the moment and make it happen, and sometimes you aren’t, and there really is no explanation beyond that. The creative life is not simple, nor is it straightforward. Projects simply take the time they take. I feel confident that I will finish the novel and the sweater. But… maybe I won’t. Maybe in five years I’ll find this 2/3rds of a sweater and take a deep breath before undoing every stitch my own hands had made. Maybe in twenty years I’ll read these 50,000 words of my novel and take a deep breath before closing the file and doing what needs to be done. I don’t know what will happen, really. But I believe that I can finish them, and I also feel that I want to. Will that see me through?

Knitting a sweater is risky — you spend all this time and money (yarn is expensive!), and then it is a very real possibility that you won’t love the finished object. That’s a hard thing for me to wrap my mind around. My own two sweaters sort of illustrate that — one is like my ultimate garment, worn all the time, the other feels more like a novelty that I don’t often reach for. I am afraid I won’t love my new sweater — but is that a reason not to finish it? No. It’s just part of the process, that fear. My novel feels the same way. What if I put in all this time and then it isn’t actually good, or no one wants to publish it? What if I show it to an editor and they want me to make HUGE edits. All those fears are real. Are they a reason not to do it? I want to say no, but part of me hesitates. I have limited time, limited energy. Sometimes leaving a project behind is the right thing to do. And, as much as I love my novel, I can’t tell where it falls on that spectrum. There is always risk in creative work.

Looking back at the version of myself who finished two sweaters and started so many other extremely fruitful projects, I can start to feel bad about who I am now — person who starts things but does not finish them. Person who can barely handle the things that need to happen. But I am the same person. I have adapted to a new environment (caregiving, motherhood, etc. ), but I am still the same girl who was that boiling pot. I can feel that energy returning, but differently. There are more pots on the stove now, more things I am responsible for. Literal children, for one. But also just a different weight to life. The stakes are higher. My career is less pliable. I sit here wearing my blue sweater, my favorite, feeling held by my younger self. She made this sweater for me to wear it. I can remember that I have the power within me to make something out of nothing. I can remember that I can finish what I start. I can finish this novel, I can knit this cardigan, it is within me to do. The question is, do I want to?

Today, I say yes — but I know I am a blessedly unreliable narrator when it comes to these things. We will see about tomorrow. All projects I start will be finished or left behind, and that is simply the way of things. They will take the time they take.

Consider — what are your loose strands? Which projects have you set aside for a while? Do you feel like picking them up again? What would it take to finish them — or is that even what you want?

Thanks so much for reading! This newsletter is free, but there are lots of ways to support my work as a self-employed artist and writer!

Buy me a coffee/leave a tip! Here’s my Kofi page!

Share this essay on notes, like and leave a comment, and/or send it to a friend who you think would like it! All of this stuff truly means a lot, and makes it more fun to share writing here for free!

Read my books, Broken Waters, There is a Future, and How To Sew Clothes.

Check out my zines, all written and published during my first year postpartum with my second baby.

Are you a knitter? Drop your favorite sweater pattern in the comments — maybe that will motivate me to finish this one so I can start a new one!

I love to hear from you! Leave a comment to share a thought, or send me an email in reply to this one!

let’s take the time we take!
xoxo,

Amy

The deeper I get into motherhood, the more true treasure I find. The deeper I get, the more I want to truly experience every day I have with my kids. It has incited more true mindfulness in me than anything else in my life. I want to be here. I want to really experience my life with my children. I want to remember. Not all the time, obviously. I get so tired, I get so frustrated, I get so bored. But it is so enchanted, truly, to experience the reciprocity of love between my children and me. To watch them grow. To feel their dependence on me, to meet their needs and know them well. To honor the ways I need them too, and manage that need as an adult. I am so proud of them and I am so proud of myself. I learn every day, and I notice myself growing and changing into a better mom little by little.

I’ve been in a pretty tough spot with my mental health in the past few weeks. It’s anxiety, mostly triggered by instability and fear of the future’s uncertainty. I have felt myself being very affected by some (not even that terrible) financial shifts for our family, some chronic illness flares (probably caused by the stress), and all the…news. I feel my mind searching frantically for some sort of certainty, some handle of control. Every decision feels bad and the future feels scary instead of bright. I want to know if and when we will have another baby so I can make sure we save the money to pay for the birth (we’ve had to pay a 6k deductible on top of premiums for both of our son’s births) and so that I can set myself up to take some kind of maternity leave as a small business owner. Speaking of small business, I want certainty that I will be able to continue making money this way — that I will connect with enough doula clients and that sewing pattern sales will not continue to fall. I want to know if I’ll sell my new poetry book, and if anyone will want to read it. I want to know if I have good ideas, if what I have to offer is helpful and wanted in the world. I want to know if I will be able to continue to balance work with motherhood, if I will be able to deliver on my goals without losing my mind or spending too much time away from my family. I want to know how much our marketplace health care is going to cost next year, and I want to know what to do if becomes unaffordable like I’m afraid it will. I want to know if my husband will get a cost of living raise that actually responds to cost of living increases. I want to know if we still will have some semblance of order and decency in our country! I feel visceral fear about all the uncertainty, while knowing full well that others have so much more to fear. The sorrow and suffering of the world takes it all over the edge — I can hardly even take it in.

I can’t be certain about any of the ticker tape of questions running through my mind, and uncertainty is the secret sauce that typically breaks my own particular brain. So, this translates for me to just a lot of somatic experiences of stress and sadness, and difficulty with executive functioning and staying present especially when I am supposed to be working, being brilliant and producing amazing things. I feel like a leaky faucet or an open wound, so reactive and tender. I want to hide away and cry. What helps? — being with my kids. Holding them, touching them, reading them books, watching them elegantly scooter circles around out local “scooter place.” Dealing with their needs, keeping just busy enough to not really be able to think much beyond the present moment. Being with them, embroiled in the mechanical motion of our family, wrapped in our cocoon — not needing to produce anything but care, not needing to make money, provide or plan ahead, or figure everything out — is the balm. Sometime the stress creeps in, of course, a cold hand on my shoulder. But when I’m with them I have good reason to shake it off and carry on. They need me. They look to me for everything. There is no true stability for any of us, but I can be stable for them. And embodying that stability, coming back to the truth of the moment, which is that we are here right now, together, ultimately helps me feel more steady too.

Parenting is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I think it took me a few years and an exit from the perpetual postpartum survival mode I was stuck in to start to really feel the ways it enriches my life too. I feel so lucky to have so much time with my kids, and I find myself feeling so protective of that time, scheming ways to get more of it, to keep everything in balance without the scales tipping too far in any direction. I feel upset when I think about my oldest starting kindergarten and being away for so many hours of the day, five days a week. I relish my time working alone, and I maintain that having some full days in the week to work makes me a better mom. And I love our home-together days so much — our park visits, our reading time, our grocery shopping trips, hours messing around outside or sprawled on the rug playing hot wheels. I love both. It makes me wish there were a school past preschool that was only three days a week, and that if there was, that we could afford it.

But here I am, in my mind racing ahead again to some uncertain future that doesn’t feel bright — worried about scarcity, worried about lack. What do we have right now? We have, truly, everything. Our little house, our days together, just enough time apart, cozy with one little boy falling asleep holding my hair, the other little boy breathing in and out an arm’s reach away. I do not need to race ahead and figure things out too far past this moment. I am here now, we are all here right now, held together and holding each other today. I keep just telling myself — be here now. There is so much co-regulation in that hair-holding trust my son has in me, the act of holding his body, feeling him breathe, smelling his smell, feeling my whole system relax into that safety and love. Helping him regulate helps me regulate too. Mutuality, and inter-dependence. I can’t stop thinking about how much we depend on each other, how much our time together means to all of us, and to the world around us too. I feel so lucky to still live near my family of origin, and to still be able to depend on my parents, to know they are always there for me, no matter what. And, to be here for them too. That interdependence doesn’t stop when you grow up, it just changes. I feel my nervous system relax knowing they’re nearby, knowing I can call them anytime, knowing I’ll see them soon. I know they feel the same about me.

A family can be a truly powerful force in the world. I am coming to learn that more and more as I experience it as a parent. My work is not separate from my family. My own inner world is not separate from my family. And the solutions to my own internal problems are not separate from my family, either. What I do affects them and what they do affects me — that can bring pain but it can also bring joy and strength. We depend on each other, and that dependence requires a lot of us and offers a lot back in return. Truly healthy and safe families where every member feels free to offer what they have to give are a treasure greater than gold. That’s what I want to provide, to cultivate, and to be a part of — in my own little family and in the great cosmic family that includes all of us. Doesn’t it feel like that cosmic family is really disregulated right now? Everyone isolated, scared, spiralling? We’ve lost that sense of inter-dependence, of mutuality, of care for those that need it bubbling up into interior happiness — that radiating and embodied feeling of safety, which is so much more important than we give it credit for. We don’t only get that safe feeling when others care for us, we get it when we care for others too, when we look around us and see that everything is ok for right now.

Here, hold my hair, be held a while, and hold me too. This is good for all of us. Can we lay our burdens down a little and rest in the moment’s simplicity? The future needs us to be regulated, to be ready to figure the big questions out when they actually need figured out without a spiral of panic, to be able to keep taking care of what needs taken care of. So how can we come back to the present, and savor what is truly good right now? Seeing this bloom in my family, in myself, I feel sure that it’s possible for the world too. If not now, then someday, somehow, in some way. How can we all sink into the truth that inter-dependence, mutuality, and care is the only way? I don’t know. To all the scary questions, the the answer I keep finding — just be here. Just let your baby hold your hair, just hold him till he falls asleep. Just breathe, and hold your baby. Offer love, receive it in return. Tomorrow will be whatever it will be.

Before the family bed, we were siloed into two separate sleep spaces, also out of necessity. I slept with the baby in our bedroom. My husband slept with our 4 year old in his bedroom. I’ve been co-sleeping with the baby since, oh, the four month sleep regression if I’m being 100% honest. It wasn’t until after six months that we figured out the sidecar crib situation, which made me feel a lot better than bedsharing, even with the safe sleep seven followed to the best of my ability. I was a sleep-deprived anxious wreck for about two months there, dealing with my second baby who woke every hour. Our firstborn was a terrible sleeper too, but we still tried to keep him in his own crib in his own room after six months in a bassinet in our room, thinking at some point he would start to sleep better that way. He never did. It got worse and worse. Once he was one and it was “safer” to bedshare, I caved and let him into our bed. He stayed there until Ben was born, then after that my husband was his bedfellow. We all always sleep better near one another, and neither of our kids have ever really successfully slept alone.

I feel funny admitting this to people — mostly because I am so happy. I literally feel warm rush of oxytocin just thinking about how happy it makes me to wake up next to my children, to have them at arms-length all night long. I couldn’t have anticipated that I would love this so much before I had children, much like I couldn’t really anticipate much of anything about how motherhood actually feels in practice. I had so many ideas about what was normal or right or successful. I had no lived experience. And lived experience has led me straight to snuggling my kids all night, with crystal clear clarity that it feels exactly right for us.

Still, it’s not something I would tell others they ought to do. Sleep is really complicated, and essential for health. There is truly no one right way, I feel really clear on that. Everyone is different! I don’t know what is right for you. I don’t know even what’s right for me until I walk right into it, until I’m laying in bed feeling safe. I feel my way into the best things in my life. I follow my intuition, often with my mind kind of straggling behind. I fell in love with my husband that way, found my way into vocations that way, wrote books that way, and now I can see that it’s how I parent too. It makes me very picky — I simply won’t do things that don’t feel right, even if they sound right on paper. Or I do things that don’t feel right and am very miserable and confused for a while. Then, when I find my way to the next right thing, it makes me a very certain person. Yes, this must be the place.

If you’re on the same parenting substack algorithm as me, you’ve been seeing the “discourse” about biological norms for parents and babies, children’s rights, feeding choices, childcare choices, sleep, etc. I’ve been following the conversations somewhat closely, feeling like I’m watching a tennis match, not sure who I’m rooting for or if I’m rooting for anyone at all. My own parenting choices have aligned very closely with one side of the argument, but my awareness still wants to hold space for other paths. This has all coincided with birth doula training — with an organization that specifically seeks to hold space for many different choices and experiences of birth. With that lens, I have listened intently to the cacophony, hearing the raw good intent behind everyone’s argument. How can two things be true at once?

In any ideological debate like this, I think I always crave experience. How did it feel to choose one thing, and how did it feel to do what you chose? What made you choose what you did? What would it have cost to make a different choice? Choices become experiences, and experiences become stories. We weave our family stories ourselves, with choice as the raw wool being spun into the yarn of experience, each family member’s experiences crossed together, the warp and weft of life together. It is not simple! And it’s also extremely simple! That’s how I’m feeling after all the quiet thinking about this I’ve been doing in the background. I’ve been asking myself — why did I choose what I chose? What structures in my life allowed me to make those choices? What experiences came from my choices? What story is my family living now?

I was having an argument with my husband about breakfast this morning. It’s an argument in which he is objectively right — he wants our kids to start the day with a hearty and healthy breakfast at the table, and not with the open-ended cuddling and screentime on the couch with food sort of haphazardly offered at some point that I tend to default to when left to my own devices. But — experience. I like cuddling on the couch in the morning, I like watching some cartoons as we ease into the day. I’m ok with half an apple and a cup of milk on the couch as a way-in to a day of eating. It’s so real to be at-odds about this, and I am glad my husband isn’t just letting me single-handedly set the family routine without any feedback. Why is this what I default to? You could call it inner-child stuff (this is how my days started as a child). Or maybe it’s laziness (very possible). Or maybe it’s (insert magical sparkles) intuitive. Either way, It’s interesting to see my instinct there, what I have “felt” my way into, and how it isn’t necessarily the healthiest or “right” choice. I will own that I do not always make perfect choices! Do you? Still, I ask myself, what story are we making in our family? This is a raw and honest question, I really don’t know. I told him, whining in the kitchen — “I don’t want to be strict!,” surprised to hear those words coming out of my mouth, the honesty of them. Is that really how I feel? Or am I copping out of doing the harder better thing? I don’t know yet, and I expect we will land somewhere in the middle and continue to change over time. I can see the benefit of a little more structure and, ahem, nutrition — and can imagine ways to still keep that cozy feeling that means so much to me going. How to add more boundaries without being “strict”?

I do find the children’s rights part of the discourse especially compelling, because I think I’m very sensitive to the vulnerability of children and their need for their caregivers to make mutually-beneficial choices on their behalf. But, that’s the key — mutual benefit. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s true that all parents are willing to put their kids’ needs before their own — but I think it is true most families find themselves with too much weight on either side. Choices are either made too much with the kids needs in mind, or too much with the parent’s. Of course it’s not good when a kid’s most vital needs are outweighed by a parent’s (especially because kids are in so little control over their life conditions and have few tools to change things in their lives). But, a parent’s self-erasure also benefits no one. I’ve been becoming more and more aware of how very much self-esteem plays into my parenting choices, and how much it benefits my kids for me to feel good about myself and to have space within my life to be myself. I want to be as tender to myself as I am to them. I think that’s where feeling my way into big parenting choices has come into play. I lived self-sacrificially for a while, and it felt bad. Getting up six or seven times a night to go take care of my firstborn when he slept in a different room because that’s what I thought I was supposed to do, yeah that was bad for me. I honestly think it was as bad for him as it was for me — he slept so much better in our bed, hardly ever crying, only waking long enough to nurse a little and then go right back to sleep. When I think about how relieved he must have been to be near me at night, I could weep. It wasn’t working for either of us! And sleeping together worked so well for both of us. That’s where true attunement lies between child and parent — where it’s so clear that we are both feeling good in what I have chosen on his behalf. Mutual benefit. It’s my responsibility to get both of us there. And that’s something I take very seriously as a parent. It’s on me and my husband to make choices that work for all of us. And that isn’t easy to do.

We have internal guard rails for these things though. We all know how it feels to be caught in a choice that feels wrong. And our kids will certainly let us know, when they are able or feel safe to. Sometimes it is possible to make a different choice! It historically takes a long time for me to change, but I am always proud when I do it! But sometimes we are bound by circumstance, by life’s rough realness, by money or time or freedom or whatever. None of this is ever all or nothing, and we can always make amends. But I think one of my goals as a parent is to always seek that magical middle ground of mutual benefit — the choice that tends to everyone’s needs, if not perfectly then well enough. No, I don’t want to be “strict.” I think what I mean by that, as I unpack it more, is that I don’t really feel good about forcing my will upon my children, even if it’s “right.” I want them to want to comply. I want us to build our world together. If they want to sleep beside me, I want them to feel free to ask me for that. And I want to feel free to say “no,” when I need to. I want us all to have a say in what our lives feel like, on the experiences we are weaving together into our family stories. All my yarn, all of yours. This feels more and more pressing as my oldest gets older, as he asks for new and different things, as he tests all our boundaries more and more. How can I help build intrinsic motivation in him to be a part of our family’s story? How can I keep him close while also setting him free? How can I help him feel safe to choose the things that are in his power to choose?

All that to say, I am cherishing this time in our family bed, all cuddled up together. I can feel the true-ness, the rightness, deep in my bones. This is right for us, for who all four of us are as people and what we need right now. Will it need to change at some point? Almost certainly. We will feel the shift when we get there. But this morning I woke up so happy to be right where I needed to be.

There’s only one way in and one way out. This is a pretty simple labyrinth, you can trace the path through the labyrinth right now on your computer screen if you’d like, I’ll give you a moment. Once you reach the center, the only thing to do is to turn around and find your way out. You can’t get lost, it isn’t a maze. There are no wrong turns. There is only forward. There is only keep going. There is only through and through and through. Now we see why this metaphor could be captivating. Now we understand where we are.

I have always liked labyrinths. My first encounter was a “prayer labyrinth” — a religious retreat center I went to as a teen and have returned to as an adult has one made out of stone up on a big hill down a trail through the woods. It’s stunning, honestly, to arrive on the hill and find this invitation. Here, take a walk to nowhere. Here, just keep going. Walking that labyrinth at different points in my life, I have felt my mind settle. If not prayer, certainly meditation. Do nothing extra.

This is a bad picture of it that I took at some point, where you can’t see the view down the hill at all, and it looks kind of unkempt. It’s nicer in person. Or maybe it isn’t, maybe it’s only beautiful in my memory. No matter what, there’s a clear affinity. I love labyrinths, and labyrinths keep finding me. There’s one at a school near my brother-in-law and sister-in-law’s house in Lancaster that surprised and delighted me one visit. And I remember feeling startled to find a cement labyrinth tucked in the side yard of a church near our old house in the city. It was overgrown and seemed seldom used, but I used it. Not that often, but I knew it was there for me if I needed it. There’s probably a labyrinth not too far from where you live too — they’re tucked away all over the world, some ancient, some new. Honestly now I am feeling like maybe I would like to build a labyrinth in my own backyard out of bricks dug down into the grass. (Crazier things have been done!!!) It moves me because it resonates. The only way out is through. You just keep moving.

My family has been going through an unfolding crisis for the past month (we’re all ok, but it is an intense time), and we can all feel the way the country is in crisis too. It’s exhausting, wading through stress and grief and uncertainty, your own or someone else’s. Sometimes I want to just sit down, stop moving. But what then? — you get nowhere, you learn nothing, you see only the walls on either side of you, the corridor behind, the path ahead. No trapdoors, no ladders out of here. Just forward. Just through.

Writing is always labyrinthine too, at least it feels that way to me. Staggering forward, stacking words on words as if I’m building the floor beneath me as I walk. The blind turns, the way you move further from the center before reaching the heart, retracing your steps to get out. Big projects especially feel this way, but poems too. Each poem is a little labyrinth. What is really in the middle? How do I get there? What strange loops, what gates to cross, what molten core? You are always different when you emerge when you were when you entered. That forward momentum. If you stop in a random hall, what’s when you’re bound to get turned around. So you don’t stop. Writing has always worked best for me if I don’t know where I am going, if I just keep moving, if I let the center surprise me, if I feel my way through.

In the doula training, the labyrinth is meant as a sort of “map” for birth — there is no straight line, only twists and turns. You will feel a little lost on your way to the center, just keep breathing keep walking keep moving until you meet your baby. I find this super helpful — but it goes beyond birth too. Once you reach the center (birth!), you have to make your way back out again, and you will be different once you do. What does it mean to emerge from the labyrinth? Do we ever really? Is life just a series of nested labyrinths, where you exit one only to enter another that is bigger and weirder soon after? Postpartum is a wilder and darker labyrinth than birth, and matrescence is even wider yet. It can all map onto this tool. And I have felt that in my life, vividly.

I remember carrying Tommy around his room in the dark to get him back to sleep when he was probably something like four months old. I did this every night for a year — but one night in particular, I felt myself walking as in a labyrinth. It was like I could suddenly see the path beneath my feet, the set pattern. My steps stretched into loops. I felt my breath change into a rhythm, my feet taking slightly different strides. I will never forget that feeling, the understanding that this was the labyrinth, my life in the nighttime carrying my child, awake when I didn’t want to be. All my questions in my mind — how long? why? what space for me? who will I be? — rushing out ahead of me and dissolving into echoes against brick walls. No way to find out except to keep walking. The night offered me the answers. When the child wakes, you wake, you go to him, you lay him back down, you lay back down too, again and again in every strange twist and turn until something changes and everything shifts again. Each hallway some new trial to endure, so you endure it. And that is life!

Now I see that all of parenthood will be a labyrinth. That childhood was one as well. Adolescence, coming of age. Marriage, vocation, growing older. That it’s the great joy of our life, the great truth, that it is impossible to get lost — and that maybe the only true error would be to give up. All of life is layers of labyrinths I feel my feet tracing — my own familiar stride. I can be with myself in the labyrinth. I can honor my exhaustion, my confusion, my confidence. I can walk with someone else for a while, I can come alongside (that feels like the goal of the doula practice I am moving towards, walking-with). I can stand still for a little while before setting off again. I can touch the walls. I can weep, I can shout, I can laugh. Little windows. Little gates. Little doors. We just move through. It is stunningly simple, and really deeply encouraging if I let it be. I don’t know what will happen. Life is long and strange. But I just have to keep moving, and see what I come upon next. The garden has grown taller, my kids are taller just around the next bend. I become more resilient the longer I walk. I spend time with myself, I enjoy my own company. No wrong turn to get here, no wrong turn ahead, just the endless corridor of now, the gentle bend toward what’s next. That’s where I am in this moment. Hearing my footsteps on stone. Forward, forward.

flowers from the garden / berries from the berry patch

And now, just a few special things I’ve liked recently:

to listen: Ann Annie is one of my favorite music-without-words composers (which has been probably my most-listened to music category recently), and she’s coming out with a new album in October that I’m really looking forward to. I’ve been listening to the singles she’s released on repeat. (Bandcamp / Spotify)

to read:

I Who Have Never Known Men — This book kind of steamrolled me, but in a good way. It’s DARK, and HEAVY, but the narrator is so fascinatingly compelling, I would follow her to any dystopian existence. I’ll think about this book for a long time.

Ordinary Love — I don’t read a lot of romance, but this book HOOKED me. Felt refreshing to read a book that centers a bi character, the sex is very sexy, and it all felt real. This is a very literary-fiction-y romance, which is really my only way in, so this was a nice treat. The yearning!!!

to absorb:

shared this poem on Instagram yesterday just after Fanny Howe’s death and now I want to read ALL of her poetry. This is exactly it.

to pod:

What We Spend is my new favorite podcast. I love hearing how people think about and spend money (it really helps me break out of my own patterns and internal echo chamber) and I love the way thinking about money breaks through into such deeper things almost all of the time. The way we spend our money is the way we spend our lives?!? (Love to bastardize Annie Dillard, lol). Have found this pod to be very thoughtful and tender and good. Big recommend!

Thanks so much for reading! This newsletter is free, but there are lots of ways to support my work as a self-employed artist and writer!

Buy me a coffee/leave a tip! Here’s my Kofi page!

Share this essay on notes, like and leave a comment, and/or send it to a friend who you think would like it! All of this stuff truly means a lot, and makes it more fun to share writing here for free!

Read my books, Broken Waters, There is a Future, and How To Sew Clothes.

Check out my zines, all written and published during my first year postpartum with my second baby.

I love to hear from you! Leave a comment to share a thought, or send me an email in reply to this one!

no wrong turns, just forward!
xoxo,

Amy

Ben is almost two. He was still nursing to sleep and throughout the night, which we were both comfortable with. I probably wouldn’t have weaned for a while longer, and it would have been very gradual if I had my choice. But, I didn’t have a choice, and he didn’t either. He was sad, but not as sad as I was. Weaning is a hormonally significant experience in the body, a kind of crash. I braced myself for impact. I’m still bracing — a sudden stop takes a while to resolve, both physically and emotionally.

There’s more to the story, more to unwind and unfurl — which is why I made a new zine. A weaning zine. The first of its kind? Who knows. I started writing the essay that became the zine thinking I might post it here on substack, but I quickly swerved toward publication, furiously shaping it into a manuscript and then a publication over the course of a single day. Deep focus, determination. Satisfaction!

(Buy the zine here! — more details at the end of this essay)

For a while now I have turned to zines as the preferred way to publish some of my most tender writing about motherhood. Weaning is vulnerable! I feel vulnerable within it! I felt that some extra care needed to be taken with how to share this writing, and so much of my other most vulnerable writing has felt the same. After my second baby’s birth, I challenged myself to spent a year publishing six new zines for a series called “A Year Postpartum.” I wanted to document this time in our lives in some durable and meaningful way, and I wanted to do that in a way that fit within my life as caregiver to two small children and small business owner on maternity leave. A way that felt like a safe place to put my tender ongoing feelings about a tender time.

I could have tucked all that writing (some of my best, I feel!) away for some kind of book proposal to try to pitch to editors (possibly never to see the light of day). I could have published in here on substack either for free or behind a paywall. But, neither of those options felt satisfying to me. I wanted more than something that only exists on the internet, and I wanted more even than a traditionally published book that would take years to come to fruition, most likely to ultimately let me down due to all sorts of things that are out of my control. No, I wanted to turn my writing from this tender time into little books myself, in my own timing, on my own terms. I wanted, for lack of a better phrase, to own the means of production! I wanted immediacy, I wanted control, I wanted elegance, stack of folded paper. I wanted to feel my words and my labor, hold them in my hands. I wanted something more personal than a book or a blog post. I wanted zines, beautiful ones. So that’s what I made!

I called that publishing project Imaginary Lake. Then, after that first year of making zines, I took an indefinite break. I wasn’t sure when I would publish a zine again. Next pregnancy? Some other milestone? I was waiting for the right feeling to arise. Turns out weaning broke the dry spell — that makes perfect sense! These huge shifts need particular containers! No ordinary substack post, no languishing manuscript.

Since even before I became a mom, I’ve been a bit obsessed with the ever shifting literary tradition of writing about motherhood. I read just about every published book that engages motherhood that I can get my hands on, and I have also been a devoted reader of a handful of very beautifully written “mom blogs” (that very much surpass the diminutive connotation that comes with the word “blog.”) It means a lot to me to contribute in my own way to this literature of motherhood according to my circumstance and capacity. But how? I’d place one of my traditionally published books in that category (and hope there will be more when the time is right) — but I feel so excited about the way that zines can contribute to a greater literary tradition too.

Zines feel like magical objects to me. The small collection of zines I have, made by friends and artists I admire, feels more precious to me than my collection of books — probably because they are handmade, because they are that much more personal, and distinctive. I keep my collection in a particular wicker basket along with other special paper memorabilia, and I love pulling it out and touching each zine. If my house was on fire, I’d leave my books and grab this basket. Zines are irreplaceable, ephemeral and enduring, both at once. You can often read a zine in a single sitting, take it all in in one long sip. You hold a zine in your hands, it is a real and tangible thing.

I want to leave a paper trail. My writing about that precious postpartum year, this zine about weaning, it means so much to me that it will exist on someone’s shelf, in someone else’s wicker basket. Something to read, share, hang onto, give as a gift. A precious object. Possibly even an heirloom? These are heirloom words! I want them to survive after me, proceed beyond me, on terms I define, printed on paper I have touched and folded myself. I think a lot about Emily Dickinson sending handwritten poem drafts to her friends in the mail along with an oak leaf or pressed flower. Zines feel so much like that to me. Something very precious, sent away in good faith, for safekeeping. There are and have been lots of reasons to distribute zines — can we add expanding literary tradition to the list?

Zine-making seems to be growing right now, surely in response to the only increasing disembodiment of the internet’s ubiquity, and even the encroachment of A.I. Zines are deeply human, defined by the limitations of super small scale publishing, the limitations of people who are real people! Who are not robots, who are not corporations, who are not marketers, who are not trying to go viral or become a bestseller. I have come to love and befriend my limitations. My own life’s particularities. They make me who I am. Motherhood is rife with limitations! What works for me may not work for you or anyone else, and that’s what’s so special about figuring out what to do with the things that are in you to make! But, I can see the impulse to publish things by yourself and often for yourself spreading. I recently shared a post about turning my personal google doc diary into a zine that’s just for me — that’s my most read and shared post on substack EVER! (I embedded it below this paragraph!) We, who are now citizens of the internet whether we want to be or not, long for tangibility, things we can hold in our hands. Maybe that’s print books. Maybe it’s printed out pages. (I saw a picture on notes of someone who printed out a bunch of substack newsletters and took them to the park to read on paper! I’m, frankly, obsessed with that!) And, maybe it’s zines!

My writing about these hugely tender thresholds I’ve found in motherhood feels too precious to only exist on the internet. I write about these things for myself — safekeeping for my memories, in the form that appeals to me. But I want to offer the writing up and let it exist in the world — on my shelf, my friend’s, a strangers. Reading literature about motherhood has been a critical part of my own matrescence. I was just thinking about this anew as I read The Wilderness by Aysegul Savas, a book length essay about the first forty days after birth. I could read this story endlessly, I found myself thinking as I drank in this exquisite and strange little book. In literature, I want to hear endless birth stories, endless postpartum stories, endless weaning stories, as many as people are willing to labor over and, offer up, and thoughtfully, publish. If a zine can make that happen, then that zine is magical. For the motherhood-writing literary genre to continue to grow in legitimacy and nuance, for it to be inclusive of established writers and those who are not consistently welcomed by traditional publishing but still have rigorous work to share, we need to welcome mothers to contribute real writing from within the experience, whatever form that takes. Blogs, substacks, zines, and books. We need to write them, and then get them to readers. We need motherhood to be read, and to see our experiences reflected back to us in the literature that is celebrated. That can only happen if we write it and share it, even if that means publishing it ourselves. I may be idealistic about all of this, actually I’m sure that I am. But I think idealism is how most books are made, really.

It has meant so much to me to make zines and send them to readers, knowing they will be read, cherished, and carried into the future. My own strange literature, firmly within the tradition if you look at the long story of people writing and sharing writing. Folded paper, an oak leaf, read and then tucked into your special wicker basket, forever.

Want to read the zine? It’s called New Feast. There’s a limited edition print version that I’ll send to you in the mail, or a downloadable version that includes a digital pdf to read on a screen and a printable file so you can print and fold the zine yourself at home.

Buy the Print Zine

Buy the Download

The print zine is $8, and the download is $5 — think of it like a more cozy paywall! Where you get a thing! I have very mixed feelings about exchanging money for writing — as someone with an extremely small amount of disposable income I really can’t afford to pay for very many subcription-based newsletters or even a surplus of books. That’s why this newsletter is free and will probably remain that way. But zines cost money to produce, and the labor of producing zines feels more significant than sending occasional essays via email. Still, I want these words to be read and kept and enjoyed, and I know times are financially weird for almost all of us, so I also want to offer a third option! If you can’t afford $8 or $5, just send me an email (amybornman@gmail.com), and I’ll be happy to send you a zine or the download for the price of the stamp or whatever you’d like to pay, free included! No questions asked! The zine economy has plenty of wiggle room for abundance. Zines for everyone! Especially weaning zines!

I also wrote about weaning my older son years ago on Substack — if you’d like to read that essay it’s here!

Buy me a coffee/leave a tip! Here’s my Kofi page!

Share this essay on notes, like and leave a comment, and/or send it to a friend who you think would like it! All of this stuff truly means a lot, and makes it more fun to share writing here for free!

Read my books, Broken Waters, There is a Future, and How To Sew Clothes.

Check out my other zines, all written and published during my first year postpartum with my second baby.

I love to hear from you! Leave a comment to share a thought, or send me an email in reply to this one!

in zines and weans!
xoxo,

Amy

I wrote a small poem this morning, feeling a little morose. “no poem except pile of blankets,” I guess it could be called. Or maybe “vast pastures.” Maybe it doesn’t need a name. But I think I’m circling around that “no-man’s-land” or storylessness. “no right choice. no wrong one either.”

I recently thought I might be (accidentally) pregnant because my period was over seven days late. And then my period came. Oh, strange threshold I stood in for a few days there, waiting, taking a negative pregnancy test, wondering if I should test again. Sure but not sure. “oatmeal, cereal, two boys on the trampoline.” We want more children, but not quite yet. I am spending some time recalibrating, and trying to focus on work for a time. But, that held breath, imagining both versions of life. Feeling frightened and hopeful at the same time. I really couldn’t tell what I wanted. Why did it almost feel like being pregnant again would be easier than not being pregnant again? That would give me a story, right? I hadn’t realized how much I was relying on the narrative structure of birth and postpartum to carry me along. How much that had become a little enclosure for my selfhood these past few years. Now that I’ve set it aside, even for a little while (one year? maybe two?) I feel sort of adrift.

I have to ask myself, what sweetness have I not uncovered yet? What new story can I allow myself to slip into, even temporarily? This interim between “mom of baby” selves — who is she? I want to go back there, but I want to enjoy not being there too, you know? Be here while I am. Myself, in a not-pregnant, not-postpartum body, a not-pregnant, not-postpartum mind — still exhausted, still fogged over and pressed into, but differently. What to find here? What new rooms in me?

I feel so ambivalent about mother’s day this year. Sometimes I think being a mom is the most interesting thing about me, or maybe I have thought that for the past few years — I don’t think that right now. In the pile of things I am, it is just one of the things. My boys have shaken my life up so much that it feels unrecognizable, but it is still mine. I have so much more love and devotion inside of me than I knew. I give so much of it to them, so happily. But there’s more! What to shower that love on? What to devote myself to? These questions feel pressing. I want to live big, you know? I feel like I’ve been clinging to reading like it might give me a new layer of identity, or maybe sewing, or maybe wearing cool clothes, or writing poems, or whatever — but that’s all just “stuff”. Just that lumber. Without all of the things I do, what do I love? What lights me up? If I build nothing from the lumber of my life, is it still worthy? If I lay down my tools for a while and rest?

I discovered the singer Julie Doiron yesterday, and her songs immediately made sense to me. I texted my friends “I think this is exactly the kind of music I would make if I was a musician.” One song, “The Life of Dreams” is so simple, simply repeating “I’m living the life of dreams, / with good people all around me, / I”m living the life of dreams,” over and over again.

As soon as I heard this song, I just felt joy welling up inside of me. Because I really am living the life of dreams. Good people all around me. So lucky, in so many ways. Maybe it’s because some of the things we have taken for granted for so long feel like they are hanging in the balance right now — I feel crushed by gratefulness these days. Surprised by joy. Life as it is now is good, I hope it remains that way. It won’t always. Bad things happen all the time to people who just want to live their own life of dreams. Bad things will happen to me. But right now, so much good, you know? In all my inscrutability, the good life is mine to build. It’s right here in front of me. Pile of blankets. A mom on mother’s day, awash in strange joy. Life must go on, I have to keep building something — but from today’s inscrutability, I feel like standing and saying that all of this is good just the way it is. I feel like laying my tools down and breathing in and out. The mother at rest, even just momentarily. A feast of joy, not a crumb. Maybe for a while not naming everything, letting some parts of the self remain mysterious and undefined. Mother, and. What about that?

For mother’s day, gotta shout out my zine about motherhood literature! You can buy it in print here. It’s also available as a digital download. I also wrote an essay about motherhood literature last May on Substack — embedded below!

Thanks so much for reading! This newsletter is free, but there are lots of ways to support my work as a self-employed artist and writer!

Buy me a coffee/leave a tip! Here’s my Kofi page!

Share this essay on notes, like and leave a comment, and/or send it to a friend who you think would like it! All of this stuff truly means a lot, and makes it more fun to share writing here for free!

Read my books, Broken Waters, There is a Future, and How To Sew Clothes.

Check out my zines, all written and published during my first year postpartum with my second baby.

I love to hear from you! Leave a comment to share a thought, or send me an email in reply to this one!

happy mother’s day!
xoxo,

Amy

In this power outage of undetermined length, my anxiety is reaching a fever pitch. 70 mph wind. But it’s been building for the past month or so, creeping up my back, slowly wrapping around my head. After months of great sleep, suddenly I’m up at night, worried. Too many uncontrollable threats, too fast and too slow. Too much to remember, to much to consider and plan. Do something? Or nothing? What’s right?

At night, after our little boys are asleep, I read fiction to try to settle my mind — so why have all the novels I’ve gravitated toward recently somehow landed squarely in the midst of cataclysmic catastrophe? My reading has been doing more unsettling than settling, but somehow I feel more comforted running toward the danger than away. I can’t stop thinking about collapse, ecological, financial, and societal, because it terrifies me. Big collapse, small collapse, collapse we imagine in the future, and collapse we’ve already lived or are living through (I’m thinking of covid, which none of us have actually really collectively processed in any meaningful way). Personal collapse (death of a loved one, loss of a home, etc.) and societal collapse (natural disaster, economic recession, political upheaval, war).

The Dust Bowl and the Great Depression’s double disaster a hundred years ago is one palmful of the past in which to rub up against collapse, to try to understand it, to figure out what it does to people and how we can survive it — if we can survive it. I’ve been thinking about the Dust Bowl a lot, reading multiple novels that use that season of America as setting. It made me think about what my prior impressions of the dust bowl were, before this deep dive. Some sort of vague understanding of people suffering, I guess — and then things improving slowly. We’ve all seen Dorothea Lange’s famous photograph, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California — this woman has become an unwitting emblem of something. Resilience? Despair? Both and neither? Now that I’m a mother too, I try not to imagine myself in this woman’s shoes. Too easy to fall down that rabbit hole to a slantwise scary wonderland, but more and more it feels like all of us are kind of wobbling over the edge of some kind of devastating downward slide. I don’t want to linger there in this essay, in fear for the future, but it’s terribly terribly on my mind, and I expect it’s at least somewhat on yours too. I know I’m not alone when I say that I fear more for my children than I fear for myself. That somehow that fear grips me tighter than worry about my own singular fate. It makes me crave details. What really happened, and how? These families, how did they survive?

Last month, I listened to the audiobook of one thick dust bowl novel, Kristin Hannah’s The Four Winds, and I’m so glad I did. Hannah’s novel follows one family who winds up leaving their home farmland as migrants, Grapes of Wrath style. Through this book, I got to fully dive into the “mom protecting children through terrible circumstances” narrative, in a way that was more comforting than I expected. Like watching Lange’s Migrant Mother photograph come to life and tell me every choice she made and why, and feeling it all make sense. What do you choose when you have no choices? Who do you meet along the way? What is awful, what is beautiful? I don’t want to think about what it would be like to live in a shanty town, but I feel like my mind has expanded a little because I allowed my mind to linger there in fiction. I feel a little more sure that we all have what we need inside of us to move through something big and bad, even though it is the last thing we want to do.

Large-scale collapse is a riveting setting for a novel. It equalizes characters, subjects everyone to the same overwhelming sets of challenges, and then the humaness and poetry is able to weave through that over-story. A lot of modern literary fiction is critiqued because “nothing happens” — you can’t say that about a novel set in collapse! The stakes are high, and those high stakes motivate everyone! It’s exciting! And unsettling. Communal fear, communal challenge, communal generosity or cruelty. Difficult weather does not discriminate. I’m working on a more in-depth essay (for one of my favorite publications, Image Journal) about an excellent Dust Bowl novel I read recently called The Antidote by Karen Russell — I’ll just share a single quote from it here because it pertains so much to what I’m thinking about here: “The great consolation of difficult weather is that we live in it together.”

Just before my dust bowl reading spree, I read Julia Armfield’s new novel, Private Rites, which is a family drama very similar to the 2023 film His Three Daughters (a film I loved, btw) but set in a future where the climate devastation is that it pretty much never stops raining — effectively the opposite of the dust bowl but just as horrible. A water bowl, causing global flooding and infrastructure and food system failure, with new solutions unable to keep up. I found this setting to be darkly fascinating (I had never thought about this kind of climate castastrophe!), and I especially loved that at times the book’s perspective jumped from the sisters to the city itself, allowing the collective to “speak” its sorrows.

That’s an imagined future, but we have real cataclysm in our past. I have found historical fiction to be a strange friend in the past few months. I mentioned The Vaster Wilds in the essay I wrote about survival fiction a few weeks ago — any preconceived notion I had or didn’t have about the experience of early colonists was swiftly kicked out from under me and replaced with the sheer scream of this story. The collapse of a new world. The collapse of displacement. The whole time I was reading it, I kept saying to myself, “I had no idea.” And I listened to another Kristian Hannah audiobook before The Four Winds, this one set in the Vietnam War — The Women. There’s really nothing like a very well researched historical novel to vividly show you how little you know of history — or how patchy the story you were told is. Had I ever even learned about the Vietnam War in any meaningful way? Collapse of war, collapse of post traumatic stress. A novel offers the chance to live it, to embody one person’s vivid perspective. It whisked me back to my American Girl doll fanaticism from my childhood. My over-identification with Kit and Samantha and Felicity. And, when I was a little older, the Dear America books. I learned about America through these character’s eyes. In some ways, that’s all I learned about America. History textbooks offer so little to the imagination, and I need all the help I can get.

The past isn’t the only place to confront our fears of collapse, though. Just last night in the midst of the power outage, I finished reading an incredible debut novel by Emma Pattee, Tilt. In this novel, Annie is nine months pregnant with her first baby trying to buy a crib at IKEA when a huge earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. She spends the rest of the novel traveling through the city on foot trying to find her husband in the wreckage, and remembering her life. Oh my gosh, this novel has shocked me — I think because this disaster is so recognizable, and so terribly possible. People have been talking about “the big one” forever. I pray it never happens. But what if it does? To a whole city full of people? Children, adults, pregnant women? This novel GOES THERE, and I feel honestly stunned by it. It sounds horrible, and it honestly kind of is, but it’s written with such care and tenderness that I feel very comfortable recommending it. Here, another inoculation. Annie is a deeply lovable protagonist (at least for me) and this novel felt like a gentle place to wander through wreckage that we are only barely separated from. For now, for now, our lives are so tender, so real. Remember that. I used to think it was dangerous to imagine disasters. Now, I think it’s not only safe but helpful. To imagine the life inside the disaster and, possibly, the life afterward too.

Maybe it’s time for me to read happier novels in which nothing horrifying happens?! Lol, we’ll see where the wind blows me. Stay safe, friends. History is wild and we are inside of it! But maybe not quite yet. I just started reading Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang, which imagines yet another form of climate collapse — this time a pervasive eternal smog crippling the food system. The protagonist is a young chef who longs for all the foods that used to exist. The twist in this book is that the chef escapes to work at none other than a billionaire’s secret mountaintop compound where (surprised) they’ve somehow managed to grow things that are long gone in the rest of the world! Stockpiles of every wonderful food. It seems wonderful, but all the signs are there that it isn’t so simple. The chef escapes collapse, but at what cost? That’s what this book seems to be keen to explore. The consolation of difficult weather is that we live in it together — but what if you don’t? What if you’re suddenly spared, and alone? What then?

You can find all the books I mention in this essay here, on Bookshop!

I wrote about reading survival fiction in February — similar but different. Lol, I really need to find some happy go lucky books! If you only read one book from that list, read The Wall. Seriously, I think it changed my life forever.

Note: Book links are affiliate links, so I’ll make a tiny bit of money if you purchase from links, so that’s a great way to support me in a small way if you choose to buy one of the books I mention!

Thanks so much for reading! This newsletter is free, but there are lots of ways to support my work as a self-employed artist and writer!

Buy me a coffee/leave a tip! Here’s my Kofi page!

Share this essay on notes, like and leave a comment, and/or send it to a friend who you think would like it! All of this stuff truly means a lot, and makes it more fun to share writing here for free!

Read my books, Broken Waters, There is a Future, and How To Sew Clothes.

Check out my zines, all written and published during my first year postpartum with my second baby.

I love to hear from you! Leave a comment to share a thought, or send me an email in reply to this one!

yours in collapse and building what’s new!
amy