It’s hard to know what to say when you’re asked what childbirth is like. There are as many answers to that question as there are women. Perhaps it’s how the poet Fiona Benson describes it, as an act of submission “to my body’s wild stampede”; or her contemporary Hannah Sullivan, whose C-section was “like dying at the hairdresser’s”. Sylvia Plath resonates, with her description of having “boarded a train there’s no getting off”, while Dorothea Lasky (“screaming pain on a Sunday”) and Mina Loy (“I am climbing a distorted mountain of agony”) convey the brutality.
Less poetically, I’d say this: there was a moment when I threatened to jump out of the window. And there was another, specifically when my husband said the words, “it’s our boy”, when I felt the exhilarating distillation of the most whole and perfect joy I have ever felt.
