Three stages of labour. Source
This post was written for the Soaring Twenties Social Club symposium with the theme “preconception”. By now, you might think I'm obsessed with vaginas. But no, I swear these things write themselves! On a regular basis, I do not give mine much thought.
In any case, and speaking of preconception, the biggest mistake I ever made was thinking that I knew what I was up for when giving birth just from attending childbirth classes. Here is a heads up: NOTHING will prepare you for labour. Anyway, here I leave you with this.
A few weeks ago, I watched the replay of a workshop titled “Write Enthralling Narrative Essays Subscribers Will Pay to Read”. With such a title, the 35$ it cost seemed like a small price to pay. So now, I have decided to put it to the test.
I wanted to dissect the lecture as I went along with my narrative because the process of storytelling, as the speaker (Sara Fay) put it, reminded me so much of childbirth that I was inspired.
I have used a brilliant resource I took from
in her story “The Swindler”, which you should all read because it is creepy in a fantastic way. All the pulled quotes in this assay are a transcription of Sarah Fay’s words in the lesson. To clarify my sources.So, let me tell you about a painful episode in my life.
Memoir is a memory. Think of a moment in your life you’d like to write about. Write down the 5 Ws. When was it? where were you? who was there? why? what were you hoping would happen? (…). The protagonist (you) wants something as a result of the first event that occurs
It’s the winter of 2015. I am heavily pregnant. I have read all the books and attended all the birth preparatory classes. I am so ready. My boyfriend hasn’t read anything; he keeps telling me, “I am vigilant”, whatever that means. I just know that the success of this search party depends only on me. What they don’t tell you in the courses is that you’ll want the whole thing to be over the minute you have your first contraction.
“Rising action”- is How you create tension in a story. It is how you keep readers reading. Both the want and the rising action and the tension that occurs as a result of someone wanting something and not being able to get it over and over and over.
You need to feel your body ripping apart from the inside to understand exactly how it feels to have your body ripping apart from the inside. I often picture one of those torture racks where they put a poor wretch, tying him by the hands and feet, and then another poor wretch, less wretched though, turns a crank that pulls the limbs of the first one in the direction of the four cardinal points. But as gruesome as this picture might sound, at least you have a visual of how much your body is allowed to hurt. You see your limbs ripping apart and can think, “Ah! This looks as painful as it is”. Giving birth, you do not see the 4 Kg baby you are trying to push out; your belly is in the way, and unless you have both the energy and the flexibility (at that very moment, you usually have neither), you cannot be a visual witness of the process. C, on the other hand, has decided to locate himself in the first row; he could be taking notes for all I know because, at this very moment, he looks like he is researching how elastic vaginas are. Me? I’m just pushing and crying at the same time. Multitasking is exhausting.
“The climax” or moment of truth is not a battle scene, never. We think it’s this event that happens. It isn’t. The Climax is a predicament. It’s a crisis question; a decision has to be made and action taken. It’s always a choice between two bad things or two good things.
God, I cannot do this anymore. What are my choices? stop pushing or keep at it. Can someone choose not to push? Can someone walk around the earth and spend the rest of her days pregnant? Would I want that? Considering how the last two months were, the pressure in my back, the discomfort in any position and the mental fog that comes with perpetual bad sleep, plus constipation and the haemorrhoids. What is the alternative? A baby? I decide that pushing forward is the only way out of this.
“The falling action” is the darkest moment for the protagonist. All seems lost.
At some point, despite my best efforts, the baby is not budging. I’m desperate. I want my mum. I say to C, “I wish my mum were here”. The midwife is whispering something in Swedish to another nurse, and they call in the gynaecologist and whisper some more. Things start to happen- they put me on my back, the surgical legs onto the bed and now I really am in the torture rack. The gynaecologist makes a cut somewhere; I cannot tell where since my anatomy feels completely out of place. It could be my vagina, it could be my brain, who knows? She introduces a suction device in me, and I scream like never before while she connects the suction cup to the baby’s head and she pulls.
“The resolution”. So, the protagonist “wins” or loses. We have been conditioned by internet writing that is hellbent on takeaways, so we think everything has to have a moral. Everything has to satisfy the reader in this really superficial way. If you want to push yourself to become a narrative writer with nuance, you can win, but it always comes at a cost.
You know the popping sound on the “Lollipop” song by The Chordettes?. This is the only way I can describe the moment of having the head of your baby out of you. The pain disappears like it was never there. I see its face sticking out from my pubic hair and its crumpled nose squashed against its face. I really hope it is a boy because right now it looks like an old man.
“Congratulations! it’s a boy!”
He cries and I breathe out, relieved by many things. The weight of the world is off my shoulders, and it now lies in my arms.
C likes to keep it romantic and says, “Babe, your ‘down there’ is totally devastated”. I laugh, thinking he won’t be getting anywhere close “down there” for a loooong time.
A key to narrative on Substack: Don’t bore readers with the back story. Start in the middle of things.
Once upon a time, I fell in love. And then everything moved fast. We courted in the distance, and after two years of flights, phone calls and romance, the three of us moved in together: C, my biological clock and I. Moving in with your boyfriend to an entirely new country, with new jobs, new culture, and new language with a perpetual tik-tok ringing in your brain is interesting, for lack of a better word.
We need to get me pregnant.
What, now?
Yes.
Don’t you want to see if we get along first?
Dude, I’m almost 35. I am in no position to find out if we get along. I know I like you, and your genetic pool looks pretty neat. Let’s just do this. Worse comes to worse, we share a child.
OK, I guess?
Yeah, that is pretty much how it went when C and I decided to conceive. Practical and to the point. As far as conceptions go, it was as smooth as it gets. The gynaecologist in me was measuring basal temperatures and studying the consistency of my vaginal mucus with the care of a malacologist. Regardless of my anxiety, we hit the jackpot the first time around.
Fuck- murmured C as the line turned red- We didn’t even get to try.
Thank you Bethel. I think none of us knew what we were in for. We took our usual approach. I read everything i could get my hands on. He just went thinking “let’s see what this is about”. We make a good team 😊.
As a man, thank you for describing this process in a way that helped me understand and for C letting me know what not to say.