Seeking Salvation From Postpartum Anxiety

One month from my due date, gigantic and uncomfortable, I sit in a park with a bunch of other pregnant women and do what we do best: eat. You can tell our character by our snacks — turmeric cookies, nettle tea, high-protein vegan cheeses — if not by our birth plans. One way or another, everyone here is hoping to stay out of the hospital. A local midwife runs the group.

As we’re starting our check-ins, two women arrive whom I’ve not met before. They carry a wooden box filled with homemade donuts. A kerchief adorns the neck of the tiny baby with them — the smallest baby I have ever seen in real life.

As we go around the circle, I learn that the women are sisters. The midwife asks Lydia, mother of the baby, if she’d like to tell her birth story. It’s a kind of ritual we have, the newly anointed mothers conferring their experience unto the yet-to-birth. The circle stirs, collectively sits up straighter; birth stories are perhaps the only thing more interesting to pregnant women than food. Part prophecy, part data point, part annal from the other side, they promise wisdom, answers, information.

“Well,” Lydia says, just a hint of a southern accent in her voice, “it’s certainly a story.”

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