A Birth Story in Five Acts

My first child was born January 2018. It took me almost a year to tell that birth story in a public sphere.

It's a big story.

It’s so big that I knew I would go through another round of processing before Baby #2 arrived (guess date: October 31). So big that I put off looking at my colleague’s edits and comments on a rough draft for nearly a year. So big that these almost three thousand words still aren’t enough to capture the full dramatic structure.

Well, enough preamble. Onto pre-labor.

Birth and Burning Man

BM Baby by Marco Sanchez.

In 2016, I attended Burning Man, the indescribable annual festival in the Nevada desert. A year and some change later, I birthed a baby. Sitting soft and damp on a couch with a nursling, texting with a burner friend, I realized the two experiences had more in common than I ever would’ve guessed.