Write Like You’re Giving Birth
January 2, 2017 § 29 Comments
By Sandra A. Miller
“Write from your guts,” I told my creative nonfiction students on the last day of class. “Don’t ignore the pain. Don’t act like it isn’t there and try tiptoeing around it. You have to write your way through your own dark woods.”
I recalled the excruciating experience of back labor when giving birth to my son. His head was positioned against my lower spine as opposed to the normal, on-top-of-the-cervix way, so whenever a contraction came, instead of him pounding down to open said cervix, his head struck my spinal cord, igniting the nerve center in a ripple of unmitigated agony. After twelve hours of useless back labor, I accepted a drug. “Yes-fucking-please.”
Bam! Ka-Pow!
My cervix went into overdrive and, in one hellish, body-wracking hour, blew open to the requisite ten centimeters, which meant it was time to push the baby out.
But instead of pushing, I stopped. I resisted. I clenched at every contraction, stealing myself against the pain that felt like a reckless trucker was driving his semi through my uterus.
“Push into the pain,” the British midwife urged in a high, clipped I know best voice that left no room for compromise. “When it feels the worst, Sandra, that’s when you must push the hardest.” She had Birkenstocks and long gray hair that would have loved a little Miss Clairol. She was kind, smart, and sensible; I wanted to kick her in the face.
“I don’t know what that even means,” I cried between gasps. “How do I push into the pain?” I actually thought that if I argued enough, I could altogether avoid having the baby.
“It means,” she explained, “that when the contraction is at its worst then you must push the hardest. Don’t shirk from the pain.”
I’ll shirk you! I thought as I felt the onset of a killer contraction and longed to rail against it. How to do this? How do you leave your fingers on the burning stove, or step more deeply onto the tack? How does a person embrace her worst fears and invite more? How does she choose a life of writing pain?
“Now!” the midwife, urged. “Push now!”
I shut my eyes and swallowed back my resistance. With my jaw locked, I pushed my hardest—or so I thought—screaming until tears streaked my face. I did that five more times through five more contractions, the pain so unrelenting that I feared I might die. I pushed as if my life depended on it.
When the baby still didn’t come, the midwife, her face betraying alarm as she watched the monitor, reached for a pair of surgical scissors. “We have to get the baby out now!” she announced. No time to numb me, just the sharp snip of raw flesh like an electric shock on my perineum. My child was in danger. His heart rate had plummeted, and, at that point, only I could save him.
And then, my boy.
Write into the pain, I tell my students. Just when you want to write around the Catholic pretense that hides the abuse, or the sight of your mother in a pink bathrobe dead on her bedroom floor, and how that day, for the first time ever, you touched her cheek and forgave everything; just when you want to ignore the acrid taste of blood, the colorless gray of loss, or the married lover whose forbidden lips, if for only a few minutes in the back of his beat-up Honda Civic, answered every prayer you ever whispered from your lonely bed; just when you want to skip a part because it’s too shameful to remember, then you absolutely have to remember it. You have to feel it wracking your body like a baby that will die if you don’t push now. Sit with each scene until it spins through every pain receptor and is ready to pull you down and drag you back and forth through your longest night, again and again and again.
Because I promise you this: if it doesn’t hurt at least a little, you will never birth your best writing.
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Sandra Miller‘s essays, articles, and short stories have appeared in over 100 publications including The Boston Sunday Globe Magazine, Spirituality and Health, and Glamour Magazine which produced a short film called “Wait” based on one of her personal essays. Kerry Washington starred.
Great.. well written and amazingly true.. being a male i don’t have an experience of birthing.. but the essence is very well conveyed to the reader.. when you walk through the hardest pains and fear, that’s when you reach gold.
Thank you for your kind comment.
So, so beautiful. Thank you for this.
Thank you for taking the time to comment.
“You have to feel it wracking your body like a baby that will die if you don’t push now.”
This is how it is. You push, or the word baby dies, of negligence, of inaction. You could be writing, but you aren’t. A good wake-up thought.
Thanks for taking the time to comment.
Writing is a baby—it goes where you go. The power to overcome fear remains long after you have done the work. Writers are nurturers of courage and truth, finding beauty in the various lives that would otherwise appear as one.
Yes, well put. Thanks for reading.
Well, I thought I didn’t want to read this. But it’s what I needed. Thanks.
Thank you!
Just the perfect read before embarking on my next MFA course in creative non fiction which, I will admit, I was a little afraid of because it means ‘going there’. Thank you.
Thank you. Best of luck with the MFA.
Great writing!
Thank you!
Fantastic piece that really resonated with me in so many ways (including the back labor and baby in danger, but also trying to skirt around the pain in writing). Thank you.
Thank you. I’m glad you connected with it.
Omg, such an intense piece to come upon and absolutely beautiful summary in the last paragraph.
Not to undervalue the sentiment, but that recount of child birth certainly does no favors to convince this cat lady to change her life plans any time soon.
[…] as when I had begun writing and revising “Exploded Pipes.” It was, as Sandra A. Miller writes, the pain of releasing the possibility of life into the world. I woke up wanting desperately to […]
“The colorless grey of loss…” wow. thanks. Beautiful and true.
Wow! Beautiful and inspiring
Reading this, I thought: each crafted sentence bursts with power and vitality; how can she keep it up? and each next sentence does just that. What a lesson on the necessity of “pushing into the pain” and the futility of dancing around unavoidable darkness while pretending that it can be sort of maybe expressed but not really. Thank you.
[…] via Write Like You’re Giving Birth — BREVITY’s Nonfiction Blog […]
Reblogged this on Don Massenzio's Blog and commented:
Here is a great post from the Brevity blog comparing writing to giving birth
I love this piece so much I’m printing it out for my writing students – I hope that’s ok. Bloody hell, I felt like I was in labour with you ….x
Wow. Really great piece. I love it. Writing can be a pain especially during the process of drafting and getting the piece ready but the outcome is really worth it!!
I really appreciate this! I am a first time blogger trying to shed light about the horrible immigration process for me ( Canadian) to get back into England to be with my husband whom I only see every 3 months currently. I keep feeling like every post I write is not good enough, which makes me close my lap top and try again later. I am working on persevering through the pain so that our story can be heard! I would love any tips of how to gain a following and to not lose hope! https://wordpress.com/stats/day/theseadouspartblog.wordpress.com
This post made me cry. The words reached me when I needed them the most, lost in my own dark wood, trying to figure my way out.
Not everyone’s giving birth experience is like that, but my birthing-words experience resonates with this masterful post and the urge to shy away from the shameful, buried secrets that must never see the light of day. Our culture’s narrative above ut giving birth paints it as a shameful, necessarily painful experience full of suffering for the sin of being born female. But what of the clitorus? The only organ devoted exclusively for pleasure. Perhaps the clitorus is not only for sexual pleasure. Could our culture ever conceive a narrative in which giving birth is an orgasmic experience, reserved exclusively for women and the scared endeavor of birthing the human race?
Reblogged this on Notes from An Alien and commented:
Today’s re-blog is One Incredible Analogy that reveals a Critical Truth about writing…