When I announced the birth of my first child to a group of friends and colleagues, I sent a photo of her and some ecstatic language about her name and birth stats. Many responded with variations of “Congratulations!” “She’s beautiful!” or “Welcome to the world!” One reply read, “So glad to hear that it was a smooth birth.”

I looked over my original message in confusion. I didn’t think I had said anything to that effect. It had not in fact been the smooth birth that I, like most pregnant women, had desired and planned for.

After developing pre-eclampsia in my fortieth week of pregnancy, I submitted to a hospital induction that lasted days and resulted in a severely malpositioned baby unable to tolerate the force of labour. Ultimately, my daughter was delivered by urgent C-section. I met her cheek-to-cheek in a bright operating room, unable to look her in the face full-on until a few hours after she was born.

The comment nagged at me. But it wasn’t until my second pregnancy, which turned out to be even more difficult than the first, that I began to diagnose my unease. It looked a lot like loneliness, born out of an inability to honestly communicate the facts of being pregnant and having children. It was a silencing I noticed in myself but also within, and because of, the culture around me.

There are plenty of books, blog posts, podcasts, and think pieces about the topic of motherhood. Most of these fall into two genres of acceptable narrative—if not by virtue of their actual content, then by the groups of people who claim and cite them.

The first genre, more common on the secular left, involves one or a combination of the following: outspoken regret over motherhood, a sustained deliberation over whether a woman should become a mother, or a firm stance that women ought not to take on the work of child-bearing. These persepectives seem to suggest that it is embarrassing to enjoy one’s children, and they can be found in books such as Regretting Motherhood by Israeli sociologist Orna Donath and What Are Children For? by American academics Rachel Wiseman and Anastasia Berg.

There is something of a pedigree to claims like theirs. In the 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, Shulamith Firestone proclaims that “the heart of woman’s oppression is her childbearing and childrearing roles.” Firestone’s solution to this oppression is, in part, not to deny that children should continue coming into the world but to deny that women should be the ones to do the nasty work of birthing them.

“Pregnancy is barbaric,” she claims, because the thing itself—the fluids, the engorgement, the aches and pains—is repulsive and loathsome. Thankfully, she notes, pregnancy may shortly become unnecessary. “Childbearing could be taken over by technology,” she predicts with longing rather than fear. Her vision is not of anti-natalism but of anti-maternalism.

Another genre of birth stories, more common on the right, suggests that it is shameful to acknowledge that there are very real challenges in child-bearing and child-raising. This is the prominent view in the Christian circles of which I have been a part since my childhood.

When my daughter was six months old, I joined a church’s moms group. As the youngest mother with the youngest child in the group, the conversations didn’t often invite my perspective on child-rearing, so I listened. I learned that motherhood was complicated—it could be hard, even—but it was a worthwhile and biblically mandated call. Many, if not all, of the hard parts of motherhood were off limits for conversation in this world, unless a mother was prepared to tidily end her lament with a Bible verse or an assurance that she was leaning on God in prayer.

When a baby enters the world, many parents send around a triumphant photo: mom smiling, freshly swaddled baby, a cocoon of sheets and blankets. Motherhood in this group was just like those birth announcements, clean and tidy without any loose ends. But these snapshots tell, by a generous estimate, only one percent of the story. We send them without further comment or elaboration because our culture is largely silent on matters of difficulty in birth and motherhood.

This silence, however, has given rise to a third genre of stories around early motherhood, one that recognizes how our narratives around birth are incomplete or lacking and complicates the oversimple left-right narratives we have come to expect. British novelist Rachel Cusk writes in A Life’s Work, her 2001 memoir of early motherhood, that it “was my impression when I became a mother that nothing had been written about it at all.” She wonders whether we have a “stop upon our powers of expression, our ability to render the truth of this subject.”

Jennifer Banks used her professional role as a university press editor to approach several potential writers for a book that could lay out a framework for birth’s significance. But her proposal was repeatedly rejected. The authors told her, “Birth is beyond language. It’s ineffable—too mysterious and contradictory, too joyful and too tragic . . . to be fully captured in words.” So in 2023 she wrote the book—Natality—herself.

The work of these and other women establishes an archive and the beginnings of a tradition of truth-telling, imagining a world where women don’t, as Banks notes, merely gather “in private, sharing birth stories the way veterans share war stories.” Beyond birth stories, these texts also make space for the psychological, social, and political effects of conceiving, child-bearing, and child-rearing. Without such space, we see what Adrienne Rich termed the “institution of motherhood” taking a debilitating toll on mothers, contributing to large-scale public health crises like the epidemic of postpartum mood disorders that affects as many as one of five new mothers.

When I received the text message assuming my daughter Julian’s birth had been smooth, the pervasive silence and silencing of birth stories in my context began something like radicalization in me. It altered me further during my second pregnancy with my son George. I wanted the stories I told about my children’s arrival and existence to be truer than these half-stories.

Halfway through my second pregnancy, I found myself at a specialist’s office—a massive building that looms over the Connecticut shoreline. Its labyrinthine hallways twisted and turned, mostly windowless, studded with offices labelled “genetics consultation,” “high risk,” and “prenatal testing.”

Trish, my chipper guide and practitioner of fetal echocardiography, asked what the weather was like outside; she had been in a dim ultrasonography room all day and hadn’t seen the sun since she entered the building. She did her work quickly and efficiently, pointing out various structures in our son’s heart, as my husband sat beside me holding my hand. At the end of the exam, she paused her cursor over our son’s heart to allow the boom boom boom of blood coursing through electrified muscle to sound through her speaker for a few moments.

My husband and I locked eyes and exhaled as she left. The locomotive sound of a fetal heartbeat pumping through a room had become to us somewhat unnerving, for we’d come to know how quickly, how quietly and without warning, such a sound might cease.

Three months earlier, we had found out that the baby we were hoping we’d see in our first ultrasound was in fact two babies—healthy twins with strong, flickering heartbeats. We quickly became experts in the literature of twin pregnancy and spent a few midnights lying awake, staring at each other in crazed awe just to whisper, “Twins!”

A few weeks later during a routine prenatal visit, a nurse mentioned offhandedly, “Since you are pregnant with twins, we’ll do another ultrasound today. We wouldn’t usually do this, you know, but at this stage it can still be a little difficult for us to distinguish the two heartbeats via doppler.” Thrilled by a chance to see the lives inside me once more, I settled myself on the table and inquired whether we could wait for my husband, who had just stepped into the bathroom. The nurse responded that the schedule was full and we’d need to start immediately, but that he’d surely come in before the exam was finished.

The sonographer pulled up her program and input my personal details, probed my stomach, and adjusted the angle of her monitor. A terrible image flashed on the screen, and I knew before she spoke any words that our story was changing. With my husband in another room, living in a different, now false reality, I saw that while one of the babies swam about in my womb, the other was perfectly still.

When we were eventually shuttled into another exam room to meet with the practitioner on call, we were given only the cold words, “There must have been a chromosomal abnormality. We will go ahead and treat this as a normal singleton pregnancy.”

In the blurry days that followed, my husband and I read on our own about vanishing twin syndrome, a peculiar kind of miscarriage that can take place in pregnancies of multiples. Sometimes, a mother pregnant with twins will go in for a second scan and—shockingly, devastatingly—find that she is carrying only one baby. Other times, as in our case, the dead baby can be seen on ultrasounds for weeks to come, gradually being dwarfed by his or her sibling.

For a stretch of months, dark insights about our situation came at unexpected times. One night early in the fall, we went to a compline service together, and as we walked out, we lamented that the church has no liturgically recognized means of socially marking the loss of a child by miscarriage.

I was taught from my youth that this was a person, yet I have never attended a service for a miscarried baby. I know women who have miscarried and had someone to bury. But one of the strangest features of vanishing twin syndrome is that, unlike a singleton miscarriage, in which a mother’s body must expel the pregnancy lest she risk grave illness or even death, a baby lost in a multiple gestation can disappear into the mother’s flesh without medical complication.

Obstetricians and midwives use a coding system to quickly note how many pregnancies, live births, and miscarriages a woman has had. Because the unit being counted in their code is pregnancies, twins or other multiple gestations count only as one. The code on my chart reads G2P2002: two pregnancies, two live births of at least twenty weeks, zero miscarriages, zero preterm births, and two full-term births. The twin we lost is not just vanished from my womb but invisible to the medical record.

We found ourselves attempting to marry grief and joy all at once in my pregnancy, the signs of which rapidly became obvious to the wider public. It was difficult for me to receive others’ joy about the life in my womb, since so few also knew about our deep and simultaneous despair. So I spent much of the pregnancy hidden away.

Even those people in our lives who knew most clearly—the professionals who could see at the top of my chart on every prenatal visit the words “fraternal twin pregnancy with demise of twin a”—failed to ever mention the loss or hint at an understanding of the psychological toll it might be taking on us as we waited for their slow-moving hands to find a heartbeat.

Gradually, my husband and I revealed the news of the pregnancy to our wider circles. We shared the story of our loss as well and were shocked to find ourselves inducted into a quiet and secret club.

Friends we have known for a decade or more shared with us their secret sorrows: One woman expressed the sting of losing four babies even while four grown children gallivant the world; another told us of back-to-back miscarriages after years of trying to conceive, and of her regret over never naming them. What does it mean to say that one day these babies will receive a new name on a white stone when they were never even given an old name? And why had even our intimate friends kept these stories from us?

In the early days of George’s life, a friend who was soon to have her first baby recommended science journalist Lucy Jones’s book Matrescence, in which she details the shock of becoming a mother—an experience she calls the most political of her life and a major female experience where her lifelong education in feminism failed her. The book kept me company in the small hours of postpartum insomnia and showed me the honesty I had craved since the moment I had received that confusing text after my daughter’s birth.

Jones’s critiques of the natural birth movement and intensive parenting, alongside her painfully relatable experiences of what she terms the “hard-core,” “edgy,” and “gnarly” aspects of new motherhood, gave me an excuse to talk explicitly, profanely, with a like-minded friend about our pregnancies, births, and postpartum experiences. This would simply not have been welcomed in that moms group at church.

Emboldened by Jones’s honesty, we shared about the utter vulnerability and dependence we felt in C-section recovery, the anxiety fuelled by prenatal testing, and the upsetting reality of pregnancy and postpartum complications. Later, influenced by some footnotes of Jones’s book, we both read Rachel Cusk, and her description of C-section birth resonated with us. Read in tandem with Jones’s critique of “natural” birth, Cusk’s book gave language to the empowerment we felt in being cared for by crews of exclusively female medical professionals during our unplanned but lifesaving surgical births.

Owing to an onslaught of complications that arose around week twenty-nine of pregnancy, George, like Julian, also entered the world via C-section, scheduled three weeks ahead of his due date to balance his capacity for growth and development in utero with a need to prevent his placenta from making me very sick—or, in the worst case, taking both of our lives.

After mourning the loss of his sibling for so many months, I tricked myself into believing that if we could both make it to thirty-seven weeks, we could have our chance at something like a happily-ever-after once he was settled in my arms. But he was unable to breathe on his own after birth, so even that hope was dashed by a stay in the NICU.

The first photo we sent of him included leads attached to his bird-like ribs, a feeding tube threaded through his nostril. Some friends in the secret club knew enough from their own experiences to reach out, just after their initial congratulatory messages, to ask with compassion and concern, “Are you in the NICU?”

In Natality, Banks writes that “birth confounds the binary. It is an experience of neither mastery nor powerlessness; it confronts us with our embodied, earthly creativity, with what we can control and with what we simply cannot control.” My thoughts about this sentiment teeter, sometimes toward acceptance of my lack of control and other times toward longing for yet more chances to prove mastery.

For mastery so often eludes us when it comes to sorrow. The day I saw the other twin curled up without a pulse, I knew, for at least that day, that I couldn’t bear to face anyone. So I hid in my bedroom and read Willa Cather’s My Ántonia cover to cover.

On the first anniversary of losing the baby, my husband and I escaped our home in New Haven for a few hours to hike Mount Monadnock in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. Coincidentally, Jaffrey is also Cather’s final resting place. Cather was raised on and famous for writing about the American plains and spent her most productive years in Manhattan, but she wanted to be buried in Jaffrey—a small town of only five thousand or so residents—because it had been to her a beloved place of frequent retreat.

After scaling the mountain, we made our way to the town cemetery to find her grave and briefly read some of her words. When we had made almost a full circle through the cemetery’s headstones, we happened upon a sleek stone that rose up out of a rough granite slab. It marks the resting place of Henry Shattuck, born 1841, died 1925. Listed below are his wife Clara, born 1847, died 1874, and their son George H., born 1874 and died 1874. I knew by the change in his breathing pattern that my husband noticed the dates, as I had, and was beginning to cry, as I was.

Jones writes extensively in Matrescence about birth in the natural world often ending in maternal and/or infant death: “Perhaps the cultural obsession with ‘natural’ birth reflects the extent of our detachment from our bodies and from the earth. We are so disconnected from the rest of the natural world that we don’t know what ‘nature’ is: bodies failing, cuckoos pushing eggs out of nests, a weirdly small human pelvis and a big infant head, illness and disease.”

That headstone had “natural” written all over it: Clara and her son died from complications arising out of childbirth. Something about that baby sharing our son’s name and an initial—George H.—was too much. Henry Shattuck, the father, was thirty-three when those horrors became his. He lived for fifty years afterward. What is the meaning of a life that encounters sorrows like these and then simply continues on for another half-century?

I had been in sorrow only one year at the time I stood by George H.’s grave, a few yards down from Willa Cather’s grave, and was only two years into my search for a story about birth and motherhood that felt whole, true. I’ve written that I learned about the death of our baby on my own, with my husband in another room. Standing with him at the graveside brought about something like a recompense for that moment in the obstetrician’s office. But it did not bring any real consolation for the loss.

Jeremiah the prophet tells of how Rachel wept for her children and refused to be comforted (Jeremiah 31:15). In the next verse God says, “Keep your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears, for there is a reward for your work.” Maybe when the Messiah comes, the weeping can stop.

But then, in Matthew, the Messiah does come. And what of Rachel? At the slaughter of the innocents, she continues weeping: “Rachel, weeping for her children . . . refused to be comforted, because they are no more” (Matthew 2:18). Rachel continues sorrowing, as do I. One day, our consolation will come. But not yet.