Birth: A Writer’s Memoir

I typed the final words just as the bell was tolling, calling the brothers to the final service of the day.

And it felt good.

I have never given physical birth, but I have observed a few parallels between the writing process and the birthing process.

~ Both include a long gestation period in which something is growing inside of an individual, something that no one else outside of that individual will ever fully understand.

~ Both involve intense discomfort balanced by sweet moments of secret joy.

~ Both require a strict diet: just as in pregnancy, women need certain food/drink and should avoid others, writers must take thought about the stories and music they put into their brain when they are carrying another story inside of them.

~ Both cannot reach fulfillment without great labor.

~ Both end in deep joy.

I’ve been told that, upon giving birth, the mother is filled with such bliss – such emotional and hormonal release – that she forgets the pain she just endured, focusing instead on the wonder of bringing a new life into the world. Substitute “book” for “life”, and you have my state of being as I sat at that service in the monastery, listening to the monks chant psalms while tears of gratitude flowed freely from my eyes.

The parallels don’t end there, of course. Now that the first draft is alive and kicking, a new kind of labor begins. I daren’t present this book to you now; it’s a helpless infant, stark naked and still covered in the mess of afterbirth. Let me clean it up, clothe it, and teach it to walk and talk a bit, and then – then you shall meet my literary offspring.

There’s another parallel: contemplating that day, I feel a bit like a mother might feel upon her child’s first day of school. I know that I won’t be able to protect this book for much longer: other people will meet it, and read it, and understand it very differently than I do. They will bring their own lives into it and draw things from it that I didn’t realize were there.

A bit daunting, that: to cut a piece out of your own heart and send it forth into the world, knowing full well it will grow far beyond your reach.

But that’s the whole point, isn’t it?

For books, like children, are not made to be alone. This tale will never become fully itself until it is read and shared outside the womb.

I have given it a body. You, dear reader, will help discover its soul.