librariann's review
4.0
I love birth stories. I comb the internet for them. Unfortunately, many of them are just not well written. Guess what? Writers write good birth stories? Who could have guessed?
(Me.)
(Me.)
herlifewithbooks's review
5.0
Oh, a book written exactly for me? Well, I cannot resist but to give you 5 stars then, book.
Fans of birth stories will obviously gobble this up. Even more so if you are a fan of literary memoir. More than one contributor seems to have named a child after Willa Cather, if that gives you a sense of what kind of moms and stories we are dealing with here.
Read: May 2014, February 2016, August 2017, April 2022
I have officially listened to this book on audio during all three of my pregnancies. And I was sad it was over every time. It is, apparently, my preferred method of ingesting birth stories as I prepare for my own.
Fans of birth stories will obviously gobble this up. Even more so if you are a fan of literary memoir. More than one contributor seems to have named a child after Willa Cather, if that gives you a sense of what kind of moms and stories we are dealing with here.
Read: May 2014, February 2016, August 2017, April 2022
I have officially listened to this book on audio during all three of my pregnancies. And I was sad it was over every time. It is, apparently, my preferred method of ingesting birth stories as I prepare for my own.
nomadreader's review
5.0
(originally published at http://nomadreader.blogspot.com)
The basics: Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today's Best Women Writers, edited by Eleanor Henderson and Anna Solomon, brings together an impressive group of contemporary female writers from a variety of genres to share their experiences giving birth. The essays are as varied as the women who write them.
My thoughts: Admittedly, before I got pregnant (and even early on in my pregnancy), I shied away from birth stories. Rarely do I favor ignorance, but in this case, I was scared of labor and childbirth, yet I knew I would be going through it, and I wasn't ready to deal with it. At some point in my pregnancy, I became eager for birth stories. I'm still frightened, of course, but I find comfort in imagining myself in a variety of different scenarios, both the positive and negative.
I'll be honest: this collection of essays often veers to the negative and sad. There are some heart-breaking stories told in these pages. I shed many, many tears as I read, yet even the most heart-breaking essays, I found a sense of comfort and kinship with the writers. These strong, beautiful voices moved me with their tales of the times before, during and after birth. To combine such intimate details about life, birth, and new motherhood with beautiful language is a true gift.
Favorite passage: "I suppose we are always alone in our pain, but we are rarely positioned appropriately to view the isolation accurately. Most of the choices with which we are presented in childbirth are secondary to the one most important in practice we must be prepared to labor alone, even in the company of others, even with the brilliantly blinding help of loved ones. Perhaps the debates regarding child birth are so he did because in the end it’s one woman’s experience, not a shared cultural phenomenon. It’s you and your pain; it’s you and it’s your baby.” --Sarah A. Strickley
The verdict: This collection is superb. While some essays are objectively better than others, only one rang hollow for me. While I connected more deeply with some than others, I appreciated and gained something from each one. I'll be giving this book to many, many pregnant friends in the years to come.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
The basics: Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today's Best Women Writers, edited by Eleanor Henderson and Anna Solomon, brings together an impressive group of contemporary female writers from a variety of genres to share their experiences giving birth. The essays are as varied as the women who write them.
My thoughts: Admittedly, before I got pregnant (and even early on in my pregnancy), I shied away from birth stories. Rarely do I favor ignorance, but in this case, I was scared of labor and childbirth, yet I knew I would be going through it, and I wasn't ready to deal with it. At some point in my pregnancy, I became eager for birth stories. I'm still frightened, of course, but I find comfort in imagining myself in a variety of different scenarios, both the positive and negative.
I'll be honest: this collection of essays often veers to the negative and sad. There are some heart-breaking stories told in these pages. I shed many, many tears as I read, yet even the most heart-breaking essays, I found a sense of comfort and kinship with the writers. These strong, beautiful voices moved me with their tales of the times before, during and after birth. To combine such intimate details about life, birth, and new motherhood with beautiful language is a true gift.
Favorite passage: "I suppose we are always alone in our pain, but we are rarely positioned appropriately to view the isolation accurately. Most of the choices with which we are presented in childbirth are secondary to the one most important in practice we must be prepared to labor alone, even in the company of others, even with the brilliantly blinding help of loved ones. Perhaps the debates regarding child birth are so he did because in the end it’s one woman’s experience, not a shared cultural phenomenon. It’s you and your pain; it’s you and it’s your baby.” --Sarah A. Strickley
The verdict: This collection is superb. While some essays are objectively better than others, only one rang hollow for me. While I connected more deeply with some than others, I appreciated and gained something from each one. I'll be giving this book to many, many pregnant friends in the years to come.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
amyjoy's review
3.0
I love birth stories, so this is right up my alley. I only recognized a couple of the writers included in this book, but all the stories were fascinating and well written. Some of them were deeply sad, but I appreciated that even the ones that started with loss ended with a healthy baby.
tigershanks's review
3.0
3.5
It’s a mixed of experiences. They don’t harp on things, it’s like sitting with some friends and hearing their birth stories and how they felt about the choices they made. Some aren’t sunshine and rainbows, trigger warnings for miscarriage and still birth.
I just took it as, these are important stories even though they aren’t happy, and they still deserve to tell their story.
Some of them are funny And sweet. There were some things I learned.
It’s a mixed of experiences. They don’t harp on things, it’s like sitting with some friends and hearing their birth stories and how they felt about the choices they made. Some aren’t sunshine and rainbows, trigger warnings for miscarriage and still birth.
I just took it as, these are important stories even though they aren’t happy, and they still deserve to tell their story.
Some of them are funny And sweet. There were some things I learned.
cdubiel's review
5.0
I think this book came at the perfect time in my life: after having one child and considering having another next year or the year after. Every essay is beautifully written and poignant, and each one gave me a lot to think about. I also reflected on my son's birth and thought about what might happen during a future birth. Life is so precarious and precious, and this collection is an illustration of the many ways we fall down and get back up when we produce that life.
mcbolt's review
3.0
It's really interesting to read birth stories. I love how a birth story is almost always so much more than just the birth of a child: it's the story of the couple's relationship at the time, it's the story of their fertility journey, it's the story of their parents. People who have more than one child usually end up having their birth stories blend together. This book contains well written, intriguing stories. That part is really wonderful and we need lots of those.
What bothered me about some of these stories is that even the warm-and-cuddly ones where the mom is over the moon about how everything went contain asshole doctors who say straight to her face "you're not strong enough. you need a c-section." It's full of doctors who perform cervical exams without consent or introduction or hospitals that were too low-staffed at the time that a baby was crowning. Those parts weren't the focus of those stories, but they screamed to me as an indictment of modern hospital practices. That's not what the authors were going for, but that's all I could see in those stories.
The introduction to this book boasted its diversity, but we need more. I want an anthology of birth stories from trans and queer folks, not just a collection with one token lesbian couple. One or two stories were written by abuse survivors, but I was surprised that no one wrote about giving birth after abortion. We need more. This book was probably marketed as too "mainstream" to be all of that, but that's what I want in a birth story anthology.
What bothered me about some of these stories is that even the warm-and-cuddly ones where the mom is over the moon about how everything went contain asshole doctors who say straight to her face "you're not strong enough. you need a c-section." It's full of doctors who perform cervical exams without consent or introduction or hospitals that were too low-staffed at the time that a baby was crowning. Those parts weren't the focus of those stories, but they screamed to me as an indictment of modern hospital practices. That's not what the authors were going for, but that's all I could see in those stories.
The introduction to this book boasted its diversity, but we need more. I want an anthology of birth stories from trans and queer folks, not just a collection with one token lesbian couple. One or two stories were written by abuse survivors, but I was surprised that no one wrote about giving birth after abortion. We need more. This book was probably marketed as too "mainstream" to be all of that, but that's what I want in a birth story anthology.
erine's review
5.0
I just gorged on thirty birth stories, and my head is spinning. I remember the first couple of birth stories I ever heard, pregnant with my first baby. Tearing skin, stitches, blood and mess, pooping, all things I had not ever associated with these women I thought I knew. And yet, those stories helped me through the pregnancy and helped me to see both the variety and the sameness of each childbirth. These birth stories included here provide much the same reminder.
Each story is different, although they all blend together. They address first births, miscarriages, c-sections, inductions, lovely medical professionals, horrid medical professionals, dashed expectations, pain, support, struggle, strength, and so much more. You could fill libraries with more stories that would all be as unique, and as much the same as what's here.
Would recommend for people interested in other people or in medical stories. Honestly, I feel like anyone who's ever been at a birth should be at least nominally interested in this... and that would be everyone, right? After all, someone labored to bring you into the world.
Some bits that resonated for me:
7: "I felt awed to be a portal through which another would enter her life." [Yes.]
44: "If I didn't fear the pain, I wouldn't feel it." [Perhaps more accurately, if I didn't fear the pain, I could endure it.]
92: "...for all of our careful planning, no matter how our birth experience turns out, we cannot prepare ourselves for anything or protect ourselves from disappointment and heartache."
117: "I didn't want a reward for pushing out my baby. I wanted the story of pushing him." [The story... you don't just get a baby, you get a story.]
130: "...real female power is nothing less than the power to risk death to bring forth new life.'' [Thinking of those two recent Ranger graduates. Females are built, literally, to fight for life in the midst of suffering and sometimes death.]
139: "Every single one of these people had a mother who brought them into the world, just as I am doing now." [One of those facts that boggles my mind.]
145: "...childbirth...had nothing on the vastness of parenthood, just as weddings have nothing on marriage."
151: "I had never felt the urge to push with my [first] birth; the midwife and the nurse had had to instruct me to lie down on my back, pull up my knees, and count as I pushed for as long and hard as I could. It was a tremendous effort of physical and mental concentration, and I was never sure I was pushing at the right moment. This was different. I felt something..." [This could have been excerpted from my own experience: birth one featured no urge to push; birth two featured an intense and surprising urge. The familiarity of some of these stories was comforting, astounding, delightful.]
157: "I was both more and less myself as a pregnant woman." [One of many paradoxes that pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting usher in.]
213: "It's hard not to make comparisons, and I felt these stories as a judgment about my choices, my capabilities." [And it doesn't stop with birth.]
227: "Isn't that why the natural-birth movement has taken hold...? Pregnancy is such a vulnerable and mysterious state that it's comforting to focus on what you can achieve instead of what you can't know. Easier to blame any... disasters on a medical establishment you can sidestep instead of on fate, which is beyond your sway." [I have always thought of the 'natural birth' folk and the 'medical birth' folk as being opposites. This statement shook that perspective and made me think that both 'natural birth' folk and 'medical birth' folk are each trying too hard to control something that is utterly capricious, they just have different ideas of how to exercise that control. What has become increasingly apparent to me, however, is that there is no need to pick a side and narrow your options. Why there is not more collaboration between 'natural' and 'medical' I am unsure.]
Each story is different, although they all blend together. They address first births, miscarriages, c-sections, inductions, lovely medical professionals, horrid medical professionals, dashed expectations, pain, support, struggle, strength, and so much more. You could fill libraries with more stories that would all be as unique, and as much the same as what's here.
Would recommend for people interested in other people or in medical stories. Honestly, I feel like anyone who's ever been at a birth should be at least nominally interested in this... and that would be everyone, right? After all, someone labored to bring you into the world.
Some bits that resonated for me:
7: "I felt awed to be a portal through which another would enter her life." [Yes.]
44: "If I didn't fear the pain, I wouldn't feel it." [Perhaps more accurately, if I didn't fear the pain, I could endure it.]
92: "...for all of our careful planning, no matter how our birth experience turns out, we cannot prepare ourselves for anything or protect ourselves from disappointment and heartache."
117: "I didn't want a reward for pushing out my baby. I wanted the story of pushing him." [The story... you don't just get a baby, you get a story.]
130: "...real female power is nothing less than the power to risk death to bring forth new life.'' [Thinking of those two recent Ranger graduates. Females are built, literally, to fight for life in the midst of suffering and sometimes death.]
139: "Every single one of these people had a mother who brought them into the world, just as I am doing now." [One of those facts that boggles my mind.]
145: "...childbirth...had nothing on the vastness of parenthood, just as weddings have nothing on marriage."
151: "I had never felt the urge to push with my [first] birth; the midwife and the nurse had had to instruct me to lie down on my back, pull up my knees, and count as I pushed for as long and hard as I could. It was a tremendous effort of physical and mental concentration, and I was never sure I was pushing at the right moment. This was different. I felt something..." [This could have been excerpted from my own experience: birth one featured no urge to push; birth two featured an intense and surprising urge. The familiarity of some of these stories was comforting, astounding, delightful.]
157: "I was both more and less myself as a pregnant woman." [One of many paradoxes that pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting usher in.]
213: "It's hard not to make comparisons, and I felt these stories as a judgment about my choices, my capabilities." [And it doesn't stop with birth.]
227: "Isn't that why the natural-birth movement has taken hold...? Pregnancy is such a vulnerable and mysterious state that it's comforting to focus on what you can achieve instead of what you can't know. Easier to blame any... disasters on a medical establishment you can sidestep instead of on fate, which is beyond your sway." [I have always thought of the 'natural birth' folk and the 'medical birth' folk as being opposites. This statement shook that perspective and made me think that both 'natural birth' folk and 'medical birth' folk are each trying too hard to control something that is utterly capricious, they just have different ideas of how to exercise that control. What has become increasingly apparent to me, however, is that there is no need to pick a side and narrow your options. Why there is not more collaboration between 'natural' and 'medical' I am unsure.]
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