3 weeks

Graham Lorenzo was born three weeks ago, and everything is changed.

I've both been wanting to tell and hoping to resist telling Graham's birth story. When I was pregnant, women everywhere and always bored, annoyed or frightened me with their labor tales. Every woman tells the story of her labor as if she's the only one who has ever given birth. Memories of their stories make me think I should keep mine to myself. But equally as strong as my desire to avoid boring, annoying or frightening anyone with the story of the most typical event in human history is my personal urge to purge. I've always kept a journal and I've often had a blog. This is just what I do:  I blab, publicly and privately. So it's not so much a question of whether to be silent or to storytell. It's just a question of where I'll do my storytelling.

Women are probably so eager to tell their birth stories because nothing crazier than a human coming out of a human routinely happens to a human. It's bizarre. Formerly, the most existentially weird thing to happen to me was when I tried to register amelia.hall as an email address at Gmail and was unable to because the address already exists. It used to blow my mind not just that another Amelia Hall exists but that she is sufficiently similar to me to want a simple email address. Having a baby, I think, is way stranger.

My friend Mary says this about birth stories:  "When you tell it, you feel it." Maybe that's why women want to tell their stories:  because it takes them back to the best experience of their lives.

I'll start my birth story with a grammatical quandary, because I'm generally more interested in grammar than I am in birth. Graham Lorenzo arrived two weeks and two days late. At two weeks past his due date, what was continually referred to as "induction of labor" began. Everyone everywhere calls this procedure "induction." Look at the index of pregnancy books and you'll see an entry for "induction." But induction is the noun form of the verb induct, and certainly my labor wasn't inducted. It was induced, and inducement is the noun form of the verb induce. My inducement lasted more than a day. Graham arrived on October 30, 2011 at 12:17am. I can't believe they let me hold him, because I was so tired, but I'm so glad they did.

None of this amounts to a birth story. I'd say I'm saving the birth story for the personal journals, but I think the truth is just that even attempting to relate the events leading to the birth of my baby intimidates me. It's ineffable, and I can't do it justice, so I'll just present a picture of the baby instead. 

"Love of my life" is a group of words people commonly use, but I don't understand how they could apply to anyone else but your own baby.