Origins in Absence: Performing Birth Stories

Abstract

For the past five years, I have been more and less intentionally listening to birth stories. In line, in the hall, over coffee, at the park, and in informal interview settings, I have participated in the ritual process of recounting birth "experiences"-or, rather, of constituting those experiences out of the scraps of memory and bits of stories left after the ritual performance of birth itself.' I heard my first birth story near the end of my first pregnancy-when my round belly and hips betrayed the fact that I would soon be the subject of similar stories, that I was, for all intents and purposes, whether I liked it or not, already inside this particular narrative ring. Bound by a conspiracy of the body, contracted by maternity to hear, to tell, and to retell what others-insidiously, joyously, anxiously-told and retold me, I became both the "subject" of and "subject" to birth stories. Listening, I was the naive student, the initiate, the mother, the co-mother, the sister and friend; I was the bearer of stories; the professional (allied by doing research to institutions of medicine and science), the expert, the surveyor of "good" and "bad" births, the teacher, the outsider who should know or know better. Buffeted by conversation from one role to the next, I nonetheless seemed always to be the "other" with and against whose standards, norms, and practices the women and men with whom I spoke defined their own. The first story I heard left me devastated and hungry for more. I was living in a small, patrician town outside of Boston at the time (we'd arrived three months earlier and would leave again in two) and was fully nine months pregnant. I'd taken to wandering the streets in the late afternoon, enjoying the sudden, knowing smiles; the uncharacteristic deference of Boston drivers waiting patiently for me to cross the street; the general sense of surrounding pause. I was an intimate stranger to this town. My neighbors-the people I didn't know and would never know who nonetheless used the same dry cleaners and waited at the same stoplights-tended me with fascination. They traded benevolence for participation. As I later learned was so common, they felt the uncommon suspense of an imminent birth and wanted to be in on the drama, conventionally asking, "When are you due?" often reaching out to touch the belly that seemed to reach out to them. I always backed away from these gestures, resisting a collapse into mere public property. I wanted to re-