As Baby Smithereens’ arrival is approaching (1 month!), you won’t be surprised to see me drawn to books on birth and babies. I want to hear real women voices and not only sappy tales or serious medical advices like in What to expect… I was a bit apprehensive that stories might be gore or tough, because some of these French writers have a reputation for being blunt. But I read this book in 2 hours at the library, because I just couldn’t put it down!

 

Each story (we can’t know for sure if it’s fiction or the story of their own experience) is completely honest and while not rosy, not scary either as some books can be. Most express the sense of wonder coming from something both ordinary and extraordinary, both painful and great. The writers don’t try to hide the embarrassing or terrifying moments but in most stories they find the right voice, at the same time moving and funny. I specially liked Helena Villovitch’s humor in her story “Mon lapin” (my little rabbit) where she instantly falls in love with her tiny, sick, ugly baby (he was born with a condition that made him look like a purple rabbit). I was moved by Marie Desplechin’s story Maya. I translate for you a paragraph or two (sorry if it’s not flowing, the meaning is complex but I don’t want to lose in nuances):

 

I have given birth several times, and in various circumstances. I would be very insincere if I didn’t mention the personal glory I got from it. But I don’t see anything there worth sharing, worth talking about. The memory, instead, rather hazy, that a mystery passed through me, at the same time possessed and dispossessed and left to ignorance. An overwhelmed ignorance, made of successive nuggets of memories, of images bursting, crowding together and overshadowing forever the precise memory of that instant. Whether we take part before or after, the birth itself remains in the shadows. Disappeared as soon as it appears, hidden, secret.

To take part as a mother to my children’s birth didn’t teach me anything about my own birth, it didn’t teach me anything at all. Nothing neat to show, nothing different from the confused emotions of being awake. After all, being doesn’t teach us what living is either.

 

The only stories I had reservations about were the first, Encore là (Still there) by Marie Darrieussecq, about a post-partum depression (anorexia), and the last one by Michèle Fitoussi, Le Cordon (the cord), that focuses on a mother’s empty-nest feeling when her teenaged son leaves home. Those two stories, while interesting, seemed a bit too far from the subject. But this book reconciled me with contemporary French female writers. I’ll definitely look for other books by Desplechin or Villovitch.

 

PS. As I was writing this post, I received a SMS announcing that a good friend of mine has given birth yesterday night, how exciting! I know what to bring her as a birth present