Childbirth has been at the top of my worst fears
since I knew where babies came from.
The stories of the tearing, Serious Complications,
the squeezing-a-watermelon-through-a-rubber-band
or whatever –
I can feel my vagina actually recoil.
It seems reasonable to believe
the act of creating a human
will destroy me.
Maybe this semi-irrational fear
is related to the contradiction I’ve always found
in “casual sex.”
Things always feel so much bigger
in their abstractions,
tied up in their cosmic significance.
If I don’t know your middle name,
if we haven’t bared our souls
and reached a vibrational level of resonance
where I felt completely safe and held,
how can we possibly merge our physical forms,
gamble the existence of another life
that weighs ten pounds
and takes hours or days to push out of me?
I envy the ancient Greeks,
how they made their gods so stoic and whimsical at once.
Fetal deities were sewn into Zeus’ thigh,
or birthed directly out of his head,
or simply appeared fully formed in the mist over an ocean.
He would turn into a swan or a bull before forcing himself on a mortal woman,
create a demigod that went on to rise and conquer,
and everyone was just cool with it.
In my 18th hour of labor,
I will try to remember those mystical storytellers,
imagine undoing the stitches
and peeling back the skin of my upper arm
to welcome the world’s newest hero.
I will close my eyes so tightly
I become the dewy yellow of morning,
and will my baby to materialize
as effortless as the dawn.