Noah's birth

Writing a birth story is such a daunting task! I don't see how people can do it without being completely overwhelmed and buried in perfectionism. That's why I never got around to finishing Daniel's. Because the kinds of feelings you get in birth don't show up anywhere else. Like, even just physically, and even without the pain part. Many are impossible to describe, and others are more personal than a lot of people might want to get into. And some things have this weird layer of vague euphemism built up that makes them okay to talk about socially as long as you don't actually talk about them, so that someone can say, "yeah, I needed two or three stitches" and people just nod and carry on as if this was normal. Sure, it is absolutely normal in birth, but it's really not normal in the speaker's every day life. (Your what got ripped open?!) So it's weird to talk about any of it, because at any given moment I might be all like, "Yup, people have been having babies for ages, nothing new under the sun," but later I'll be going, "Holy crap! A freaking placenta came out of me! AND IT FELT REALLY WEIRD"

But, anyway. I guess I have to let go of that, to a certain extent. I'll never be able to actually convey the intensity of the experience in all its pain / joy / terror / relief / amazement / excitement / utter alien weirdness. People who have had their own babies will have an allegory, but even they haven't done exactly what I did. No one has. But I can still tell the outside facts, and remember the inner things better for it later.