Birth Stories

Published on December 11th, 2015 | by Sacha Mardou

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THE STATE I’M IN: A Birth Story in Comics by Sacha Mardou, PART II

This is my story of navigating the messy, flawed, American healthcare system to having a low-key, British-style hospital birth. I’d say it’s pretty comparable, except for the bill you receive afterward.

I’m very grateful to Meg Lemke for holding my virtual hand as I showed her various drafts of this story, and to the cartoonist Lauren Weinstein for having the guts to do it first. In comics!

Part I of Sacha Mardou’s “The State I’m In” is here–you must read that if you haven’t yet. P.S. Mardou’s graphic novel Sky In Stereo just published, so also click that link!

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About the Author

Mardou was born and raised in Manchester, England  and now makes a home in St Louis, MO with her husband and their 10.5 year old daughter. She is the author of the graphic novel series ‘Sky in Stereo’, a trippy ‘coming of age’ story dealing with teenage mental breakdown. You can follow her weekly therapy comics on Instagram @msmardou and Facebook @sachamardou


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  • “It does not escape me that critiques about expectant Black women like me are also rooted in misogynoir.” “You’ve already told me that story,” he said. Switching gears, he asked, “Why isn’t my father around?” #breastfeeding #parenting #fuckit #protest #teenagers #sexualviolence “Over time, Anabelle learned to talk about her feelings. She said saw her birthmother in the sky. She drew a picture of grief moving through her body like water. When she had more language, she began to talk about her losses.” “I’m not sure why I read that poster and thought that it applied to other mothers, other people’s children. But it probably has something to do with the shock I felt two years later when a neurologist confidently diagnosed “Autism Spectrum Disorder” and I responded with at least twenty “What about…” type questions. I had described my dynamic, interesting, loving toddler to this doctor, and her response sounded dire and clinical. That poster was the same. All of it seemed so unfortunate.” “Someone hit the call button. No one came. Someone rushed to the nurses’ station; still no one came. The contractions, a creature, twisted my uterus, lancing its nails. I tried to breathe through them, but there was no space, no time.” “But when, one-by-one, natural disasters ransacked too many of the communities we visited, including my home-state of California, I began to spiral into a grief I didn’t know how to support. I came to realize that our climate crisis wasn’t off in some far-flung future. It was here. Now. I’d birthed two perfectly good humans, boys who wanted to set up lemonade stands and play soccer, but who would be tasked instead to worry about rising seas and firestorms.” “I have to say,” my doctor said. We were still in the OR. He seemed saddened. “There was a uterine rupture. A large one. I have only seen something like this four times in my career.”

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