I Had a Book Come Out, Then I Had the Baby: On Embracing Privacy in My Most Public Year
I remember looking out the window the morning after my son was born. My view from the hospital was on level with an adjacent roof. Workers, a nurse warned, were known to walk across it, could peer in. “Just something to be aware of,” she told me, and I can remember finding this funny, my room a fishbowl—me and the baby inside it.
But that morning, that roof was covered with snow, so no worker walked upon it. The sun would come out later that afternoon, and by nightfall, most of the snow would be gone.
It was March, and earlier that month, my debut collection of poetry, Ghostlit, was released to the world a mere ten days before the birth of my son. It’s about many things, including memory and the body, mythology and ideology, abuse and power.
It didn’t take long for friends and fellow writers to wish me and my baby congratulations. Some referred to my new book as my “baby,” too, a comparison that called to mind the image of the Greek god Zeus giving birth to Athena. How, after swallowing Athena’s mother whole, out the goddess sprung from his head. I knew that friends who congratulated me on these “babies” were well intentioned, but I also did not understand what they meant. Bringing the book and the baby into the world felt completely unrelated. In the years it took me to write Ghostlit, my life evolved, over and again. I got divorced, I secured my own apartment. I wrote new stories, new poems; I met someone new. Then the pandemic happened, and this new love interest and I moved in together in Houston. I devoted myself to writing, as our wealthy neighbors hired lawn crews to leaf blow; rarely was our street not roaring. I prepared documents for the academic job market, we moved somewhere quieter. Eventually, I finished a draft. We got vaccinated, people read my manuscript. I flew across the country for an interview and got the job. We sold our gym equipment on Craig’s List, gave away our pink velvet couch.
It was as if I were on a completely different planet when, a few years later, I was pregnant with our son. Like most women, I kept my pregnancy a secret in those first scary months when anything could happen. I vomited and ate plain bread and was never not nauseous. I grew out of my jeans, sucked on sour gummies.
When I first started sharing that I was pregnant, I was warned by those I love most that I would be offered unsolicited advice. Family, friends, strangers: it didn’t matter. I prepared myself to be a sponge. In the beginning, I didn’t feel all that bothered by the prospect. It was, after all, my first time being pregnant. I could probably use (some of) the advice. But then I had one (male) friend inform me that my body would never be the same after pregnancy and, in the same breath, warn my husband that he might need to “take care of himself” for a while. A woman who I took water fitness classes with eyed my messy bun and advised me not to let myself go once the baby was here. “Remember to brush your hair,” she said. “You may have a baby, but you still have a husband.”
As a writer, I can choose when to keep my work private or make it for public consumption.
Something that feels almost palpable to me now: A pregnant woman walks around, defenseless for public consumption.
There are certain occasions in life (birth, death) where we follow a script. It wasn’t until after I had the baby that I began to question the language of the script that was being read around me. It was not only the comparison of publishing a book to birthing a baby that felt so wrong. Worse was the most frequently asked question I received: Would I have, or had I had, a natural birth?
The term “gaslight” derives from the haunting 1944 film of the same name, featuring unforgettable performances by Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. I began writing Ghostlit over the summer of 2019, just before the term “gaslit” re-entered the (very) popular lexicon. It was from my parents’ gold-colored armchair in Pennsylvania that I could more easily write about the swamp that is Houston, with its stormy, gator-green skies and its balmy, nocturnal nights.
There are many reasons why the poems in the book were uncomfortable to write and to share. At its heart, Ghostlit is a trauma narrative. For me, the story is about power. Power in a relationship between the speaker of the poems and her husband, power she retains over her mind and body; power that the speaker has over herself.
When my box of author copies arrived on our porch, I carried it inside in haste, I ceremoniously cracked open the tape. I took stock of the book’s texture, its heft. I read it from cover to cover, terrified and grateful, and went to bed that night feeling like the story I wanted to tell was over and done with, a sensation that left me exhilarated and exhausted. I rose the next day feeling like a vast distance existed between the person who had written that book and the one who stood, nine months pregnant, before the mirror. This wasn’t the first time I experienced that sense of defamiliarization. After the author copies of my novella, On the Rocks, arrived and I read the first page, I threw the book down, tied up my sneakers, and took to the craterous, pot-holed riddled streets of Upper Kirby in Houston, and ran as if my hands had been set on fire.
My first event for Ghostlit was a pre-launch reading at the university where I teach.
I was due three weeks after the reading. That night, I was nervous. I felt protective of the themes of the book, and by extension of any of its future readers who might have been victims of emotional abuse themselves. An interviewer had recently suggested that I/the speakers and characters I wrote about hate men, a read that I resented—I was carrying a beautiful little boy inside me. At the reading, I can remember breathlessly waddling before the audience, eager to situate my enormous belly behind the podium. I adjusted the microphone, I looked out at my colleagues and students waiting to hear me speak. This is the most public, I remember thinking, that I have ever been willing to be.
I am a planner by nature, and I knew exactly how I wanted to have my baby: in the hospital, my husband by my side. I wanted the pain relief, when the time came. For medical reasons, I also decided to be induced.
The morning of my scheduled induction, a storm blew in, coating our little Nebraskan college town in ice and snow. It would be the last snowstorm of the year and, fittingly, began on the final day of winter. Due to the storm, there was no room for us, as it were, at the inn. Too many women were going into labor, there were not enough staff, not enough beds. Multiple hospital personnel I spoke with attributed the influx of laboring women to the change in the moon cycle as well as the weather. So, we changed plans, scheduling my induction at another hospital for later that night.
At six pm, we checked in. My husband plugged in the essential oil diffuser, which would burn for so long that the plastic casing would turn brittle, flake off. Soon I was administered the typical array of drugs. By morning, the contractions came. I bounced on a birthing ball, said no to bone broth. Opting for the glaring Jell-O that I would promptly throw up into one of those accordion bags with the plastic rings. Then I was given the Pitocin, and the contractions cascaded, in full swing. Everything changed when my water broke. I found myself in an endless black sea, going under from wave after wave. I was elated because I understood that the breaking of waters meant that the baby was coming.
I knew things weren’t as they should be by the third time the anesthesiologist attempted to administer the epidural. I had done a lot of reading about babies before the arrival of mine and could remember the literature cautioning against allowing an anesthesiologist in training to insert it. I was prepared to make sure that whoever did mine was a professional. Yet when the time came, and the student anesthesiologist appeared, I gave her my permission to place it. After all, she was already in the room when I was asked to consent to her treatment. I didn’t want to offend her, didn’t want to assume she didn’t have enough experience to successfully complete the task. As a former graduate teaching assistant, I knew what it was like to be a teacher-in-training. How difficult it was to be taken seriously, especially as a woman. So I obediently offered her my back, I got in the requested position, winced through the contractions. I was stabbed in the spine a fourth time, a fifth. The student anesthesiologist switched out for her mentor. Prick after prick, I gritted my teeth. Neither could figure out why the epidural wasn’t taking, why I could still feel everything—over and again, the preparatory smearing of cool paste on my back like a child’s finger painting. Someone said something about giving me a bolus, and I was too weak to ask what the hell was a bolus. My aching back gave out from sitting forward, my feet kicked helplessly. I couldn’t hold my husband’s hand because I couldn’t hold anything.
The part that haunts me to this day was when the baby wasn’t responding the way that he ought. His heart rate was dipping. Everything inside and around me was beating. The air tasted green, and my mouth grew fuzzy. A nurse strapped an oxygen mask on my face, and I was told to get on my hands and my knees. For hours after, as I writhed in the sheets, I felt like I had crossed the threshold of some unspoken understanding among women who become mothers. Getting pregnant, giving birth, taking care of your child—all of it will change you; I understood this now and I recognized it then, when my husband was presented with white coveralls, white mask, white booties: the ethereal garb of a beekeeper.
Thirteen weeks after, you could still see the faint pink marks on my baby’s forehead from pushing to get through the canal when nothing was working.
I had fantasized about what those first moments of my baby’s life would be like. I had imagined seeing him just after he was carried from me, doing skin-to-skin immediately. I had thought that my husband would be there the whole time, in the room with me. Because I was rushed into surgery, our meeting was completely outside of what I envisioned. Before I went under, I asked the doctor to assure us that my husband would get to hold the baby as soon as it was safe. Then I was rolled down the hall, a bonnet was placed on my head. There were gloved hands and masked faces moving me from the bed, the dazzled brightness of the lights, and the doctor’s assuring hand on my wrist. As I was secured to the table—residue from that tape would linger for weeks—I remember worrying that the baby wouldn’t know me, that he’d greet me like a stranger when we were finally reunited. I knew that I wouldn’t be in pain much longer, and I knew that nothing I did or said would change the adage that the only way out was through.
When I woke, I was back in my room. The lights weren’t dim or abrasive, and I no longer felt the excruciating grind of the contractions. Someone asked if I’d like to see the baby, and my mouth said, “He’s here?” My husband and I still joke about my response to that question, for never in my life had I experienced anything so surreal. The effect of meeting our baby was uncanny, my vision tunneled like an animal who’s evolved to see from a great distance: I perceived the sight of my husband holding our son as if from down a very long hallway. Even before his little body was placed in my arms, I could see in his big blue eyes that the baby knew me. That we had known each other, in fact, since the beginning of time.
Later, I stayed up all night looking at him, I wrote in my journal, recording everything: the names of the nurses, the colors and the smells and the sounds in the cocoon of our room. I was so hopped up on Percocet, I wandered barefoot around the jaundiced halls in the stained pink hospital nightgown, pushing the sleeping baby in his plastic carriage.
I was in such a hurry to write after birth, much like I’ve been in a hurry to write this essay. In the past, I’ve found it useful to have distance from personal events before deciding to write about them, but there is something about having a baby that is urgent. Now, more than ever, I balk at the use of the word “natural” to describe any birthing process. I can understand the temptation to compare publishing to birth, sure. But I don’t know if I will ever be able to reconcile my experiences to the point that I can give them a shared language.
There isn’t a day that goes by that the memory of what it was like to bring my son into the world doesn’t bubble to the surface. In the weeks after his birth, I experienced my anxiety for his safety physically. Dumbfounded and exhausted and sure I’d fuck things up, I cried into my pillowcase before I fell asleep. Awake, but still in a dream, I rocked, and I sang to the baby. I held him to my chest like he was made of glass.
I see now that I wrote Ghostlit because I wanted a turn in the story. The poems aren’t about being abused; they are about recognizing a loss of self, the workings of a mind when confronted with that knowledge. What, I wonder, do we gain when we withhold our inner lives, and what do we lose when we reveal them? What, I ask my writing students, are the stakes?
Every semester, I tell them to draw the shape of their stories. There is no right way, I tell them, watching their heads bow over their notebooks. For me, the poems in Ghostlit form a spiral, as the speaker circles around and back to her abuse, as she reaches toward other forms of art to see her own experience from a different angle. When I was pregnant with my son, I felt as if I were continually climbing—that the apex would bring me to his birth. But even with him here, I still feel like I’m climbing. Like I can’t quite see the top of wherever I am or once was.
In our discourse about pregnancy and writing, birth and publishing, we can never quite find the right words to capture the experience, but we are on the brink.
One of the features I love most about our house is the staircase, with its century-old carved wooden spindles and banister, the frosted lamp at the base of the handrail. Whenever I carry the baby up or down, it takes everything inside me not to hold my breath, ascend with one shoulder grazing the wall—as if that could prevent me from slipping.
Read a poem excerpted from Ghostlit here
About the Author
Theodora Ziolkowski is the author of a Next Generation Indie Book Award-winning novella, On the Rocks, and the poetry collection, Ghostlit. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle, The Normal School, Short Fiction (UK), Prairie Schooner, No Tokens, Oxford Poetry (UK), and elsewhere. Currently, she teaches creative writing as an assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Kearney and serves on the faculty of the University of Nebraska, Omaha MFA Program.
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