Birthing Narratives

“Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry

Took its place among the elements.”

—Sylvia Plath, “Morning Song” (1960)

“The three women sat talking about various miseries they had had, their cure or abatement, what had helped. Over and over again they returned to Aunt Jimmy’s condition. Repeating its cause, what could have been done to prevent the misery from taking hold, and M’Dear’s infallibility. Their voices blended into a threnody of nostalgia about pain. Rising and falling, complex in harmony, uncertain in pitch, but constant in the recitative of pain. They hugged the memories of illnesses to their bosoms. They licked their lips and clucked their tongues in fond remembrance of pains they had endured—childbirth, rheumatism, croup, sprains, backaches, piles. All of the bruises they had collected from moving about the earth—harvesting, cleaning, hoisting, pitching, stooping, kneeling, picking—always with young ones underfoot.”

—Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970)

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