Unplaceable Stories
Where to put the things we've been told not to say
Right after I gave birth, I would be asked, by other people who had given birth, “Oh! Tell me your birth story— how did it go?”
It was a question I was unprepared for— having never given birth myself, it had never occurred to me to ask someone this, and I had never heard the full story of someone else giving birth. I would start to stumble through the story— the late night cab ride, the closet I was put in because the hospital was overflowing with birthing parents that day— and then I would be interrupted. The interruption wasn’t rude, it was urgent. Desperate. And the interruption was the story of their own labor, their own birthing story. In detail. Relayed to me in a rush, breathless, as if I might tell them they had to stop, as if they had never told it before and absolutely needed to get it out. As if they had been waiting for just this chance for years.
It wasn’t until a few months later that I started to understand what was happening. Giving birth is a singular and strange and overwhelming experience. It is also a relatively common one. And a physical, vulnerable one. The combination makes it one without a specific place in our culture. We don’t know when to tell the story. Or who to tell it to. Or if we are even allowed? Also how much detail should we give and actually what are the details, anyway?
And wrapping that all up is the fact that there is a baby, and that baby is what we are meant to talk about, and the story of the birth gets lost in the story of the baby, the story of parenting, the story of the day to day crisis that is having a newborn.
And so the story gets lost. Until, of course, we find out a friend is pregnant and we feel at last this is our moment, we can finally share what it is we’ve been desperate to share, a story we are still probably processing ourselves.
Birth is not the only story that falls into this hazy category of untellable stories. The stories that we don’t have a place for are so often the ones that we also all share. Lately, it’s the pandemic. There is a need to tell the story of our first four months at home— the moment we realized the world had changed, the things we did in those months, the ways we survived. I am fixated on the first week of lockdown and eating lunch with my kid at the dog park, watching the dogs play, noticing as day by day less people came, until finally, it closed and that small pleasure, too, was gone. The way the mask hung off my kid’s face when we had to take an unexpected trip to the hospital in the first week of shut down. The kindness of my neighborhood coffee shop baking me a batch of scones that they knew were getting me through the long days, and the tiny pleasure of eating a scone in our bedroom when my morning parenting shift was over and I had a moment to pretend I was somewhere else, in some better time.
Surely, you are fixated on certain details too. Looking for a time and a place to share them, waiting to be asked about them. And no one asks, because the experience is too common and too specific. Too shared and too singular. So you roll the moments, the details, over and over in your hands too— right? These moments are rubik’s cubes. Things we can’t quite piece together correctly, so we turn and turn and turn to try to make them make sense.
So that we can somehow put them aside. Find a place for them.
I think I’d like to start asking about these shared experience more specifically— giving birth, the early months of the pandemic, an election going one way or another, shared griefs and triumphs and transitions. These shared-and-not-shared experiences. I want to ask for the top three things you are still trying to unravel about that time. The top three things your mind keeps bringing up in the middle of the night when you should be sleeping. The top three things that are undeniably yours about an experience that many of us share.
Maybe this newsletter today is a call to action to do the same. To ask a parent who just gave birth what three things about the experience stand out to them. And to just hear those three things, to be a place to put them, to be a location for a story that so far hasn’t quite fit anywhere.
In my life as a teacher of writing, I tell students to focus on tiny details and bold choices. That story is somewhere in the balance of these things, a care for both. In the world, we are drawn to the bold choices in others’ lives, but the tiny details get forgotten. It’s a mistake. The tiny details are the story. The tiny details tell us more than the broad strokes. In the broad strokes our stories are all the same— the long hours of labor, the long days of covid— there are touchstones we all agree on, so we focus our attention, our connections, there.
But. The real story is so much smaller. It is the perfect feta cheese my best friend brought me in the hospital the day after giving birth. It is the fact that I washed my hair and shaved my legs when contractions started picking up, and my own confusion at that decision. It is the nurse who told me I was being too loud, and my twin feelings of embarrassment that she was right and certainty that she was wrong. The story is in there, somewhere, I am still working it out.
In writing stories, I love the tiny details, the intricate choices that seem like they don’t matter—the brand of someone deodorant or the pattern on a couch or the particular way a character pronounces the word synonymous. I know, as a writer, that a reader’s connection to the story is born in those details.
I suspect there is connection to be made from those same small details in our lives, too.
Book News!
LAWLESS SPACES, my YA novel-in-verse, a multi-pov story of generational trauma and, yep, the courage of telling untellable stories, has received its first review, and it’s a STAR from Kirkus! It was also chose as a Junior Library Guild Selection! It is available for pre-order now, from your local indie, or mine.
The fourth installment in my HAND ME DOWN MAGIC series comes out January 11th. The cover is one of the prettiest color combinations of all time— I would like a sweater inspired my this color scheme, please. It’s the final book in the series, and features a mysterious tea set— truly one of my favorite magical objects. And right now, the e-book of the first book is available for 1.99! A great deal, if you haven’t checked out this young readers’ series yet.
Recommendations!
My childhood bff recommended me this perfect soup, and now it is all I want to make in my slowcooker and all I want to eat. It is cozy fall perfection.
My daughter picked out this book at the library, and while often a wordless picture book is not my favorite, this one really spoke to me and was charming and fun to read together, and she really connected with it. I recommend ROSIE’S GLASSES for your picture book reader, especially if they happen to be fascinated by emotional ups and downs.
I will write a whole newsletter about my curly hair journey someday, but for now, if you have curly hair, I am absolutely in love with this product for no-wash days. I don’t know that I have ever been so amazed by a hair product before, so often they are disappointments, and this one does what it says.
I’d love to hear from you on the tiny details or untold stories that you keep to yourself or have deemed unimportant. What are your top three things that you are still unpacking from an event in your life?