After Birth Quotes

“It’s always that way with periods of crisis: people you expect and want to be there for you are incapable and/or unwilling, and others you never imagined would be there for you show up with exactly what you need, exactly how you need it. And there is almost no way, alas, no way at all, to predict which people will be which.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“Adrienne Rich had it right. No one gives a crap about motherhood unless they can profit off it. Women are expendable and the work of childbearing, done fully, done consciously, is all-consuming. So who’s gonna write about it if everyone doing it is lost forever within it? You want adventures, you want poetry and art, you want to salon it up over at Gertrude and Alice’s, you’d best leave the messy all-consuming baby stuff to someone else. Birthing and nursing and rocking and distracting and socializing and cooking and washing and gardening and mending: what’s that compared with bullets whizzing overhead, dazzling destructive heroics, headlines, parties,”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“The trick is to surrender completely, take your moments when you get them, don’t dare want for more.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“Fuck you, by the way, couples at couples tables at weddings who don’t go out of your way to engage with that one couple who doesn’t know anyone.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“A baby opens you up, is the problem. No way around it unless you want to pay someone else to have it for you. There’s before and there’s after. To live in your body before is one thing. To live in your body after is another. Some deal by attempting to micromanage; some go crazy; some zone right the hell on out. Or all of the above.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“Are you some kind of witch? Yup, I reply, and stare him down.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“These tiny people, they're not about you. They are not for you. They do not belong to you. They are under your care, is all, and it's your job to work at being a decent human being, love them well and a lot, dont put your problems on them, dont make your problems thier problems, dont use them to occupy empty parts of yourself.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“One hundred years ago you'd have a child surrounded by other women: your mother, her mother, sisters, cousins, sisters-in-law, mother-in-law. And you'd be a teenager, too young to have had any kind of life yourself. You'd share childcare with a raft of women. They'd help you, keep you company, show you how. Then you'd do the same. Not just people to share in the work of raising children, but people to share in the loving of children.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“Falling in love often is crucial. You just have to let it nourish you without giving in to it. Why turn it off entirely? Why deaden any part of yourself? Won’t death do that for you, and soon enough?”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“Volumes upon volumes on exploration, war, violence, the life-threatening transformative journeys of man. But you can't talk about this. The fucking, the sadness, the dark, the blood, the light. They will burn you at the fucking stake for this shit.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“You and your dyke music, Erica remarked once. I hadn’t thought of them as dykes, my beloved Indigo Girls, my Michelle Shocked, Dar Williams, Shawn Colvin, Le Tigre, my Ani DiFranco. I just knew that at those shows I was whole and right. I was a person. I mattered. I was in fact not stupid or fat or ugly or lame; I was smart and valid and right and well. I had a fucking voice. The women at those shows weren’t gussied up like geishas. They talked of art, life, politics. They felt entitled to feelings and opinions and rage and poetry and laughter and tears and bodies. There was dissent. Looking “cute” was low on the list. Practical shoes were high. It mattered only that one articulate oneself properly”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“Here’s the problem: we are taught nothing. How to sew, grow food, preserve food, build things, fix things, make fires, birth babies, care for babies, feed babies, move through time, grow old, die, grieve, change, sit still, be quiet. Still and quiet, endless Interneters, quiet, quiet, quiet. How to be alone, how to shut up and be”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“Muted pain, it turns out, is much worse than clear pain. Clear pain is quantifiable. One can face it, reckon with it, come away braver. There is no way to understand what you cannot feel. No reckoning to be had. It will haunt you forever, make you afraid. Still, they call her this laughable word: Survivor.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“It’s always that way with periods of crisis: people you expect and want to be there for you are incapable and/or unwilling, and others you never imagined would be there for you show up with exactly what you need, exactly how you need it. And there is almost no way, alas, no way at all, to predict which people will be which.   Got”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“book. I understood early that I’d find what I needed in books, if not in her. She gave me that.   But”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“I understood early that I’d find what I needed in books, if not in her. She gave me that.   But”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“Avoiding pain will get you nowhere. Avoiding pain multiplies pain exponentially.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“Paul's wanting does not hinge on anything other than the fact of me. This is an excellent trait in a man.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“No scrim, no filter, no bullshit. She wasn't all bound up in there, gagged and furious and resentful beneath some high-pitched shrink-wrapped mess of pleasantry.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“People dont want to hear about that, dont want to entertain it. Vast numbers will watch two naked girls online shit in a cup then eat it, but babies enjoying the living hell out of breasts as a supreme source of endless free nourishment and good health for all remains taboo.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“No, seriously, you should bury her up to her neck and throw rocks at her until she dies. What a crazy lunatic, offering her child a normal, healthy mammalian childhood. A woman in full bloom of health daring to use her body according to its biological design and function? Gross! When she could be purchasing from a multinational corporation a totally inferior product for the same purpose. That’s downright un-American. And to do so within full view of an intellectual such as yourself!? Tie her up and SET HER ON FUCKING FIRE.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“A person who doesn't have friends must explain himself to strangers, I read that in a poem once, and I saw how even my "best" friends were thusly unreal: I had to explain myself constantly, always, to everyone.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“I found myself pleading with my mother one icy night.

Could you please, please be a little bit maternal for a few minutes?

I didn't know how I would make it through the next few hours. I feared I might not make it through the next few hours. Her face went momentarily soft.

Yes, darling, she said, and cocked her perfectly coiffed head. there was still a small openness in my heart for her, it was true. A pinprick from which blood or love or whatever still flowed. She was part of me, after all. I was part of her. No matter what, it was true. She was in me. You can't disown what's yours, no matter how hard you try. What's yours is yours is yours.

Thank you, I mewed, dropped a tear or two.
She came closer, spoke softly.
Could you maybe just explain to me what that means?”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“You have to know what people are capable of, and forgive them for whatever they’re not. It’ll”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“It’s fantastic, these babies and my boobs. People don’t want to hear about that, don’t want to entertain it. Vast numbers will watch two naked girls online shit in a cup then eat it, but babies enjoying the living hell out of breasts as supreme source of endless free nourishment and good health for all remains taboo. Explain that to me in a way that does not skirt the historical imperative of misogyny. Go ahead. Try. I’m”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“The C-list girls who just banded together to create their own little utopia. Those are the girls you want to be, it couldn’t be clearer in hindsight. Early anarchists. Badasses. They didn’t bother, exempted themselves, turned their backs and took up softball, computer science, gardening, poetry, sewing. Those are the ones with a shot at becoming fairly content happy/tough/certain/fulfilled/gray-haired grown women. An”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“The baby’s first birthday. Surgery day, I point out, because I have trouble calling it birth. Anniversary of the great failure. Ari.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“did you know it’s almost impossible to feel aggression when you’re holding an infant?”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“was so proud that night, so self-possessed, standing tall, fully inhabited. I owned myself, felt fully mine to give.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“You have to know what people are capable of, and forgive them for whatever they’re not.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth