Writing

“It takes courage to write about motherhood in a culture that sets women with children on the sidelines, and it takes even greater courage to give voice to the powerful emotions and fears that swirl deep beneath the surface of our daily lives, informing and shaping our relationships with our children and the world at large.”

                                                —Kathleen Hirsch and Katrina Kenison, Mothers

Ready for Air

No woman dreams of having a premature baby when she becomes pregnant. Whether she imagines a home or hospital birth, the imagined outcome is always the same: a healthy baby cradled in her arms. But millions of women do not experience the birth of their dreams. In the United States alone, half a million babies are born prematurely every year, more than one thousand every day.

In September 2003, when I was pregnant with my first child and just beginning my third year in the MFA program at the University Minnesota, I began exhibiting signs of preeclampsia, the pregnancy-induced disease that affects over 200,000 U.S. women and causes an estimated 76,000 maternal deaths worldwide every year.

Two months before my due date, when my symptoms became life-threatening, my daughter, Stella, was born via C-section, and my husband and I were thrust into the uncertainty and terror of the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Stella spent four weeks in the hospital and five winter months inside with me, quarantined from the world.

Ready for Air is an often funny, often terrifying account of the final weeks of my pregnancy, the “this-was-not-part-of-the-plan” first weeks of my daughter’s life in the hospital, and the isolated, post-NICU world we inhabited after we took her home. Ready for Air is a story about the dark side of pregnancy and motherhood—the fear, the irrationality, the psychic disruption. It’s about depression and coping and the isolation that so many women experience after they become mothers. It’s about the different ways that men and women deal with crisis and the unexpected. And finally, it is a story of hope and resolve and of learning to relinquish the reins long enough to love my daughter.

Other Writing

"The Nuk Princess" in Minnesota Parent (May, 2007).

"CaringBridge: A Conduit for Hope and Support" and "Hit the Road: 4 Tips for Happy Traveling with Your Preemie" in the May/June 2007 issue of Preemie Magazine.

" A Life Fully Lived: Deborah Garrison's New Poems: A Review of The Second Child and an Interview With the Author" in mamazine (July, 2007).

"Mothers' Words Speak Volumes" in the Minneapolis Star Tibune (July 14, 2007).

"The Milkmaid" in MotherVerse, Issue #7 (August, 2007).

"Go, Mama, Go!" in Minnesota Parent (September, 2007).

"A Make or Break Relationship: Graduate Students and Their Advisers Navigate a Challenging Course" in Connect! (November, 2007).

A review of Suzanne Kamata's Losing Kei in mamazine (January, 2008).

"Writing Ambivalence." Review of The Baby Lottery and Interview with author Kathryn Trueblood in mamazine (March, 2008).