Writer Ariel Levy offers a heart-wrenching account of adventure and coming into motherhood in her essay called “Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” featured in The New Yorker.
...morePeople were alarmed when I told them where I was going, but I was pleased with myself.
This is the part of the birth story when the woman is supposed to tap into the primal strength of her ancestors, a pool with a hundred thousand years of depth…
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Once a bright and talented writer and professor, my mother now can no longer write. She tries, but she can’t spell her name, or mine, and letters run off the page. I am humbled by how quickly time passes and how roles change. Frightened, too. Where will we both be in another fifteen years?
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It was a cool, blue morning in Baghdad. I stood in the rubble of a bombed out building, a shell of what it had once been.
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It’s two in the morning on the OB ward. Light filters into our dark room from the hallway, making a dim twilight around bassinet and bed. My first child, Emily, is twenty-seven hours old.
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I refused to listen to the B-side. This was, I guess, an extension or reflection of the poverty of those years after leaving my marriage and buying the 10 Willie Nelson records at a small town Goodwill store for 10 cents each– a kind of hoarding of every meager resource, like the unopened cans of beans, moved from kitchen to kitchen, state to state.
A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to be around while one of my best friends gave birth to a baby boy. It was an amazing experience. As a result, unfortunately, I had to spend a lot of time at SF General.
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Joanna Smith Rakoff’s debut novel follows a group of friends through the trials and triumphs of post-college life in New York.
