Birth Story

Hello.

I’ve been working on this newsletter with a baby sometimes in a pouch on my chest, sometimes breastfeeding in my lap, sometimes over my shoulder, very rarely in her bassinet. My husband has been taking a series of very long showers. My son finally got a strep test after two weeks of low-grade fever and a lymph node the size of a golf ball in his neck. We’re in the new house. Stuff is chugging along, and, because the move is over and also because we’re off work (literally in my husband’s case, theoretically in mine—do I even work?), much less hectic and awful than it has been. I haven’t lifted anything larger than a baby (or, OK, a three-and-a-half-year-old) in days, and my feet aren’t in searing pain, which they were throughout that last month of packing and unpacking while heavily pregnant.

I promised you a birth story. Before we get to that, a book announcement.

I’ve also been drawing some raw political cartoons, but might save those for another time (please God let there be another time) because the wisdom about a newsletter is that, unlike life, it’s better to stick to a single theme.

OK, book announcement!

An event with Sarah Manguso for our new book, Questions Without Answers, at a remarkable events space in my neighborhood, the Urbane Arts Club. The couple who bought this historic building is doing so many wonderful things.

Please come – it’s a couple weeks before the launch, we’ll have copies of both our other books available for signing or bring a copy you already have.

As always:

prints

books

website

Instagram, sigh

I’m also on Bluesky.

Read on for my birth story

and lots and lots of drawings.

The baby came ten days early, on Purim. I’ll call her Esther in this newsletter because of that. I’ll keep the words sparse because It’s taken me A DAY to scan these and a SECOND DAY to write what I’ve written so far; my time is nonlinear. More on that later.

Delivery Room Drawings: