Reposted by Erica Stern
please share this call with your human friends, human students, human neighbors, human writing groups
Erica Stern
@ericarstern.bsky.social
412 followers 1K following 18 posts
Chicago-based writer. Work in The Iowa Review, Denver Quarterly, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. Hybrid memoir forthcoming from Barrelhouse Books.
![Giving birth a second time (and, years later, a third), didn’t take away any of my love for my oldest son. In fact, it allowed me to separate him from the experience of his birth. I could leave that trauma, or at least the power it wielded over me, behind. It had taken another round to figure out what should have been obvious: the child was not the birth. I hugged them close—children who had arrived in different ways, but who were both very much mine.
[Family photo below]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:qcgmjzw4ty77w5zk46mvg25x/bafkreiee6owdphjrzqgktkvjuk7qv4lyr4vn3trweoqa6vk437vlytgada)
