Exponent Essays #3: "Dawn"

Essays by Erin Barra on her new EP "Exponent"

Stream "Dawn" Here!

I was terrified before it even started. Not of motherhood in theory - in theory, children with my husband made sense, fit neatly into a life I'd carefully constructed. But theory dissolves fast. In practice I was afraid of what would happen to my body, what would be living inside it, who I'd be when it was over. Afraid for my career, my identity, my sense of self. And underneath all of it, the low hum of something more primal - that to bring new life into this world, you have to get as close to death as possible first, through giving birth. My soul knew I was going to do it anyway. My body and mind had not yet agreed.

On a work trip to Germany I took four extra days alone and wrote my fears down one by one. Put them on the page. Sat with them. Let them move through me until I arrived at something like acceptance - that it was totally reasonable for me to be afraid, and that I could be absolutely terrified and still move forward. At the end of my time alone, I decided to forgive myself my fears, and that I would be brave. 

I went home, told my husband I was ready, and immediately became pregnant. And the moment the test came back positive, I felt it — that pull. I am not someone who does well with drugs. Hand me mushrooms and I will rapidly ruin everyone's good time by completely losing my shit. I know the feeling of being yanked into something you can no longer steer, that moment the door closes behind you and there is no handle on the inside. That's what I felt standing in my bathroom holding that stick. I had just voluntarily walked into a nine month trip with no exit, no bad batch to blame, no one to call. The dose had already been administered. We were going in.

My pregnancy was not the typical glowing narrative. At month 6 I had a hairline fracture in my pelvis that made walking nearly impossible. I vomited so severely for two thirds of it that I had to be medicated, which made me so sleepy I could barely function. I was overproducing relaxin, which caused my jaw to dislocate - repeatedly. The baby kicked my ribs and punched my cervix. It felt like I was a passenger inside my own body. 

When it came time to give birth, he got stuck in my already-fractured pelvis. They performed an emergency C-section - turned me upside down and yanked him out of my womb. What a violent way to enter the world. Poor little guy. Poor me. And then: learn to nurse, don't sleep, recover from abdominal surgery - Tylenol and Motrin only, no narcotics allowed. How do we do this to women? It is a biological function and yet we allow such violence - emotional, spiritual, physical. I was broken. Shattered.

Somewhere in the rubble I read Octavia Butler's Dawn.

A Black woman is abducted by aliens. Her body is not her own. She is kept, studied, used - conscripted into breeding a new hybrid species to repopulate earth. She did not consent to any of it. And yet she survives. And yet she creates. And yet she becomes something new that could not have existed without the violence done to her.

I read that novel and saw my own experience projected back at me in stark, galactic relief. The injustice. The pain. The

strange, impossible beauty. Her resilience wasn't despite what was done to her - it was forged inside it. This book is WILD, and the fact that I identified with it so much completely took me by surprise. I hadn't expected to find myself in science fiction. But that's the thing about a good metaphor - it finds you in the dark and hands you a flashlight.

Time marched on. I slowly reassembled myself from what remained. Learned to breastfeed. Eventually slept. My body healed. My baby and I became one - I slept with him in my arms every night, could not be separate from him. A new life emerged, mine and his both. I worked again. I traveled again. I had survived. I had, in fact, been brave.

This song is the whole of it — the abduction, the fracture, the emergence. A death march toward a rebirth. An escape from that which tethers you. Almost too brilliant to look directly at.

The sound at the beginning is the most treasured piece of audio I've ever recorded. Twelve of us sat in a circle, each with our fingers on the wrist of the person beside us, feeling their pulse. Every time we felt one, we clicked our tongues — marking each other's heartbeats in a strange, living symphony. It is a precious memory and an eerie entry point into Octavia's world. What is life? What truly is?

Most stories about pregnancy and birth are stories of beauty. Those are not my stories, I guess. Mine is raw and real and wholly my own. The song is the vessel I poured it all into — and like any good abduction story, the person who came back was not exactly the one that went in.

By Erin Barra

Stream "Exponent"