The movies got it wrong. So did the prenatal yoga instructor, the birthing class teachers, and especially the book, What to Expect: The First Year.
This was not the promised birth story. This was not the narrative she’d been culturally fed about motherhood. This was something else entirely: a liminal state, steeped in dissociation and trauma.
Erica Stern’s hybrid memoir, Frontier, is many things: a searing critique of the narratives our culture feeds expectant parents; an indictment of how outdated beliefs still shape birth and maternal health; and a meditation on how women, in the most vulnerable of moments, can feel like ghosts in the system. Throughout it all, her prose remains both lyrically beautiful and unflinchingly raw.
By layering her own birth story in Chicago with the history of obstetrics and interweaving memoir with a parallel fictional frontier story, Stern exposes how the historical narratives persist. Not much has changed, despite our collective faith in scientific progress, she argues. And when birth does not unfold as the pervasive stories of motherhood promise, women can feel a crushing sense of shame as though they themselves had failed. In Stern’s Frontier, women become the landscape of the frontier–open and raw.
Unraveling the Birth Narrative
Stern deftly unpacks the intricate stories that mothers-to-be are fed while noting how these narratives rarely shape men’s schemas in the same way. What Stern most wanted to know was what it felt like as a new mother to transform—what it “felt like to undergo a metamorphosis” of new motherhood, both bodily and psychologically (10).
But instead, what she encountered was cliched, contradictory, or hollow generalities. She sensed that, even in an era of “the bare-it-all” social media and “‘radical honesty’ in therapy-speak,” the conversations around birth “remained strangely shrouded” (10). People spoke of their experiences in vague tropes and familiar plot points, slotting their experiences into pre-existing scripts.
The Ghost in the Room
At times, Stern’s experience with birth was pure and sacred and natural, as when a prenatal yoga teacher encouraged her to breathe love into her belly. At other times, it was an inscrutable, medicalized event requiring medical intervention that required simultaneous trust in the system and distrust of one’s own body (14). She was caught between the sterility of the movies, the cheerful commodification of the baby store commercials, and the reclaimed agency offered by doulas.
It wasn’t until she found herself trying to swim up from the depths of a traumatic birth experience that Stern began to see the invisible scaffolding behind all of these images: the centuries-old historical narratives that claimed successful birth was a matter of women’s will. If one is “woman enough” and tries hard enough, all will be well (19). Stern becomes acutely aware of the insidious implication: When birth goes wrong, the fault lies with the mother.
And so, when the doctors’ worry escalates during labor—when the forceps appear, and she feels herself splitting and cleaving—Stern floats above it all, a ghost in the air vent, watching her body lie prone on the hospital bed below. She empties out, entering an inchoate state of rupture—a self fissured beyond recognition. Stern’s experience was layered: the felt passivity of the birth process itself, the untethering prompted by the magnesium, and the liminal state of her newborn son’s health.
Stern writes:
My baby is born, only Baby is not my baby.
Baby is born, but not completely.
I lie in the bed and Baby is pulled out of me.
I have nothing to do with Baby’s birth.
I am a prop facilitating Baby’s birth.
The baby is a baby of the hospital.
I am not the mother.
I am the mother, but I am not there when Baby is born. (33)
When the forceps emerge and the baby is “pulled out” of her, Stern appears to dissociate, finding herself looking down from the ceiling vent on the birth playing like a movie. She, like the blindfolded and drugged mothers that came decades and centuries before her, is “not there,” a mere “prop” for the birth.
When her newborn son is whisked away to the NICU and the doctors share the news of his suspected brain injury, Stern feels herself splitting further, her husband Jeb trying to hold her together. They are left to wait for answers, unsure of their son’s fate.
The day when they might gain some clarity keeps getting pushed back. She is stuck in limbo, feeling that she is both “a mother and not a mother” and that her “baby is alive and not alive” (68). The baby’s possible temporary suffocation in the birth canal leads Stern to feel guilt and shame, and she leans into any way she can make up for her body’s perceived failure, trying to “atone” for where she had gone “off-course” (87). The doctors also prescribe her a magnesium drip as a neuroprotectant against some bodily toxicity, and the disembodied voices that come when she closes her eyes crowd out sleep, further untethering her.
All the time, she is operating on two planes at once: She is in the containment room and she is is the vent watching the baby being born; she is standing in the middle of a field as vines grow and choke her and she is standing in the hospital room as the doctor explains the perceived brain injury preventing her son from waking in the NICU. She is all of these places and nowhere (69).
In her lyrical and unflinching prose, Stern captures this trauma: “The pain manifest in the body, burrowing deep down in the psyche[.] That pain is not a one and done proposition, but something that lingers and recurs, bobbing up and down on the surface of the water” (83).
Trauma Loops and Time Travel
Stern’s traumatic birthing experience at one of the best hospitals in the country convinces her that to give birth, in many ways, is to go back in time. She revisits Adrienne Rich’s claim that “the modern woman swaps the very real historical fear of death from puerperal fever and other preindustrial complications for the abstract fear of identity eclipsed by a child” (57). Stern’s experience reactivates those visceral, non-abstract fears, removing her from the present and hurling her back “into the historical world Rich treats as a distant inheritance” (57).
Stern feels that “the past presses down, never far” (81), and her historical time travel is layered. On one level, her trauma experience plays like a loop: She finds herself in the vent, looking down at the forceps, again and again. On another level, she finds herself in an echo chamber of centuries-old power structures.
“History repeats itself,” Stern warns: “[M]en put on a new disguise as the champions of natural womanhood, but underneath, their message—an intrusive ‘doctor knows best’—[is] made of the same stuff as it was hundreds of years before” (83).
Frontier ultimately reminds us that birth is not just a physical but also a psychological matter and that women’s perinatal mental health cannot be fully understood without confronting the weight of the stories they’ve inherited and carry.
