Festival programmer Rijula ​​Das about writing when you expect

Rijula ​​Das says being a words person means you have deadlines forever.

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Rijula ​​Das says being a words person means you have deadlines forever.

Rijula ​​Das is a writer and festival programmer.

As I write this, I am due to go into labor in two days.

After releasing my debut novel a few weeks ago and my debut program for the Verb Readers and Writers Festival in November, I thought I might be on parental leave by now. I had idyllic visions of camping on my couch, nibbling on Kung Fu Panda and Kitchen Nightmares, knitting a rainbow baby blanket, and living my best life – glorious, delicious, with no deadline.

But as Calvin would say, reality continues to ruin my life. I’m realizing that being a word person means having deadlines forever. In sickness and in health, for little money and for free, we have deadlines. But one good thing: they are convenient excuses for not taking prenatal classes.

The state of pregnancy opens a portal to a hidden world, a kind of secret society: The Order of the Correct Birthing, Care and Feeding Of Infants. As I stumbled upon it as I merrily floated through my third decade, I feel like a foreign correspondent taking notes in the trenches of the breast milk wars — is breast really the best? Does the formula perform just as well in the long run?

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Minor deaths from Rijula ​​Das.

delivered

Minor deaths from Rijula ​​Das.

I’m surprised it’s not more socially acceptable to ask strangers at parties, “Have you been breastfed?” how I chose a non-medicated birth. But if you were to assume a random sample of posts in Reddit and Mumsnet, most of our collective concerns are about how we feed our children.

How we give birth to the second position with an overwhelming amount of posts about unsupportive, indifferent, ignorant partners. There’s also a significant but small number of regrets, and other motherhood foot soldiers gather around the desperate confessions with assurances that love, like better days, will come.

Perhaps it is because birth is so close to what we understand to be a religious experience that pain is so closely intertwined with it. Perhaps it is again a stick with which to beat women and birthing persons. I grew up in a Catholic monastery overrun with images of Mother Mary, blue in holy virginity, elevated to rare divine power in a patriarchal religion because of her complete devotion through motherhood. Mary has no identity except as a mother. This destruction of the self, this idea of ​​sacrifice seems to cast a broad and indelible shadow on how we understand motherhood.

A hypno-birther spoke to me about ‘pain with a purpose’, but pain always has a purpose. It teaches us not to do it again. It teaches us to survive, to fear, to innovate and to avoid pain.

But when it comes to the survival of the species, our brains are literally lighting us up with gas so we’ll make more babies. You had a traumatic birth and a few months later your brain quietly rewired the little pieces and what you remember wasn’t that bad. The new baby scent hits your amygdala and you forget how your body drained calcium from your teeth to make your child’s bones.

But for the sake of sanity, I remember that the arts, business, cult and industry of motherhood are susceptible to fashion, perhaps more so than plumbing, for example. And whatever Instagram ads say, remember, you don’t need handmade organic French linen playmats. That poop-burp-vomit-pee-isn’t-he-precious thing you pushed out doesn’t deserve French linen until they can afford the dry cleaning themselves. But between now and that blessed future state, there are a million, a billion deadlines.

  • Rijula ​​Das’ debut novel Small Deaths is out now. Verb runs from November 3-6 in Wellington.