Postpartum Horror and the Fourth Trimester

So there’s a thing called the fourth trimester, a name for the first three months of an infant’s life, when they still seem foetal and completely unsuited to the world. They can’t regulate their temperature. They are only happy when they’re in contact with you, skin to skin, like they haven’t left your body. They register no boundaries, and no limits, and no language, but respond to touch and tone, and to your heartbeat, and rhythm of your footsteps walking up and down and up and down.

I’ve written a lot about pregnancy and birth since I got pregnant and had my son in the Summer of 2017, with “Secrets of the Uterus Abscondita” being the last story I published on the topic (and the last story I published– a YEAR ago).  “The Fourth Trimester is the Strangest” appears this month in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, it was the first thing I wrote after giving birth, and it’s about those first strange months. It’s about trying to figure out what it means to live this wordless, animal life, caring for a creature who is beloved and disoriented and helpless, who cannot be argued with (no matter how tired you are, and how much you try to explain that he needs to need for sleep). I write “animal” meaning it in the best possible sense, since the fourth trimester belongs to a place before language, or maybe beneath it, where all communication is visceral rather than abstract. The story is about what this experience does to your daylight, rational, waking self. Since I write gothic-ish, horror-ish stuff these days, the story is a darker version of events than what I experienced. This is a representative excerpt:

Max’s first doctor’s appointment, day twelve. Getting out the door a disaster. Max crying, inconsolable. She stood in the middle of the living room, trying to remember what she didn’t have, but how could she think when the sound of his voice wrenched her mind until she couldn’t think —

it’s okay just a minute don’t

— what was it —

cry it’s okay max boy my max my little guy

— sandals she could step into because otherwise she’d have to tielaces and —

just a minute

Such a tiny and desolate sound, it was hard to believe, sometimes, that he was human and not some other sort of creature, so enormous were his eyes, and his head, and his thin little arms and legs braided across his body as though he was still enwombed.

Handbag. No. Phone. Yes. No. Keys?

max my sweet boy my dear please

And? Something else. She need —

baby don’t cry im right here im

— ed her phone. She grabbed the landline and let it ring until she heard it through the basement door, where a faint light shone through the cracks and —

You can find my story “The Fourth Trimester is the Strangest” in the May/June issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s online at weightless books, as well as on their website, and over at amazon.

ETA: There’s an interview up over at the F&SF website.