Word: childbirth
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Murphy sat in on a journalism class where the students interviewed each other, sharing stories of violence in their neighborhoods, of experiences with pregnancy and childbirth. The class, he says, was a success...
...cities. Constant famine, rotten flour and vitamin deficiencies afflicted huge segments of society with blindness, goiter, paralysis and bone malformations that created hunchbacks and cripples. A man was lucky to survive 30, and 50 was a ripe old age. Most women, many of them succumbing to the ravages of childbirth, lived less than 30 years. There was no time for what is now considered childhood; children of every class had to grow up immediately, and be useful as soon as possible. Emperors were leading armies in their teens; John XI became Pope...
Among other things, being a Murphy Mom means having postponed childbirth until your salary has reached the upper brackets and you have sufficient disposable income to employ a full-time muralist and buy enough Scandinavian furniture to induce existential dread. But even at the upper end, where the career track is fast and the dress code is for success, there can come the nagging feeling that this might not be all there is. By then, of course, the flexibility to tolerate a big lug leaving his dirty socks on the floor and the luxury of having time to find...
...Ephron and her husband Henry were prolific and successful screenwriters in the 1940s and '50s, getting credit for at least one masterpiece, The Desk Set. Nora says her mother did the actual typing, while "my father did the pacing up and down" -- roughly the same job division as in childbirth. Henry wrote a charming memoir of the couple's life together, We Thought We Could Do Anything, leaving out most of the bleak parts -- the alcoholism, the bitter fights that made their daughters beg the two to get a divorce, both parents' descent into mental illness. It was enough...
...Electronic Cafe International in Santa Monica, California, the emphasis is on a mix of video and poetry called Telepoetics. At one recent event a poet in Santa Fe read a work about childbirth over telephone wires that fed into the cafe public address system. While her disembodied voice filled the room, images of her performance in New Mexico were projected onto three TV screens...