Topics | Pregnancy and Childbirth | The Sun Magazine #2

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Pregnancy and Childbirth

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Unknowing

Watching my wife, I have finally found the key to the map. I understand why men have spent millennia constructing systems to strip the power from this body: Look how she pulls her spine up to the sky. Look how effortlessly she strings herself between the ordinary and the divine.

By Laura Price Steele June 2021
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Cat Years

He stops short, horrified that he has interrupted his employer during an emotional moment. Bishop quickly wipes away her tears and says, in Portuguese, Don’t worry, José. I’m only crying in English.

By Christine Marshall January 2020
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

What To Expect

Try to avoid symbolism and metaphors, and leave fate out of it, too. Fate was not preparing you for this loss when you were an eight-year-old farm girl and held that stillborn piglet for hours in the barn.

By Molly Bashaw November 2019
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Hello, Goodbye

You want to write back, He died. You want your hurt to be the world’s hurt. This pain is what was born tonight. It’s a palpable, physical thing, an object of infinite dimension that can be looked at from many angles, held closely or at a distance, and always there is some new aspect of the sorrow.

By Brady Emerson January 2019
Readers Write

Honeymoons

A bride’s lament, a smoker’s remorse, a swingers’ resort

By Our Readers February 2017
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Radical Idea Of Marrying For Love

For most of history it was inconceivable that people would choose their mates on the basis of something as fragile and irrational as love and then focus all their sexual, intimate, and altruistic desires on the resulting marriage.

By Stephanie Coontz September 2016
The Sun Interview

To Have And To Hold

Stephanie Coontz On The Past, Present, And Future Of Marriage

One quality that helps a marriage work is when partners respect each other and are each grateful for what the other brings to the relationship. Relationships run on an economy of gratitude. And if your partner needs to change his or her behavior, it’s important to ask for that change without attributing bad motives to the behavior. When you do argue, or when your partner gets angry, look for the soft emotion under the hard one and talk to that. A belief in the goodwill of the other person is critical.

By Mark Leviton September 2016
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Twenty-Three Weeks

Dr. C. doesn’t sit, as if he won’t be staying long, but he does have information for us. He says that 75 percent of women deliver within a week of membrane rupture. He says that if they induce labor now, and Olivia is alive, we will have complete say in her care and how much we want the doctors to do to keep her alive. But if I deliver a few days from now, my daughter will be twenty-four weeks, and the hospital’s ethics board will step in to limit our choices.

By Genevieve Thurtle February 2016
The Sun Interview

The Kids Are All Right

David Lancy Questions Our Assumptions About Parenting

Parenting trends are less about what’s good for the child and more about parents’ need for affirmation. The message of my work is that parents have far less impact than they think they do.

By Mark Leviton February 2016
The Sun Interview

It’s Her Choice

Katha Pollitt On The Struggle Over Abortion Rights

If one in three women has had an abortion, you can’t really talk about it as some rare practice indulged in only by particularly evil women. . . . What do you do with that one-third of women? . . . Put them in prison?

By Gillian Kendall December 2015