Read the beginning of "Expecting" from A Double Life: Discovering Motherhood by Lisa Catherine Harper:

"The story of motherhood doesn’t really begin, at least not always, with the fact of conception. Ask anyone who has found her life transformed by a baby and she will tell you about the time before—the moment, days, weeks, months, or even years—when she waited. Sometimes, of course, as in my mother’s case, a pregnancy takes you by surprise so that one day you find yourself suddenly, unexpectedly pregnant. But for very many others, there is first the decision—the Yes! Sure! Why not? Let’s have a baby!—and then the inevitable wait. Some couples make this decision easily; children are what they’ve always wanted. Others make the choice only after long reflection and deliberation. Our friends, for instance, came to it after nearly ten years of marriage. But once that decision is made, there’s a gap. Some will tell you they got pregnant immediately. Others will tell you long stories about agonizing years of infertility treatments. Every story is different, but the waiting is not. All parents experience that interregnum, a time between two rulers, a time when the solo life seems less sovereign but the dictatorship of the child is not yet an established fact. For many women, it can be a chaotic, unsettling time: we’re not pregnant, which is the one thing we long to be. It makes a lot of us irrational—crazed with the desire for the thing that seems obtainable but which remains always out of reach—until that shock of a day when it isn’t. This time of waiting is a pause, a hiccup, a disjunction in your life when you’re trying to get ready, and you think you are ready, but there’s nothing yet to be ready for.

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Read the beginning of Chapter 1 from Riding the Trail of Tears by Blake M. Hausman:

"Tallulah Wilson never dies in her dreams.

It’s true. I dreamed with her last summer, for four months. At least I think it was four months. I watched her watching the calendars. I saw the reflections of her eyes in the plastic of her digital clocks. I heard the sounds of coffee machines and I smelled the beans grinding. I had her eyes, her ears, her nose, her whole skin—I sensed the world through Tallulah’s body for those precious four months. Yes, four months. No. It must have been more. Five months. Yes, it must have been five months, because the sickness didn’t hit until the second month of my residence in her head. Maybe five and a half.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Riding the Trail of Tears by Blake M. Hausman”