Negotiating a Life Lived in the Middle

Abstract

Through a series of asynchronous vignettes, I explore the experiences surrounding my wife’s and my decision to have a home birth. I sought to disrupt the heavy hand of narrative temporality and synchronous ordering through story. The disjointed vignettes speak to the narrative difficultly of trying to parse out an isolated event (a birth) that is fully wedded into a much larger sociobiological fabric. In addition, I anchored each vignette around Martin Buber’s concept of a “life in the middle” through the representation of a symbolic fulcrum. This idea of a fulcrum is predicated on the notion that our lives are difficult to narrate as they unfold and are inherently bound by a multitude of contexts. I suggest that our lives unfold in a sensuous pragmatic aesthetic of presence that is not neatly divided between beauty (birth) and depravity (death) but ripe with potential and meaning that denies duality of experience.