Once upon a time, there was a girl who lived with her father in a village at the edge of the woods.
She might have siblings, cruel or kind, and a neglectful father wooed by the most wicked of stepmothers. Perhaps she’s a princess stuck in a castle, her father the king. Maybe she has jealous stepsiblings or a host of suitors ready to swoop in as soon as she’s of marriageable age. What she doesn’t have is a mother to keep her safe.
Growing up, I did not question this familiar setup. It was the girl who drew my interest. She was the one who went on all the adventures—donning an exquisite gown and riding to a ball in a pumpkin carriage, wiling away her days reading in a magical library, or running from the local cannibalistic witch living in that delectable gingerbread house. I spared no thought for any of their absent mothers.
But in February of 2022, I could think of little else.
I gave birth to my second daughter on a cold winter eve, the first day of the Year of the Tiger. She arrived quickly—a healthy infant with a well-developed set of lungs that she immediately put to use, screaming her outrage at being expelled from my (presumably) cozy womb.
She was fine; and at first, the doctor and nurses thought I would be, too.
But the bleeding didn’t stop. As pad after pad under me soaked red, the nurse made a tense phone call. Even in my epidural-induced haze, I knew that couldn’t be good.
If this were fiction, a reel of life’s defining moments would have flashed through my mind as a dozen masked medical professionals descended upon me, using terse words and gestures to coordinate with one another as they injected me with painkillers that did not completely dull the pain of the procedures they were performing.
As one nurse pulled my husband aside to explain the situation and another offered me reassurances, I would relive my surprise seventh birthday at a park, decorating craft store picture frames with my friends. As the drugs failed to stop the bleeding and orderlies wheeled me to the operating room, I’d recall my first kiss, renting my first apartment, the first time the man I would end up marrying told me he loved me.
As a doctor explained that as a last resort, they might need to perform a hysterectomy, I would think of my stepson (a toddler when we met) grinning wide when I offered him half of my flaky, delicious butterhorn. As doctors and nurses lifted me off the wheeled bed onto the operating table, I would feel a phantom warmth in my chest—a memory of holding my newborn eldest daughter in a different hospital, years earlier.
As they replaced my N-95 with an anesthesia mask that lulled me into unconsciousness, I would wonder about the baby I’d known for two fleeting hours. I’d picture what would happen if the procedures failed; all those moments she would have without me. The scar I might leave in my children’s lives.
In reality, it wasn’t until after I woke again, in immense pain but in stable condition, that I had any presence of mind beyond immediate shock. After the trauma and massive blood loss, my recovery was slow, and I spent weeks rarely leaving bed. I had a lot of time to think, to cry, and to process how close I’d come to death. To imagine a world without me.
I thought about how if this had happened mere decades earlier—or in this day and age, under slightly less fortunate circumstances—I would have died. About the many people who have died in childbirth. The collective weight of all those lost lives, a sort of unwilling sacrifice given to create precious new life.
Fairy tales are full of horror—murderous monsters of both supernatural and human varieties, severe punishments for minor infractions, dark woods and darker deeds. These are stories passed down through the generations to warn us of the world’s dangers. We know what happens to the spinster (she becomes the evil witch in the woods) or the girl who talks to a stranger (she’s nearly eaten by a wolf) or the jealous stepsisters (birds peck out their eyes, or in tamer versions, they fail to marry the prince). But where are the tales warning little girls about what might happen to them if they grow up and bear children?
It does not fit the intended societal narrative, of course.
All the missing mothers shape these tales in their absence. If they had been alive to protect their children, some of the stories might have had no reason to take place. And if the countless real people who died in childbirth had, instead, survived, how different would our world be today?
Now, when I think of fairy or folk tales of motherless children—or read any story where a character’s birth came at a mortal price—I can’t help but imagine another version. To reach back into the past and split off a new timeline in which the mother doesn’t die on their birthing bed. In which they survive, and recover, and live long enough to watch their children grow up.
