A Year in Reading: Aja Gabel

I wanted 2021 to be the year I opened up. I started the year preparing to give birth by reading Britta Bushnell’s Transformed by Birth: Cultivating Openness, because I saw it on ’s Instagram. I copied down mantras from the pages and put them on index cards and tucked them in my hospital bag. I liked how she wrote about giving birth as descending into the wilderness of oneself, and how you must stay in that dark wood for as long as it takes. That you are transforming into something new. I took my last pregnant bath with my belly sticking out over the water like an island while reading by . I related very much to the mixed Japanese-American experience described in the memoir, and wondered how my baby, who would only be a quarter Japanese, would experience it. In February, when I gave birth at the hospital, I didn’t take out the mantra cards, but I did open up and descend into the wilderness.