Perhaps I am a pioneer. Someone had to go first. I couldn’t believe there wasn’t a mainstream play depicting childbirth. Women got The Vagina Monologues. But somehow childbirth has been left out of the dialogue about women’s bodies. Nobody wants to touch birth.

Believe me, in the fall of 2003 I knocked on every door of every editor of every mainstream magazine. The response? Lots of shut doors. Either they were all deaf or somebody wasn’t interested in hearing the details about childbirth. A prenatal yoga article? Yes. A hypnobirthing piece? Absolutely. But the act of giving birth? The door was slammed tight. “Please don’t tell me about the baby coming out,” one editor told me.

That made up my mind. I was going in.

Women all have vaginas. Maybe that’s it. Women have vaginas, but not every woman gives birth. I can’t figure it out. I can’t figure out why when a woman’s vagina opens far wider than she ever imagined and another human being comes out this is not something people want to hear about? Someone I know once told me childbirth was “gross and animalistic.” Maybe that’s it.

So I called everyone I knew and I asked them to call everyone they knew to tell me their birth stories. I sent out requests for birth stories to listservs, alumni magazines, midwifery newsletters. I approached women in supermarkets. The response was overwhelming. I needed a secretary. My days were booked solid with two and often as many as three phone interviews. I could have scheduled interviews every day for years and not have gotten to all the women who wanted to talk to me.

I’m sorry if I didn’t get back to you.

First I thought the birth stories had to be turned into a book. Two weeks later I was convinced they were a series of New Yorker-style articles. Two weeks after that I was planning a documentary film. My head was spinning.

I had never written a play, never thought about writing a play, never wanted to write a play, had no idea how to start writing a play (thank you, Playwrights Forum), but one day I woke up, saw my dead grandfather and great aunt sitting on a couch in my mind, sun shining through a basement window, screaming: This is a play, idiot.

I’ve chosen eight women’s stories. That was the hardest part -- choosing only eight. An impossible task. What about women who give birth to stillborn babies at seven months? Birth from a blind woman’s perspective? Women who give birth in prisons? Some birth stories had to be dropped. I chose the most typical ones I heard; the most common themes. Namely: epidurals, cesareans and natural births.

I wish I could have included Jodi’s story. I spent over three hours on the phone with Jodi in February 2004. Her words touched me deeply. “The day after giving birth,” she told me, “I looked like a war victim. Crusty blood all over my body. They didn’t even clean me up. Nobody tells you that after birth you look like you were shot from the waist down. People think you’re a woman -- just deal with it. But if a man had his genitals ripped apart would he be told to just deal with it?”

Jodi, this play is for you.

And this play is for Eden, who insisted I didn’t want to interview her because she had a quick “uneventful” planned epidural birth. Three hours into the interview I had to politely ask Eden to stop talking. Thanks for your honesty, Eden, for telling me that you are no “earth mother,” that you happily chose the epidural so you could “focus on the mission at hand,” and that your biggest surprise in giving birth was how much you liked the OB who screamed like a soccer mom at your birth, “Come on, Eden, you can do it!”

I learned a lot from Audrey, a 5-foot-2 body builder, who had the courage to scream, “Get out of my vagina!” at her fifth and last birth. And Kris, who after her second cesarean, tenderly confessed, “I would have told you before I gave birth that if anyone could push a child out it would be me.”

And, finally, Beth, a feminist social-worker-turned- childbirth-educator who used a midwife at a birth center for her first birth despite being laughed at by her co-workers. Beth believed so much in birth, that birth “is the one thing only women can do.” Yet even with this strong belief her first birth ended up being medicated. “I felt like a failure to the birth movement,” she told me. Well, all that changed with birth number two, a feet-first, breech baby that she delivered naturally in the hospital. She sent me Noah’s birth announcement: “What a miracle! His birth was the most amazing experience of my life, everything I had dreamed of birth, everything I ever hoped for!”

Rock on, Beth.

Writing Birth was a calling. It needed to be written so I wrote it; many day I would say it wrote itself. The eight women you meet in Birth are the most typical stories I heard across America. Everything they say was told to me by the mothers I interviewed. I hope their stories crack open a door for you to a world few of us really, truly know. Birth.