They are tearing down Women’s Hospital, where I gave birth to my youngest two, a girl against the flame-bright maples of November, a boy in June’s fat sweat. For years, the hospital stands silent, as we drive to the…
I began writing flash nonfiction when my children got older and I went back to teaching high school full-time. I no longer had the time I’d once had to write. Flash nonfiction became a way to capture some of the intensity of imagination that still flared through my days.
The spark for this essay began when I drove past the Women’s Hospital, or what had been the hospital, and experienced the jarring sensation of seeing something that had seemed so solid, so ignorable, just…disappear. The fact that my youngest was no longer a baby, not even really a little kid, but a long-legged third grader, added to my mystified wistfulness. Where did everything go?
As I began writing about the hospital, I realized it was inextricable from my memories of giving birth there, twice. Where would I shelve the memories I’d excavated now that the building, the triggering site, was gone? Also: Where had the actual hospital flotsam gone? All those trays, gowns, and mirrors that must have been smashed or stored or burned were details that found their way into this piece. I was thinking about all that changes when we’re not really paying attention—which is almost everything.
This motif of change suggested I needed a slight narrative, even in this flash form, to tug us forward in time. The drives past the hospital mark my evolving thoughts about its destruction. But I also needed to move backward in time, to write about my memories of childbirth and the surreal emotional aftermath in an institution as ordinary and sterile as a hospital. Writing mostly in present tense helped me navigate these shifts in time. It also, I hope, conveys the immediacy of both present-day observations and resurfacing memories.
As I wrote it, this piece became a meditation on time, loss, destruction, and memory. I began to think of the Women’s Hospital less as a real place—it’s gone now, after all—and more as a symbol of what women learn by growing older, becoming mothers, and watching our own kids grow up. How to separate the Women’s Hospital from all the women who had looked at their newly flattened bellies in those same mirrors? The lessons of this piece revealed themselves to me slowly: You can’t know what’s in the Women’s Hospital until you go inside. Once you have been inside, you can never forget. And maybe most importantly, though it may not feel like it, it is a kind of luck to live long enough to see something disappear.
ANNE P. BEATTY’s essays have appeared in The American Scholar, The Common, Copper Nickel, Longreads, New England Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Greensboro, North Carolina. Find her on Facebook @anne.beatty.313.
