Just a note that this newsletter discusses pregnancy and childbirth and links to previous newsletters mentioning pregnancy loss, so read with care if those are difficult topics for you.
MIDWIFE, n. Hello again, beloved Word Suitcase readers! Many of you already know—or guessed—that this newsletter’s recent hiatus was because I had a baby. And longtime readers might remember that I had a rough road getting to this point—hence the little content note above, because my past self would have wanted one, and maybe one of you appreciates it, too. But anyway, I am doing well and so is my baby, who is now six weeks old. I don’t think I’m ready to resume every-two-weeks Word Suitcase emails, but I’m hoping to write at least once a month.
Because labor and delivery was so much on my mind recently, I was wondering about the word “midwife.” “Wife” is Middle English for “woman.” You can see this in words like fishwife and alewife, which mean a woman who sells fish or makes ale and not a woman who is married to a fish. (That is a good movie, though.)
So what is the “mid” in midwife? It’s an adverb inherited from Germanic languages and it means “with,” just like “mit” in German. A fairly straightforward etymology overall: the midwife is the woman who is with you in childbirth. If I spoke German, I probably wouldn’t even have needed to look this up, but given that I haven’t slept much in the past six weeks and barely speak English right now, I remain grateful for dictionaries.
I have actually read a lot—more than I expected to—in the past six weeks, mainly in short stretches in the middle of the night while I feed the baby. My memory is completely shot so I’m not listing all the books or doing content guidance because I don’t trust myself to catch everything. But on the flip side, if a book was good enough to keep me awake in the middle of the night and I remember anything about it, you know it’s good. Here were my two favorite small-r romance titles:
Delilah Green Doesn’t Care (lesbian f/bi f, both cis, contemporary) by Ashley Herring Blake. This is the hot, angsty, sapphic contemporary of my dreams. It’s got some humor—wedding shenanigans, a camping trip gone wrong, pranks on a terrible husband-not-to-be—but it also deals seriously with grief and difficult family relationships. The prose is sharp. Mostly, though, tattooed edgy photographer Delilah with the jumpsuits and the bomber jackets and the wild hair and the sharp tongue and the secret broken heart is a woman to die for, and so is vintage-dress aficionado and single mom Claire. Marvelous.
The Long Game (gay m/bi m, both cis, contemporary) by Rachel Reid. This is the eagerly awaited sequel to Heated Rivalry—first reviewed in this newsletter in the lost world of January 2020, reread uncountable times since then—about two rival hockey players in a secret relationship trying to navigate not merely coming out but also revealing their years-long romance without damaging their careers in the homophobic hockey league where they play. It is as delightful as its predecessor and I can’t wait to read it again. Of course, all this paragraph really needed to say was “Ilya Rozanov goes to therapy and gets a dog.”
And in books that are neither Romance nor romance, I also listened to an audiobook of T. Kingfisher’s young adult fantasy A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking. It was charming, and weird in that wonderful T. Kingfisher way—there’s a homicidal sourdough starter named Bob. I was impressed with how it hammered home that all the adults in a community have failed if it’s a fourteen-year-old who saves the day, and also that relying on individual heroes is not a solution to giant systemic problems, plus it’s really hard on the people we deem heroes. And long long ago before I had a baby, I read Molly Tanzer’s fantasy western Vermilion, which has a non-binary Chinese-American hero who works in nineteenth-century San Francisco dispatching ghosts to the afterlife, and is wildly imaginative and queer.
That’s all for now, but I hope to be back in your inbox in June. Maybe I’ll even have slept more than two hours in a row by then!
