The Day I Gave Birth to an Octopus

It sounds absurd, doesn’t it? Giving birth to an octopus? Yet here I am, telling you it totally happened.

Not metaphorically. Not in a dream. A real, flesh-and-tentacles octopus emerged from me. 

Sort of.

The kind with eight limbs that multitask better than any human ever could; though, to be fair, they do lose their phone mid-task just like the rest of us.

When it moves like an octopus, it looks like an octopus; it must be an octopus right? I mean, what even are those limbs? Arms? Legs? Something in between? 

Whatever they are, they’re capable of cooking dinner, brushing teeth and drawing and painting 10 different realistic artworks with all those hands and feet.

As you probably suspected, the whole giving-birth thing was like being drop-kicked into the ninth circle of hell, then clawing my way back up, only to realize I left my dignity somewhere between having NOOOO contractions at all, a nurse staff that was only busy watching world championship ice-skating and my mom and husband attacking them to force them to help me after 3 days of birth hell.

(Also, I’m working on a book about it. Translating it into English takes forever when you’re also managing life post-octopus.)

Now this very octopus-person-daughter is documented in the worldfsmous ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not’ book. How about that; big eyes emoji here. 

If they hadn’t, I’d still be just as proud; because surviving the absolute disaster that was her birth, felt like a world record in itself.