What happens when a teacher goes into labour during a high school lockdown? 

The sound from the hallway has frozen us all in our slouching, semi-prone positions. What will happen next? Time billows, becomes bulbous with this question. Someone is there. In the first instant – how long does it last? – no one moves a muscle. It is cliché, but it is true, as if our bodies, like the bodies of animals – which they are – know to remain in place, breaths held, everything contracted, contracted. Still. Which is when I feel my belly go rock hard, a band of pain around my lower back. 

High school English teacher Elise loves teaching Shakespeare. She is also very pregnant and trapped in a classroom with her Grade 12 students during a lockdown. Anthony, the cause of the lockdown, is roaming the halls with a knife in search of some solace, consumed by thoughts of his best friend Samantha’s suicide attempt. Maria, the school’s counsellor, is second-guessing her decision to turn him in. As the lockdown drags on, Elise can no longer deny that she’s going into labour. And she’ll have to rely on the students to get her through: Shai-Anna and Faduma end up acting as midwives, and the others do what they can. 

This isn’t your typical lockdown story. With clear-eyed empathy, Born explores the many pitfalls and utopian possibilities of the school system, motherhood, and caregiving, and the sometimes fraught, sometimes transcendent nature of the student-teacher relationship.