The first birth metaphor of the process

According to my friend Karine, female grad students have baby dreams whenever they experience dissertation anxiety. I have already taken note of the phenomenon here and here. Karine has thought about posting a photo of her finished dissertation on her Facebook account as a counterpoint to all her friend's baby photos (I wonder what the grad student equivalent of cat/kitten photos would be?). And lest you think that the use of birth language is limited to neurotic female grad students, at my meeting with my supervisor about chapter one yesterday, in response to my description of the difficulty I'd experienced with the writing, she compared the first chapter to a "breech birth".

Which makes me wonder: what metaphor for the dissertation writing process do men use? The birth metaphor might seem a little clichéd but it has its uses. Being able to compare the writing process to something momentous and life-changing validates the dissertation, accords it the importance that it already has but that others might not understand. It speaks to the long gestation, the difficulty, the highs and lows of the process, and (presumably) the relief once it's over but also the fear of "now, what?" that follows. The more I think about it, the more I think the metaphor is appropriate.

And it's not that it's a new comparison. In her letters, Jane Austen herself twice compared her novels to children, noting of Sense and Sensibility that she could no more forget it "than a mother can forget her suckling child" and calling Pride and Prejudice her "own darling child". Interestingly, in both cases she was referring specifically to the finished, published novel. Clearly for Austen, the process ended not with the last sentence, but with the last binding.