Week 4/ 52 January 31, 2017

All through the day, today, I kept thinking: seventeen years ago, at this time, I was in labor. I guess that’s still true, since I delivered my baby girl after 18 hours of labor via cesarean at 4 am, and it is only 10 pm here, now, and that’s only two hours behind east coast time… so… yeah, if I can close my eyes, I can almost remember the absolute indignities of a medicalized childbirth.

Close your eyes and picture this with me:

It is mid-winter in New Hampshire and the barometric pressure is going crazy. Let’s get out of the house, how can I make this baby get out of my womb? The obvious choice was swimming at the local gym. Obvious for me, at least.  So 21 year old, baby-faced me, and my equally baby-faced husband go with my beach-ball belly and swim laps, and goof off in the water. I’m sure maybe I am making this memory happier than it actually was, but I don’t care. I could see the winter sunshine filtering in through the plate glass windows, brilliant flashes on the already set, iced-over snow, evergreen trees bending and swaying gently. The penetrating smell of chlorine, comforting as always for a pool rat like me, and the weightlessness of floating, with a person inside you, also floating, moving against the current. “Maybe now she’ll hurry up and come out.”

And the next morning, you wake at 10 am, and suddenly you think, have I really peed myself? No, it is my amniotic fluid leaking from inside of me (yes, that’s exactly what you think… not, oh, my water broke, because you are just that annoying. Always have been, always will be, undoubtedly).  And the contractions begin mildly. So you call the doctor and you walk around, and you time the contractions and you go to the office, and they send you home, but it is a 30 minute drive back to your house, so your mom and your husband and you wander around the mall, timing your contracting uterus and its maneuvers, and it simply doesn’t hurt, but the contractions start to get closer together and you don’t want to have an “accident” at the mall, and there is a forecast of snow, so you haul yourselves over to the hospital, and they begrudgingly take you in, whisk you away in a wheel chair, though you are still waiting for the pain.

That will come later. When they decide that you are not contracting hard enough, or fast enough. You are not progressing. You are speaking in English and translating everything into Spanish, and trying to manage everyone’s anxiety, and damn, if this won’t just be easy. And so, they insist, and you are too small, and young, and insignificant to push back, and thus begins the Pitocin drip… and then the nurse wanders away and forgets to check on you, and the Pitocin has suddenly taken your mild-mannered contractions and turned them into a bucking bronco that JUST. KEEPS. BUCKING. With no release, and by the time they come back to check on you, you are huddled in a weeping mass, and they quickly lower the dose when it becomes clear that you have had a 25 minute unending contraction with no respite… and you slip into the bath, because you read all the damn books about what to expect, and what to do, to you know, be a good mother from the get go… and it doesn’t fucking work because your goddamn 21 year old body won’t cooperate, it won’t, it won’t. And you’re crying, and refusing pain medications because you are stoic, and you don’t want to hurt the baby that you haven’t even met yet, and he paces anxiously, and doesn’t know how to protect you. And the idyllic cerulean floating of yesterday seems thousands of light years away, and WHAT THE FUCK HAVE YOU DONE? And you settle in, for the long, medically-intervened haul, with doctors that look at you like you’re an idiot simply because you happen to look like you are 12, and because your partner and you are speaking a language that they don’t speak, and it doesn’t matter that you wrote and defended an excellent thesis just months before at a fancy private women’s college, because to them, you are just a body that needs to be dealt with, and a shameful teen-mother at that, and with a foreign baby-daddy… well, who knows. Maybe they weren’t thinking any of those things, and were simply ho-hum-drumming their way through another day at work, and for you, this is the most monumental trial (and tribulation) of your short (but not that short) life, and you don’t feel heard. And you feel small and meek and overlooked, and holy shit, you feel like a failure. ALREADY. Breathe. Yes, you remind yourself, breathe. In… Out… In… Out. The antiseptic space really doesn’t seem that bad, by now there is late afternoon sunshine, the waning day comes early at 4 pm, but this will go on for hours. Each time they tell you, nope, not dilated enough… you’re stuck at 8 cm, and you will your body to do what it is supposed to do, and then you think that you would have been one of the many dead mothers in the middle ages, or in the middle of the bush, with no access to running water and sanitary bedding, and you breathe in and out some more, and probably crack jokes, because that is your general response to pain. And it is dark, so dark, there is no sun and the snow is falling softly in the black sea of night, and it is almost midnight and they say, you know, maybe you should have a c-section, your water broke over 12 hours ago, and you refuse, you try walking, up and down the hallway with the iv drip and the metal-stand from which the bag is hanging, but no. So now it is 1 am, and you beg them for another chance, one more, let me use the birthing ball, and you labor, trying to will your body into submission following the techniques that you learned about in the class where everyone else was 15 to 20 years older than you and made you feel alienated and ashamed for your lack of your own home, and your own career, and the fact that you were living in your parents’ big, beautiful home, basking in the glory of kitties and your teenage bedroom transformed, and it is now 2 am, and they’re having none of it. So they no longer give you a choice, and you are shaking, and crying, and exhausted, and in pain (but it is a pain almost immediately forgotten), and the force you to bend forward on the edge of the bed while they jam a thick-gauge needle into your spine (and you think of all the horrible ways a spinal tap could go heinously wrong, and leave you permanently paralyzed), and there are innumerable hands holding you down, telling you to be still, to not shake as your body rends itself apart in contraction upon contraction and they are trying to force your unruly body to bend to their will, and you are so angry and weak that you feel a flood of urine, warmth wrapping itself in a shameful spill around you as they manage to wrestle you into a moment of stillness and insert the epidural. Then the rest is a blur, you don’t feel and you won’t look as they cut you open, they pull a perfect baby girl with a head of hair so thick she looks like a monchichi from your battered womb. And he cuts the cord, and is beaming. And they don’t ask, they just give you medicine to let you rest, that then makes the baby sleepy and you itchy, because they didn’t read your chart, or note your allergy to opioids. And you worry that your colostrum won’t come in, and within hours, they’re trying to force you to feed your baby formula, and you refuse. And you fight with your husband, because he says something unkind, or maybe he doesn’t but he isn’t defending you against these unrelenting police. And you don’t let them take her away, insist on her sleeping in your room with her, and she is perfect, and tiny, and yours. And eventually she gets the hang of the nursing, and the tears of rage and shame and frustration that you felt at being ignored and dismissed by the medical staff cede to simultaneous joy and terror. What if you drop this baby.  You don’t really think, because the birth is this single-minded goal, but then suddenly, you have this live thing, and you have to NOT KILL IT… For, like 18 years… and so…you will keep copious records of her feeding and her pooping, and her shots, and the teeth she loses, and you will laugh until you cry and cry until you laugh, and she will be your best friend and your harshest critic... but, tonight, on the eve of her last childish year, I baked her some brownies (that she is begging to nibble while I refuse until it is actually midnight) you remember that it was so so long ago, and not so long ago at all. And that time really does fly when you’re having fun, or struggling to keep your head above water, or slogging through graduate school, or aiming for tenure. And it is good to just take a moment to breathe.