It is the same with our bodies; most of the time we have to ignore the narrative of the foot, the ear or the arse. There is a brief period when a baby begins to apprehend its body; I remember both my daughter and son holding their hands in front of them as they lay in their cots, turning them this way and that, examining them. Here is something that belongs to me – if I do this, it moves. But this soon disappears into the deep, oblivious happiness of the healthy. Like literature, we have to move forward.
A vagina is a thing we sometimes notice, partly because we are told to notice it, early on. It distinguishes us from our brothers. It becomes a source of pleasure. It is an entrance to our body. But until it became an exit I didn’t consider it closely.
* * *
My two labours were relatively uncomplicated, and successful – the first involved some intervention with scissors and drugs; the second lasted ninety minutes, leaving no time for intervention of any sort. Both babies were well. My husband helped me and held onto me throughout, and we both cried a lot at the end.
My first child was my daughter, Alice, who is now eighteen. The labour of bringing Alice out took eleven or twelve hours, beginning with a pain that I could hold at bay as long as I was standing up. I spent a full day on my feet, walking around and around the old motor raceway near our house, washing dishes, folding clothes, watching TV with Russell, him in the blue armchair, me standing behind him.
As soon as I reached the point at which the pain stayed whether I was upright or not, all I wanted was to go back, to not have a baby, to have never been pregnant. But there is nothing so inexorable as birth, unless it is death. My husband drove me to the hospital and delivered me to the back entrance, the special place for labouring mothers. I remember that I started taking my clothes off as I was being led through the doors. I was so hot. No-one said anything.
It was a straightforward labour, and in four or five hours my cervix was fully dilated – ready for the exit of a baby. Almost ready. There are stages, and it seemed to me that I was in the final one.
But I didn’t know – although I’d been told – what the final stage of labour was meant to feel like. Like loss, labour makes no sense until it is experienced. Throughout the previous months I’d felt like an athlete training for an event I had no real picture of, an event that might take place in the sea or on land or in space. And because I was fully dilated and already so sick of the labour and so desperate for it to be over, and because I thought that fully dilated meant ready, I asked the midwife if I could push. She said yes. So I began. I leaned against the wall and pushed – tried to force the baby out of myself. I leaned against my husband and pushed. I leaned against the bed and pushed. Push and return, push and return. This was what it felt like: every time I pushed I had the sense of Alice coming down – and then of her being pulled back into my body as soon as I relaxed. This went on for three hours.
I do wish I’d known that I wasn’t ready to push, and I wish the midwife had known for me. But I’d never had a labour before; the experience was not what I’d read about or imagined, and it moved too quickly for me to adapt my training to it. And she wasn’t a perfect midwife. A perfect midwife recognises everything, I suppose: she becomes one with the labouring mother, and can help her find the moment when she is ready for this or for that. It’s an art, and not everyone has the gift. This midwife was possibly as sick of the whole thing as I was, and she was not gifted.
In my second labour, with my son, Patrick, the final stage announced itself very clearly. This is the story I’m going to tell my daughter when it is her turn. I’ll say, The final stage feels like expulsion. The body makes the decisions, not you. Think of heaving when vomiting, the way the body takes over and hurls out whatever your stomach can’t retain. It is wholly involuntary. This is what a real final stage feels like, or at least it does for me. Your body heaves and contracts and forces and throws out the baby. The midwife at Patrick’s birth – a luckier one, or a better one – saw, and said it was time. Three pushes – a baby.
* * *
I have a friend whose grandmother went into her first labour without having had it explained to her that the baby would come out of her vagina. She was from the north of England, working class, Catholic – and it was the 1950s. I laughed in horror and amazement when I was first told this. Imagine not knowing.
But it didn’t make any difference to know, as it turned out. You can see as many pictures as you like of a baby sliding down that birth canal, but those last hours of your first labour seem to have nothing to do with it. You don’t think about your vagina, but if you did you might just think, No. This cannot happen. You think instead of caesareans, of tearings open, of your stomach bursting and you dying as it does so, in a great explosion of relief. All those books I’d read in which women died in childbirth returned to me afterwards and I felt as though I had to mourn the hordes of them who had, and still were. I have seen deaths. But I can’t think of a worse one.
In the first labour I finally crawled onto the bed and lay there asking for an epidural. Every time a contraction came I wept and curled up. I think my body by now was entering the final stage of labour – I do remember the beginnings of that throwing-up feeling, the uncontrollable heaving – but I didn’t want to know about it. I’m still sorry I wasn’t up to it.
It took a while for the anaesthetist to come, because we live in a regional area and he had to travel. The injection he gave me in my spine cleared the pain of the contractions completely. It was exactly like waking from a nightmare. I sat up, I could see; the room became a room instead of a looming cave of hell. I could hear properly. I could see Russell. I would be able to deliver the baby now.
But it was evident that something hadn’t progressed in the way that it should have, and I would need help. I could hardly push now – I was exhausted, and I could not recognise, thank god, the feeling of a contraction, which is what you are meant to push with, or against. The obstetrician, also from out of town, preferred forceps to the ventouse (the rubber suction cup placed over the baby’s head that is more commonly used now). For a few minutes I had been safe, but as he came towards me with the forceps – servers for a terrible salad – I could feel myself going back into the cave of hell. I remember him sliding them one handle at a time into my vagina. Not sliding, not inserting: manoeuvring, angling, pushing. This was the moment I understood that the epidural had removed the sensation of contractions but nothing else. I could feel my vagina.
Forceps in, he quickly reached behind him for something else. Scissors.
Russell says he thought, Tegan’s not going to like this. He thought it because an episiotomy was the thing we were all told to avoid. Enough reading and conversation tells you that an episiotomy – cutting the vagina down towards the anus to make a wider opening for the baby – is not a good thing. It’s not necessary, say the books and conversation, because if the vagina needs to tear it will tear ‘naturally’ (before giving birth you ignore words like these – you think you are listening but you’re not). A surgical cut won’t heal as well, it may cause problems with continence, it may start a bigger, worse tear than would have happened of its own accord.
Russell was right, I didn’t like it, but it had nothing to do with my ‘plan’ for the birth, which was not rigid, only hopeful. I did not like it because I could feel it. It takes strength and skill and guts to cut through flesh when someone is screaming, but that’s what the obstetrician did, and out came Alice. They had to give my vagina many small injections of local anaesthetic before they could stitch me up.
Afterwards, when my sister was carrying Alice around the room and singing to her, and Russell and I were holding hands and wiping our tears, one of the midwives gave me a shot of pethidine. ‘We usually only do this for caesars,’ was what she said. So on that first night the pain was not too great.
After that, the pain was quite – painful. I walked very little for those five days I was in hospital, but it was deeply uncomfortable sitting up to bre
astfeed, with my whole weight on the site of my wound. I wasn’t allowed any more pethidine but I was given Panadeine Forte, and many condoms that had been filled with water and frozen. You lay these along the thick maternity pad that you already have in your pants to soak up the rivers of blood that you pass after giving birth. They cool the sore vagina, and ease the pain a bit. Pretty quickly the heat of your vagina and blood melts these ice penises, so you peel them out, along with the maternity pad and all the blood, and start again.
But breastfeeding was causing me fresh pain. The first couple of times were fine. By the third time – and Alice was feeding every two or three hours – I was developing blisters on my nipples. Her small mouth and its ridgy gums felt like an oyster closing over my breast. I loved feeding her because she needed it so much, and my breasts were so full of colostrum that I was desperate to empty them, so hard with milk that you could have knocked on them like a door; just to touch them brought exquisite agony. But it was difficult to keep feeding because every time I did the blisters grew worse – and there would be that oystery little mouth again, clamping down on them.
So although it hurt, I couldn’t pay a great deal of attention to my vagina. I only thought about it when I was on my feet. When I stood up to go to the toilet or change Alice’s nappy I shuffled, wide-legged, like a hurt cowboy.
I also knew I had to open my bowels at some point. But I was avoiding it. Avoiding voiding. When I sat on the toilet I had to look up at the ceiling and chant just to urinate. The piss ran over the wound and it hurt a lot. If I put my fingers down I could feel the bristle of stitches, like little wires in my vagina. If I pushed at all – and I made a gentle effort to do so – they bulged, and the pain was very great. So I didn’t try.
I had a room of my own, a luxury few of my city friends had; you need private health insurance or a stroke of weird luck to secure a single room in a Sydney hospital. It was midwinter in the mountains but my room faced north and was full of a gentle sunlight, and the days, despite the pain, were loving and warm. Sometimes at night I thought that if I’d had injuries like this from anything but birth there would have been ambulances, police, counselling. If I’d hurt myself this way in a car accident there would have been weeks put aside for recovery and rehabilitation. Instead I was sleeping only a few hours a night and I was about to step back into a life that was utterly changed.
But during the days, when time flowed past me like a stream, dipping and changing in the sun, I also thought, This is the happiest I have ever been: Alice wrapped in her cotton blanket and serene beside me, and the life of the hospital quietly passing by our door. I loved her, and still love her, overwhelmingly. What an interesting feeling it was – animal, but separable into parts. Part of my love was pride.
* * *
We left hospital on a Tuesday. Coming out into the winter morning with the baby in my arms was shocking. The noise of the highway was like a howl. It was so cold and the light hurt our eyes; Alice winced and started crying. I was dizzy and my stitches were hurting. Levering my screaming newborn into the car, all I could think was that I was entrusting that fragile head to a kind of missile. It felt impossible that we would drive out into the traffic with her. It felt as though she had nothing to protect her.
We pulled up at the back of our house, which was a communal area for all the cottages in our street. Russell took the baby in her capsule and my bag and strode inside, and all I had to do was walk across the shared space, through the gate, and across the grass to our open back door. But as soon as I got out of the car something was very wrong: the pain in my vagina was much worse; there was a pressure, a bursting feeling, and then a terrible rush in my pants. I couldn’t run but I got as quickly as possible to the bathroom, closed the door, pulled down my pants and sat, and another rush of shit went where it was meant to go. Tears ran down my face. I could hear Alice screaming in Russell’s arms. I had to have a shower to clean myself.
I’d already given a name to the phenomenon of hearing your baby screaming when you shower, even if she isn’t screaming: I called it Ghost Babies. Every new parent gets Ghost Babies in the shower, because the running water has a pitch that sounds like a baby’s scream. This wasn’t Ghost Babies, though; Alice screamed the whole way through. When your first baby screams it makes you frantic, so I showered as quickly as possible.
However, my vagina healed very well, and I didn’t have any more accidents like that one.
Enough has been said by others about the first weeks with a new baby. Part of the shock was that I was not allowed to rest. Instead of the weeks of rehabilitation I was on my feet more than I’d ever been in my life. It was the start of never sitting down, a period that runs right through parenting life but is at its peak when children are very young. My feet ached. My healing vagina also ached.
Sometimes I put my fingers in my pants and then smelt them. They were – pissy. Pissier than usual. I wasn’t doing any running, so I wasn’t having the sudden leakages friends and my sister had described. I was starting to do my pelvic floor exercises because I was going to a weekly mothers’ meeting run by a midwife who brightly described them to us as ‘going up like a lift!’ ‘One floor,’ she said, grimacing lightly, ‘the next floor’ – grimacing a little more – ‘and the third floor’ – big grimace. ‘Hold and – release!’ I couldn’t do them very well – on certain days it felt as though I couldn’t even feel my pelvic floor muscles. But I tried, and things were okay.
And this is just one birth. Eight months later one of my friends laboured without pain relief for thirty-eight hours. When the birth-centre midwife stitched her vagina after it tore, it was so swollen that she stitched it wrongly, joined parts that should not be joined, caused a new vaginal entrance that was not natural. After this my friend could not have sex, wear a tampon, even put a finger inside her vagina.
2.
In my late teens and early twenties I could read away entire days, get up from a bed damp with the print of my body feeling utterly disoriented, as though I lived in the book. Voices took me over, colonised me; I had problems distinguishing myself from the likes of Zooey Glass, and Nora in Monkey Grip.
I had less time for reading once Alice was born. Russell used to call what I did breastreading; as I was settling Alice down to feed I’d be groping around for my book. I used to prop it on her stomach. Best to read small, old books in this situation – my copies of Barchester Towers and Middlemarch had soft leather covers and stayed obediently open as they rested against the baby. I couldn’t, later, do this with my son, who would empty a breast in three minutes – before I could get myself properly lodged inside a sentence. Alice fed slowly and dreamily.
These old books were about religion, love, landscape. There would always be childbirth, and deaths in childbirth – but never on stage. Always hidden.
* * *
When Alice was eight months old my period started again. It had been nice not to think about that. We’d been careful not to get pregnant, though; we knew I could be fertile only weeks after the birth. We had friends who’d been fooled, friends with babies twelve or fourteen months apart. But we knew our limits. My period started and it became clear that I could no longer use tampons. ‘I just sort of… walk them out,’ said my sister, and that was exactly my experience. A tampon went in okay but as I left the bathroom it would start to corkscrew out of me. I turned to pads. I am wearing one now. I can feel the blood as it leaves me – a little pump, a flush into the pad.
It’s hard to recall those days in detail, though detail was all there was. But life with children rushes on, and every day you’re reinventing yourself, every day responding to something you’ve never seen before. I’m trying to slow down, to remember, be honest about the change in the landscape, which was as though a glacier gave up inching down a mountain and decided to get it over and done with in a day. Whoosh. Landscape changed.
I’ve said that the birth of my son was straightforward, which it was. Both my births began with my waters bre
aking (for most women, this happens during labour). With Alice, it happened twenty-four hours before she was born. With Paddy, perhaps six hours. Some time after my waters broke (a little feeling of pressure, a shove from the baby, and pop – our bed was soaked), the labour began. No gentle lead-up, no mild pains as with Alice. I was suddenly in full labour; I was suddenly in the bath, head down and chanting; I was suddenly at the hospital and the perfect midwife was saying, ‘This baby’s coming! I’m going to prep!’
I needed to be down low, so Russell quickly found himself a place on the soft armchair in the labour ward and reached out for me. I fell onto my knees in front of him, and slammed my elbows into his thighs. I put my face in his lap. And with every contraction I rammed my head as hard as I could into his chest. I can still remember the feel and smell of his flannelette shirt, and forcing him backwards as hard as I could, and him resisting, keeping still for me, his muscles quivering. Three of these, four of these. The midwife was behind me, ready to catch the baby, helping me to stay calm, saying, ‘Tegan, try to be quiet so you can hear me telling you when to push,’ in a kind and comforting voice. I must have been screaming. I didn’t explode – but as with the first birth, I thought I might, and even hoped I might. And Patrick was born.
I had a small tear, a natural tear, and I wept as it was stitched up because of the last time. I was frightened of having needles and scissors near my vagina. But it wasn’t too bad. I knew how to breastfeed this time and Paddy latched on straight away, and we were taken to our room, and Russell went home to get Alice, and all was well. Our children had been born in the same room, in the same hospital, at the same time of day.
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