by Amy Boesky
Dr. Weiss warned me version wasn’t easy, but I was game. I had that little thrill I’d gotten when I signed up for Honors Latin in graduate school instead of the one for people who can’t learn languages. We moved into one of the brand-new birthing rooms, and I lay on the table while Dr. Weiss got things ready. As she connected me to the monitor, it occurred to me Honors Latin hadn’t gone that well.
It’s impossible to describe what version felt like. “Breathe and relax,” Dr. Weiss instructed me—easier said than done—as she and the nurse proceeded to grab onto my belly and twist with all their might. It was like having my head rotated a hundred and eighty degrees. I screamed. This seemed like the kind of thing that might have happened in the sixteenth century, in a dark back room of the Tower. Dr. Weiss glanced at the nurse, frowned. “Again!” she instructed. The second time, knowing what to expect, my entire body tensed before they could get near me. Version unsuccessful, Dr. Weiss scrawled on the form the insurance company duplicated and returned to me two months later with Payment Due attached.
I’d failed version. Our options were narrowing—water broken, baby breech. We needed a C-section, Dr. Weiss announced.
A C-section. That was real surgery. Weeks of recovery. I grabbed Jacques’s hand as they prepared me for a spinal and mouthed the phrase that had long been linked in my mind with this possibility: baby nurse.
Dave and Lori had had one. Her name was Annette, and she was a model of starched decorum, shooing away pesky visitors while swiftly scooping up gifts and casseroles, imposing only so often to bring their baby in, spanking clean, to nurse. She stayed for three weeks, and I wanted her.
“Don’t worry about that now,” Jacques murmured, looking down at me with tender eyes. “We’ll figure that out later.”
Later. A core word in Jacques’s philosophy. I was about to explain why later wouldn’t work this time when the orderlies came and wheeled me into the OR. Everyone flew into action. They hung up a sheet to separate my lower half from my shoulders and head and pinned my arms to my sides, which I hated, but they explained it kept “the field” sanitary. At least I was conscious and there was no pain. This wasn’t how I’d imagined childbirth, but there was something sweetly egalitarian about the fact that Jacques—he looked good in scrubs, he should’ve been a doctor—could hold my hand and we could both approach the whole thing from the same vantage. We were partners in all of this—what a good omen! Of course, as I reconsidered, we weren’t literally in the same position—I was actually lying on the table, my belly swabbed with Betadine, and Jacques was standing in scrubs and a mask next to my head—but still. We felt close.
One thing nobody ever mentions is how long it takes to actually reach the baby during a C-section. Twenty minutes. Thirty minutes. What were they doing? How much was there to get through down there? I had gained forty-five pounds, was that the problem? We talked, we paused, we waited, it was awfully quiet, and finally there was this funny tugging sensation, like my belly was a suitcase and someone was trying to pull out the rolled-up pair of pants way underneath all the other stuff—tug, tug, tug—and then Dr. Weiss said, in this marveling Addison-from-Private-Practice kind of voice—“Well! You have a beautiful baby girl!”
A girl.
Jacques and I stared at each other, trying to assimilate this.
Sacha, we said to each other in unison, trying it out. Her birth certificate name would be Alexandra, but Sacha was her real name—the name we knew her by the minute we saw her. The Russian diminutive for a name our grandfathers shared.
Maybe it was partly the hormones and the euphoria of delivery. Maybe it was the perfection of Sacha’s tiny body, her little fingers and toes, her wide, alert eyes. The agony of months of worry evaporated, and holding her, I felt something close to grace.
She was healthy. She was perfect, perfect, perfect. And she was here.
I kept saying her name. Whispering it, crooning it. Sacha. Sacha-la. Sachabelle. Bellie. Belle. Named, she was immediately nicknamed, as if there were no degree of closeness close enough for this one noun. No one name special enough. Each layer of nicknaming made her more completely and identifiably her.
She’d inherit the best of both of us, I assured her. Jacques’s optimism, his keen ethics, his sense of the possible. His parents’ warmth. My parents’ humor. My love of detail and discipline.
Alexandra was a big name for someone so small. Sacha, on the other hand, fit right from the start.
OUR WEEK AT COLUMBIA HOSPITAL for Women was the week of big babies. Ten pounds. Nine pounds eleven ounces. Eleven pounds nine ounces. Big baby, big baby, big baby, and then there was Sacha: five pounds six ounces, curled up like a shrimp, red faced, scowling, insanely bright lights in this place, can’t a baby get some rest? I scrutinized her with the anxious eyes of a soccer mom whose child has been left all season on the bench. “Yours is so tiny,” the woman outside the nursery said sympathetically, like I’d drawn the short stick on a desert island. “She’s early,” I said, ready to defend her to the death; early, ahead of herself, on the ball—not like those chunky, laggard babies! Premature. Pre. Ahead of herself! Two days old and already there was competition. What is it about having a child that is so instantly and profoundly comparative? I couldn’t help it, I was already eyeing the other babies and worrying about their disproportionate strength and acumen. Already comparing Apgar scores as I trolled up and down the hallways tethered to my IV pole. Sacha was so tiny, so ruddy, so crustacean-like. But the splaying of those miniscule fingers put me in a trance, she was dazzling, the others were bruisers and ours a pearl!
She wasn’t due for another three weeks and already I’d thought and felt half the things I’d always sworn were beneath contempt.
I loved my five days in the hospital. There was a system in place. The babies were lined up in Lucite boxes on small wheeled carts in the nursery, swaddled in waffle-weave blankets with an air about them of utter calm. I had a crank on my bed, up, down, in between, and meals that arrived with shrink-wrapped condiments, everything the same soothing shade of taupe, and a buzzer to push for more Percocet, and in one pile at my left I had the last of my blue books to grade, and baby catalogues with pages folded down, things I’d never even known existed—baby-wipe warmers! Nostril suctioners!—and the phone numbers of three baby-nurse agencies, and on the other side intermittently Sacha herself arrived, tucked up by the nurses into nursing position A.
Ah, nursing.
There was a whole science to it. There was a hotline you could call for help—the La Leche League—and within twenty-four hours I discovered nothing I’d learned before was as important or as gutwrenchingly hard.
Nursing seemed to take at least four hands, if not six. First, there was the positioning of the breast (block-hard, enormous, so painful that the whoosh of the hospital gown against it caused agony). Then the unclamping of Sacha’s groping mouth. Grope, clamp. Grope, clamp. Chomping at the air like a desperate thing. The holding of Sacha, so tiny, so unable to hold any part of herself airborne on her own. The excruciating pain of her chomping mouth. Nothing came out of me, I was sweating, Jessie—my favorite nurse, seven AM to three PM shift—was sweating, Sacha was sweating; we switched positions, named them (the underhand, the overhand, the underdoggy, the overdoggy); we tried chemical heating pads, ice packs, massage; by day three my breasts filled the entire bed, the entire room, the chomping and stapling hurt so much tears sprang to my eyes at the very sight of Sacha, mitered in her onesie. Why was there so much combat in this very first act? I was ready to give up, ready to do anything but this, ready to sign on for a wet nurse, bring us bottles, we are starving! Then suddenly, on day three and a half, in the middle of the night, wincing against the sweet sting of her clenching jaw, milk spewed out of me, hot, sweet, sticky. And this was all we did anymore. We were a remarkable pair, a perfect duo of supply and demand. I filled up the minute I saw her; I heard her cry and milk spilled down the front of my hospital gown. We fit together beautifully, I was all
breast and she was all mouth.
Instead of postpartum depression, I felt a kind of euphoria. I called my parents, Julie, Sara, my in-laws in South Africa, I called Annie. I was tenderhearted and exhilarated by the newness of it all, Sacha’s fingernails with their perfect plum translucence, her miniature perfection. The whole world glowing in each tiny eye. Each visitor, each flower, each present was dazzling to me. I peeled the petals off the mauve roses sent by my in-laws and glued them one by one into Baby’s First Book given to us by our neighbors; I recorded headlines from the day of her birth (SOVIET UNION DISSOLVES); I noted the weather (fifty-three degrees, rainy).
On the second day, there was a knock on the door. I was expecting our pediatrician. “Come in,” I called, holding Sacha and gazing tenderly at her tiny face.
It wasn’t the pediatrician. It was Julie, holding the biggest stuffed bear I’d ever seen.
“Hey, Mellie,” she said.
Tears sprang to my eyes—hormones, joy—and then to hers, and we both sobbed, and we tried to hug each other without squashing Sacha between us, and she told me how sorry she was that she hadn’t been there for me these past few months, and we cried together about Emily, and I told her I was happy for them about Portland, honestly, I really was, I’d been selfish before, but now—We hung on to each other and kept crying until Sacha was sopping wet. Sacha was a mitzvah, a charm, a catalyst, things would be OK, Julie would be OK, they were “trying” again, she told me, blowing her nose. She rubbed Sacha like a talisman. “Wish us luck, little one,” she whispered.
The bear took up the whole corner. I named him Pepys, and even though he had slightly creepy eyes, I loved him.
MY PARENTS ARRIVED FROM DETROIT just as we were being told by an obstetrical resident that Sacha had jaundice and might not be able to come home with us right away. The resident delivered this news with perfect calm. It was not uncommon with babies born “a bit early,” he told us. He explained this like he thought it would cheer me up. He didn’t look much older than my undergraduates.
Right in the middle of this, my mother came in without knocking, holding a pink flowering begonia in front of her like a shield.
I tried to pull myself up into a sitting position, squinting at the resident. I had negotiated this visit with my parents—I hadn’t wanted them to come until we were home, settled, and knew enough about what we were doing that I wouldn’t feel completely self-conscious and awkward. They wanted to come right away. The compromise was, they won. They were staying with Julie and Jon, and we agreed they’d just come to the hospital, say hello, and meet the baby. They’d come back for another (short) visit the next day, then go back to Detroit. They’d be back for a “real” visit over Christmas, in a few weeks.
Short as their visit was, I wanted it to go well. At the very least, I wanted to have washed my hair, to be nursing without visible pain, to be giving off an aura of maternal calm. This wasn’t how I’d planned for them to see me: I had dried breast milk all over me, my hair was unbrushed, and I had a blistering headache.
But for once, I couldn’t focus on what they thought. I was too busy trying to understand what the resident was telling us.
“It’s just a matter of days, maybe a week,” he said, as if he were talking about a library book that needed to be held back behind the counter for rebinding. Sacha needed light therapy, and the standard procedure was to stretch her out in a special nursery and beam a light at her. A bilirubin light, it’s called. I pictured a butterfly drying on a rack.
My father leapt on this. Breaking medical issues around my father is like throwing raw meat to a wolf. He started barraging the resident with questions and throwing around medical jargon before Jacques and I could even respond.
Jacques, hero of the hour, took my father gently aside. “No worries, Dale,” he said, not looking yet at me. “We’ll get good advice and figure this out.”
I waited for my mother to leap in with plans of her own, advice, suggestions.
Another surprise: a new side of my mother came out. She didn’t say a word about jaundice. Instead, she set the begonia down, out of the way, came over to pat me on the shoulder a little—she was never big on hugging—and leaned in to scoop Sacha out of the Lucite bassinette beside me.
“Hello, Sachabelle,” she said, apparently immune to the chatter of the resident behind us. She seemed completely unfazed, eyes only for Sacha.
She nudged me over a little with her hip, sank down onto the bed next to me, and proceeded to reintroduce me to the perfection of Sacha’s face. “Look,” she said admiringly, “at those eyelashes! Look at those dimples! Look—” Sacha was grabbing tightly onto my mother’s pinky, her fingers squeezing tightly. “Look how strong she is!”
Temporarily, I stopped trying to read the signs the resident must be giving to suggest which option was better: leaving Sacha in the hospital for three days of light treatment, or bringing her home and hooking her up to what he called a “bilirubin blanket.” Over my mother’s shoulder, I got caught up in readmiring Sacha. I had to admit she looked good. The jaundice made her look a little suntanned, like she’d just been to the beach. My panic subsided. I heard, tacitly or not, the subliminal message in my mother’s voice: She’s going to be fine. I’m a mother, I know about things like this, and you have nothing to worry about.
Another surprise: Jacques was already speaking up. “We’ll bring her home,” he told the resident, without a shred of hesitation. No “later,” no “one step at a time,” no “let’s wait and see.” I looked at him, considering. He had a whole new sound in his voice.
It was really something, this parenthood business. It was changing all of us, and Sacha had only been around for four days.
WHEN IT WAS TIME TO leave the hospital, I was in tears. It was like leaving summer camp, I wanted everyone’s autograph, I wanted to stay forever. What would happen to our little Lucite box? Where would our system go? Every part of my body seemed to be leaking. Jessie, my favorite nurse, brought a stack of forms to sign with my breakfast tray and she and I hugged, rocking back and forth, while I reminded her she was the one who taught us the underdoggie, she was the one who brought me prunes when I couldn’t go to the bathroom, she was the one who gave Sacha her first bath. Why couldn’t she leave the hospital and come home with us? Sacha needed us both, two mothers!
I reminded her I knew pretty much nothing about babies.
Sacha was swaddled in three waffle-weave blankets stamped COLUMBIA HOSPITAL FOR WOMEN, most of the N rubbed off. Her face looked wizened and pathetically grave. Jacques was trying to get the car (24 Hours or More) out of hock. I rode downstairs in a wheelchair, holding Sacha on my lap—barely five pounds now, her newborn diaper big as a kilt on her, and outside a winter gale was raging.
What kind of world were we bringing her into?
“Just take her home and love her,” Jessie said.
And we did.
Help (I)
COMING HOME FROM THE HOSPITAL, I wanted my mother. I wanted her to be standing outside our back door, arms stretched out, ready to take Sacha from me. I wanted her to be in the kitchen, whipping up something fragrant and soothing for dinner. I wanted her to be everywhere, putting things away, getting things settled.
Instead—just like I’d insisted—she and my father were back in Detroit, waiting anxiously for us to call and say it was OK for them to come back.
There were six steps up to the brick porch outside our kitchen. I winched myself up the iron railing like it was a tow lift, my abdomen torched with pain. Jacques was behind me, holding Sacha in the car seat that detached and became a carrier. It took four hands just to get her inside the door.
Inside, our house overwhelmed me. Bacchus, leaping forward with unrestrained joy. The twins from next door had been walking him, but he still had a week’s worth of pent-up energy to share. Stacks of unopened mail on the table. How were we going to manage on our own? The dining room table was piled with baby equipment: monitors, diapers, changing pads, cot
ton balls. I looked around, disoriented. I hadn’t planned on feeling so tired.
“I know it’s probably hard to climb stairs,” Jacques said, looking like he’d just won the lottery, “but I have something to show you up in Sacha’s room. Can you make it?”
I took a deep breath. There were thirty-seven stairs between me and the third floor. But I could see from Jacques’s face this was important.
We took our time. Bacchus went first, tail flicking like a metronome. Then Jacques, holding Sacha. Then me, tugging on the banister, trying to hide each wince. “I’m fine!” I huffed disingenuously, as I fell farther and farther behind.
Finally, we made it to the top floor. I inched my way along the corridor, while Jacques nudged open the door to Sacha’s room.
I let my breath out, half in pain, half in wonder.
My parents had only been in DC for two days, but while my mother was here and I was in the hospital, she and Jacques had whirled into action, taking over my incomplete to-do list. Everything was ready. They’d set up the changing table, complete with its stack of wipes. They’d arranged miniature onesies in tiny piles on the fresh white shelves.
My eye roved approvingly. Then I turned and saw it. The crib from Baby World. White, simple, perfect—just the one I’d coveted. It was all set up, with a note hanging from it tied with an enormous pink ribbon. “Welcome home, Mellie and Sacha-la. Love, Bomma and Boppa.”
They’d driven out to Virginia with Jacques to get it. While I was in the hospital learning how to breastfeed, Jacques had assembled the crib, using the cordless screwdriver Valerie had given us, and my mother had arranged the bedding: waterproof sheet first, soft flannel next, an adroitly folded cotton diaper where Sacha’s face would lie, all starched and sweet-smelling and cocoonlike. I stood against the door jamb, still panting a little, and looked around at the room with its rocking glider for nursing and the blue-and-yellow border and the fan-shaped window, and I looked back at the crib, and I burst into tears. Bacchus, panting decorously beneath the rocker, watched me with soft wet eyes.