And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

by Meaghan O'Connell

  We tried to sleep. We slept in intervals of twelve minutes, then fifteen, then twenty, then seven. All along, the worst pain; rocking, cringing, shouting, kneading pain.

  By midnight I was in tears and cursing the piece of paper we had hanging on the fridge that told us when we could take this whole labor thing seriously: 3-1-1. That was the code, drilled into us by the doctor. We could come in when the contractions were three minutes apart, lasted one minute each, and continued in this pattern for one hour.

  “Maybe,” I whimpered, “this is just how labor is for me. Maybe I’m close. Maybe my contractions will never get closer together. That happened to someone on BabyCenter!” I wanted to be monitored, to make sure the baby was okay. I was still feeling him kick, but who knew? We couldn’t see in there, couldn’t access his chamber. This was what I hated most about pregnancy and what I wanted over with more than anything: the opacity. I wanted him out where I could see him. But before that, I had to be made to suffer. Before that, this.

  When Dustin called the doctor, seeming so grown up in the next room, I got a contraction and made sure to moan extra-loud for effect. Everyone told us the doctors gauge your labor sounds for signs of progress. Dustin paced and reasoned with her and then hung up and came back to me. The on-call doctor had told him that if a patient has been in labor for a long time but her contractions aren’t getting closer together, she “lets” them come in at the twenty-four-hour mark to check in and get monitored for a bit. Dustin gave this information to me gently, without the despair I thought the situation called for. He became, then, the enemy too.

  “No,” I said, crumbling. I needed a fix. I felt unheard, misunderstood. The twenty-four-hour mark of my labor would be at six the next morning, eight hours from now. I was sure I wouldn’t make it that long. I’d never make it.

  I don’t know how I endured the next eight hours, but it mostly involved making deals with myself. Keep going until two a.m., and then you can reassess. Three a.m. Six.

  And all along—pain, pain, pain. The grooves of it were beginning to feel familiar, well worn. Sore.

  Dustin gathering our stuff and calling a car gave me a second wind. It was eight a.m., twenty-six hours in. I felt like a kid about to go on a huge trip. I tried not to grin, feeling the bigness of the situation as I lived it; I was setting off to a terrible fate.

  Then I lay screaming on the bed as Dustin popped in, held up different objects, and asked if he should bring them. He picked up the yoga ball and I shook my head no. I was decisive, certain. No, no, no. I wanted to show up unarmed. I wanted to be taken care of. There would be no more bouncing.

  I hadn’t imagined my mom with us for any of this, but there she was and I wasn’t going to ask her to leave. She was quiet, like a ghost—a nice ghost, hovering but unobtrusive. When she came over at seven or eight in the morning, she said she’d had a dream we went to the hospital without her. I took that to mean I shouldn’t ask her to meet us there later. I said nothing.

  It’s not that my mom’s being there bothered me; it was more that I was constantly evaluating whether her being there bothered me.

  We opened the door and I felt like Miss America as I walked out onto the dais of my front stoop. The driver didn’t flinch when he saw me. I watched for it. The three of us slid into the backseat, Dustin in the middle. He patted my knee and leaned forward to the cabbie. “She’s in labor,” he said with comic nonchalance. “You might hear some noises but she’s not going to have the baby in the car or anything.”

  I gripped the handle above the car window, the one that must have been invented for women in labor. I got three contractions during our forty-minute trip to the hospital through rush-hour traffic. I handled them silently, like a professional. We careened across Houston Street, went up the West Side Highway. The wind blew into my face through the open window, saving me. I closed my eyes and breathed it in. It was as if I were on my way to the first day of school.

  The problem with walking through the lobby of the hospital and riding up the elevators is that everyone at the hospital is having his or her own moment. This is not the story of you in labor, walking through the hospital. No one is even looking at you. People are dying, or visiting the dying, or coming in for surgery, or leaving after it. People are here to visit babies or ex-wives, to get skin grafts. There is no dramatic music playing as you glide through security. I’m having a baby! you want to announce, as if your body doesn’t, but no one looks at you.

  As we were about to burst through the doors of Labor and Delivery—and there is no other way to enter Labor and Delivery but by bursting—my mom stopped us. “Wait, wait, guys!” she shouted, laughing. “I’m sorry, but let me take your picture.” Only one person can accompany the woman in labor into triage, so my mom was about to go back down in the elevator.

  In the picture, I’m swollen and huge and have this teenage look, like I’m trying not to roll my eyes.

  Just then I had a contraction, a convenient rebuke to anyone who doubted me, my right to be here. “Are you in labor?” the woman at the first desk asked sweetly. I nodded my head yes but it was buried in my arms, my forehead resting on the cool laminate counter. There were other people, people not in labor, looking at me. I didn’t have much time to think about them, which was possibly a first in my life, to be in such pain that I didn’t care anymore what other people thought of me.

  We were called into a big room with a bunch of beds and curtains. It had been under construction, and there were ladders and fresh paint, and I worried about the paint fumes affecting the baby. I was told to go into the exam room alone. Someone told me to change into a hospital gown and put my clothes in a bag. The thought of doing this by myself was ridiculous, like they had just left me with an Allen wrench and told me to assemble my hospital bed, but I did it anyway, inching my red cotton underwear off in slow motion, gingerly stepping out of one leg and then shaking it off my other ankle. I stared down at it, overwhelmed and steeling myself for the journey of bending over to pick it up. I kicked it away from the bed, a stalling tactic. Uhhhh. Standing there naked, I puzzled over what I eventually figured out was a stretchy, crop-top-like thing I had to put over my belly to hold the monitors in place.

  Finally—a monitor. It would show my heart rate and blood pressure, the baby’s heart rate, and my contractions. Being tethered to a machine like this had been presented in childbirth class as a nuisance, but once the nurse came back in and hooked it up, I found the whole thing hugely reassuring, concrete evidence of my subjective experience: This is happening but you’re fine, the baby’s fine. The machine was behind me a bit, over my left shoulder, and I lay in the bed and gazed up at it reverently, craning my neck to see the numbers, flashing in digital green. At this point I didn’t believe, really, that either of us, me or the baby, would make it out alive, but the numbers argued otherwise. As long as I kept watching them, I felt like we would be okay.

  I told the nurses again and again about my pregnancy, which had been totally uncomplicated—perfect, even. I had been in labor for twenty-eight hours. No one cared. No one gave me a medal or batted an eye. They just nodded and wrote it all down in my chart.

  I wished for a way to communicate pain more precisely than on a scale of one to ten. This was the worst pain I’d ever felt, but I had never had my arm cut off. That was what I always imagined to be the worst pain: having a limb chopped off. I saved ten for that, out of respect. I wanted to keep nine for the moment the baby tore his way out of my vagina. That left eight. I wanted to seem brave, so at first I said seven, but then, worried they wouldn’t understand the urgency of the situation, I came back with eight. I tried to communicate in a gesture that I didn’t agree with their method, with these yellow emoticons, with the Spanish above it. DOLOR. I stared at this sign, waiting for some answer to come from it. MUY DOLOROSO.

  Eventually Dustin came in and held my arm. He felt betrayed, I sensed, that he’d been left out there so long. They asked if it was okay with me if two residents che
cked me. This was what they called it. They wanted to “check you.” You means your cervix. You are your cervix. Check means stick a hand inside of you—your vagina—to measure how dilated your cervix is. They do this with their fingertips, because that was where we were at with science in 2014: fingertips were used as a unit of measurement.

  “You’re a three” meant your cervix was dilated three fingertips. You got checked, typically, at your last few OB appointments. I had been found to be closed. Or “soft and closed” or “high and tight.” “Low and soft and closed.”

  After the first resident checked me, he pulled out his hand and it was covered in goo and blood, and as he walked over to the trash to throw away the glove, he kept his two fingers in the fingering position. Maybe I was projecting, but he seemed a little grossed out. I hated him for this, and still do, this resident with a goatee who pretended to be chipper. I’d never had a male ob-gyn before and I would like never to again.

  Next came the second resident, who seemed superior to the first in rank if not humanity. She went in and did something horrible to me in a way I won’t ever forget. She stuck her index and middle fingers up there and rammed them around every which way, like she was trying to tear a hole in me. I trusted, with some hesitation, that this was the proper procedure. Someone held my thighs open in goddess pose, feet touching, while I thrashed. I wanted to show up with painted signs and picket about the way this woman was handling my vagina. “Oh my God!” I yelled. She pulled her hand out, satisfied. “You’re going to have some spotting,” she said, snapping her glove, at least in my memory of her.

  If I regret anything about the way I labored, it’s the fact that I let two people fish around in my vagina for the sake of their own education. And then worried they weren’t pleased with me because I was a “three.” I had been in labor for thirty hours. Fuck the world, fuck humanity, fuck God. I looked up at Dustin, scared.

  “They want to kick me out,” I said.

  “Yep,” he said.

  I have failed them, I’m a fool, the person who shows up at the hospital too early, I thought. The medical professionals came back, sighing. I saw my OB through a crack in the curtain, standing in the hallway chatting with the nurses. She was wearing a dress and heels and glasses, holding a bunch of manila folders, having it all. I hated her for living her business-attire life while I was enduring this.

  The resident who’d manually torn open my cervix came back and announced, “Dr. R. had you scheduled to be induced today at four p.m.” Dustin perked up at this.

  “Oh, really!” he said, sarcastic. “How wonderful of her to let us know!” Normally I would have walked away and pretended I didn’t know him, but under the circumstances this was not an option.

  The medical staff laughed uncomfortably and shrugged as if to say, Sorry, this is how it works. I wanted to be mad but what could I have done? Refused to be induced? (I wrote that as a joke, and yet even now, there is a part of me that is sure that someone made of sterner stuff would have done just that.)

  The kindest of the nurses, tall and cheerful and middle-aged, came over to my bedside and spoke soothingly, like a conspirator. “Hey, have you eaten anything? Once you are admitted you can’t eat or drink anything, so you might want to go eat lunch then come back!” News to me. I imagined myself at an Indian buffet, crashing face-first into it and then tearing it down with the force of my rage at being born female. Instead I was grateful for the advice and nodded obediently. “Okay, I think we will do that!”

  It took what felt like ten years to get dressed again. As Dustin and I were on our way out, the nurse tapped me on the shoulder and, laughing, told me to have a glass of wine and caviar. Then Dustin and I ventured blinking back out into the day that, inexplicably, had been going on without us.

  Not five feet out the door, we started our well-worn “What do you want to eat?” routine. It was considerably higher stakes than most days. I didn’t want to walk far, but I didn’t want to be still either. I wanted not to exist. Men in suits were out on their lunch breaks. We passed by a deli, which looked like the only option. Everything seemed awful. I asked for a plain bagel with cream cheese. I urged Dustin to eat too. He ordered some kind of sandwich but never touched it. On the corner of Fifty-Eighth Street and Amsterdam—a contraction. I leaned against the brick wall and then dropped to my knees. We crossed the street to the hospital and walked up some stairs, and a security guard told me that once we went through the doors I could get a wheelchair. I didn’t want a wheelchair, though. I wanted to be able to walk away from my pain.

  “Back so soon?” said the nurse from before, and I felt like I had failed her. I hadn’t walked enough. I hadn’t eaten caviar.

  Eventually we got checked in to a birthing room. My new nurse was named Kathleen and she was youngish and sweet and pregnant too. She asked me a series of questions, reading from a clipboard. “Are you in an abusive relationship?” Only with myself, I thought. Kathleen was proud, it seemed, of my uncomplicated pregnancy. Or I was the proud one, ticking things off: No, no, no. Either way, there was pride in the room. There was a feeling, finally, that I was a good one.

  Kathleen said she was going to start my IV. I asked her if I could get a hep-lock, which is like an IV but instead of being attached to bags and machines, it’s just a little tube stuck in a vein in your hand, taped down, ready for medication. She said that if I wanted an epidural I’d need an IV. I told her that I didn’t think I wanted one. She was taken aback. I was taken aback that she was taken aback. “Okay,” Kathleen said, forbearing, but if I did want an epidural, I’d need an entire bag of saline first, which would take about forty-five minutes to run. Something about this forty-five minutes, of all things, unnerved me. In some deep corner of my brain, I realized, I’d been soothing myself with the possibility of instant relief. Not that I would take it, but knowing I had an out if I needed one was what made the pain endurable. I was choosing it.

  Nurse Kathleen said she had to ask if I could have a hep-lock. She seemed a little put out by this.

  “Okay,” I said in a small voice. “Can you ask?” She nodded and left.

  So this is why people get doulas, I thought. I was going to have to be my own doula, to keep asserting my right to an unmedicated childbirth. I chanted the particulars of our “Birth Priorities” Google Doc in my head to steel myself. Hep-lock. Intermittent monitoring. Do not receive pain medication unless absolutely necessary.

  Just then a particularly strong contraction came over me. Doubled over in pain, I found myself studying the cabinets of medical supplies. I saw that one had been labeled, with a label maker, AMNIOTIC HOOKS. I could see stacks of what looked like big plastic knitting needles wrapped in cellophane. Part of me wanted to take a picture, but when you’re in labor you don’t really keep your purse on you.

  They were going to break my water with a knitting needle. I knew it was coming for me. They’d warned me in triage; the nurses said it would be the first step the doctor would take to get labor progressing. This had seemed like a good idea in the abstract but now the thought of lying back and having someone stick one of these things inside of me made me queasy and furious. To have the invasion—the violation—along with the pain was too much. I stared at the white hospital sheets, then the cabinet. I felt my legs go weak. As soon as Nurse Kathleen came back into the room with the hep-lock, I stood up and, almost without thinking, said, “Actually, I want the epidural.”

  Dustin looked at me. “Are you sure?” he asked in his supportive-but-firm birth-partner voice. “This isn’t what we talked about.” He put his hand on mine, stared right into my eyes. “This isn’t what you wanted.”

  “None of this is what I wanted!” I snapped at him. I had wanted to do it without any help, yes. I had drunk the Kool-Aid. I had wanted a “natural labor and birth” for reasons that, now that I was actually living through natural labor, I no longer related to. A different person had set this goal, someone who’d been attached to the idea of “being present” a
nd “getting the full experience” before she’d known what the experience would be like. Someone who, when she made her precious little plan, was not imagining this. Wasn’t it really just the overachiever in me, my stubborn pride, wanting to prove to everybody—especially myself—that I could do it? I knew, also, that I was deeply afraid of so much and that I had imagined if I felt everything—every terrible sensation—then I might earn some better outcome. I’d imagined that if I could withstand all the pain, take it on and ride it out, “make friends” with it, observe it at a remove, I would be rewarded somehow. Bragging rights? Bodily transcendence? Lifelong confidence? I wasn’t exactly sure, but other women had promised me all of that, whether they’d intended to or not. Now my stubborn perfectionism receded with each contraction. The pain eclipsed whatever bullshit messages I had internalized. I didn’t care anymore.

  People talked about the necessity of “riding the waves” of contractions, submitting to the pain and letting it wash over you. Try to look into the pain and see what it looks like…imagine you’re seeing the feeling under a magnifying glass and slowly studying the edges of the pain…does the feeling have any colors or textures? I could see the wisdom of this advice. I believed in it, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t keep fighting against my instincts—my personality, perhaps, or something more elemental—which shrank from pain and difficulty. I was washed up, exhausted, desperate for an end. This had gone on too long. What could be more “natural” than the end? I was a dehydrated corpse out in the middle of the ocean, bloated with salt water. Hook me up to a buoy, man. Helicopter me out.