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

by Meaghan O'Connell

  “Okay, give me the C-section.”

  Everyone nodded, said, “All right!” It was like I had just read out from the playbook at the big game and my team had clapped their hands and gone running. It happened about that quickly too. As soon as I said, “Give me the C-section,” I got, for the first time, genuinely excited to meet my baby, as if this whole natural-childbirth thing, long ago thrown out the window, had been a sort of block. The smoke had cleared and we were finally going to do the thing we’d come here to do, people.

  Dr. R. told me she would go write my name on the whiteboard, which loomed large in my imagination thanks to television sitcoms, and she must have known it. Then I would be “on the schedule.” I got the impression this might not happen for a while, and I would have the opportunity to get used to the idea—that is, freak out about it, Google it on my phone between contractions, make Dustin console me, find out if he thought it was the right decision, apologize ahead of time in case I had just volunteered to go to my death. Was I walking the plank? (I was always walking the plank.)

  What felt like thirty seconds later, a team of people scurried into the room. They must have detached wires and tubes from me. I think they placed my bag of pee between my legs. I think they moved me into a portable bed but I don’t remember. It was all so fast, this nonemergency.

  Only one person could accompany me into the operating room, the nurses announced in the hallway. Who would that be? Dustin quickly raised his hand. “Me.” He was so serious; sure. My mom rushed up to me in the bed, put her head next to mine, and said she was so proud of me.

  “You’re going to have a baby,” she said. “You made the right decision,” she said. I shrugged, but she was emphatic. I hadn’t asked her opinion in the birthing room, but maybe I should have. She cried and kissed me and told me she’d see me soon and I heard someone herding Dustin somewhere to get suited up. They wheeled me along, through double doors, just like you imagine. Everyone was happy, and I got happy too. I was no longer oppressed. I was liberating myself from the tyranny of the body.

  It really did feel like that, like man triumphing over man. Or man triumphing over woman. Over nature. What was nature, anyway? Nature was cruel; nature was indifferent to my pain. Nature was catastrophic. Nature needed man to intervene. Science, technology, medicine. This was what was called for. How had I ever thought otherwise?

  And then there I was, in the operating room. I couldn’t believe how much like an operating room it felt. Cold, bright lights, antiseptic, people scurrying around and chatting with each other. It was like being present at my own death, except once in a while someone would ask me a question.

  “You’re smiling again,” the doctor said to me. “Guess you’re feeling more like yourself.”

  I stared at the ceiling tiles and thought about personality, wondering if the pain had made me more myself or less.

  They told me that they were going to move me from my wheeled bed to the table. “Oh, boy,” I said. I was a rock from the belly button down. They coached me somehow and I said, “I don’t think I can do much!” and the doctor said, “Don’t try to help us at all!” and she and another tiny woman heaved me—rolled me, really—over to the operating table. I helped them shuffle my half-corpse to the center. It was a disturbingly narrow table. People had to be able to reach over me and into my body cavity, so I guess it made sense.

  They were going to prep me first, and then let in “Dad.” Poor, sweet Dad, stuck in the hallway somewhere. Were they putting the scrubs on him, turning him into an archetype? Dad at the Birth of His Son. They said they didn’t want Dad to see the prep. They wanted everything all set up and covered up and hidden before he came in. Must be nice, I thought, but also: Why spare him?

  Someone spoke to me from a place I couldn’t see. “Sometimes they get squeamish,” he said. “Does Dad have any issues with this, Mom?”

  Who were these Mom and Dad people they kept talking about? “No,” I said, trying to defend his reputation. Then I remembered that he actually was squeamish, or so he had told me.

  “Actually, it’s hard to say,” I said. “We’ve never done this before.” Everyone laughed. Maybe making jokes while splayed out naked would help me dissociate. A woman had an electric razor out and was shaving my pubic hair. I debated asking her if she accepted tips and decided against it.

  When had I slipped onto the set of the scary government-hospital scene in ET? It was horrific, but I felt at peace, like things were being taken care of finally. This I could endure.

  There was a new anesthesiologist, and he introduced his assistant to me. She was Southern, pretty, youngish, and on her first day back from maternity leave. Her baby was four months old, a girl. She missed her, but it was nice to be back. She’d ended up with a C-section too, she told me. “You’re going to feel really, really weird stuff, okay?” she said. “I mean, really, really weird. It’s so weird. But you’re going to meet your baby really soon. It’s so exciting!” I nodded. She was my new mother. I had to keep it together for her.

  Pressure, though. You feel pressure. How is this possible, pressure and not pain? I could feel them tapping my pregnant belly. I told the woman, my new mother, that I felt strange lying on my back. “I know, right?” She laughed. “But it’s okay.” You weren’t supposed to lie flat on your back during pregnancy for fear that the baby would rest on your aorta and compress it, decreasing the blood flow to both of you.

  I imagined coming all this way only to have the baby die because I was lying flat on my back on the operating table.

  Before Dustin could come in, they hung up a sheet blocking my view of my naked body and bulging belly. My arms were spread wide, the table shaped like a crucifix. The drugs made me shake. I was cheerful and scared and so, so excited all at once. I was running a marathon and would get a baby at the end. My teeth chattered. My arms flopped around on the crucifix table. I asked if this was normal. It was totally normal. They said it was partially hormonal and partially the medication. I kept apologizing. No, honey, no. This just happens. It’s okay. Shake-shake-shake. I tried to treat my body like a science experiment, to float above it and simply observe. On some level I loved being there, witnessing this horrific scene.

  “Okay,” the new mother said, “your husband is coming in soon.”

  “Fiancé,” I corrected her. Normally I would have gone with it, with husband, but this seemed like official business, like our passports would be checked at the end and they’d look at me and shake their heads. A liar. A liar with a child.

  “Oh, okay. Your fiancé will be here soon.”

  (I hated saying fiancé during pregnancy; I felt it conjured obligation.)

  A man’s voice called out to me from somewhere in the room.

  “Boy or girl?”

  “Boy!” I said, trembling, grinning. We were shouting to each other like acquaintances in a loud bar.

  “What’s his name?”

  “We don’t know yet!” I laughed. We all laughed. People in scrubs and masks shook their heads.

  “Gonna wait and meet him, huh? I like that!”

  He didn’t have a name because so far nothing had felt right. We wanted, or I wanted, a revelation. A name that was traditional, simple, strong, but that all of society had somehow forgotten; a name that we alone had unearthed. I wanted other new parents to kick themselves, wishing they’d thought of it first. I wanted it to be hiding in plain sight.

  This never happened.

  The anesthesiologist’s assistant offered me “something,” as in “I can give you something. A sedative.” I nodded, shaking. Yes. Give it to me. I had been basted like a turkey at this point. Nothing fazed me. Drugs were now my friends.

  The curtain was up and my new mom was explaining to me how they would get the baby out. They would not be, as I’d imagined, plopping my uterus onto my stomach and tearing it open like a Christmas present. They would make a three-inch incision at my bikini line. (I had never worn a bikini in my life, and I certainly never
will now. It’s hard to remember what was there before.)

  In order for the baby to emerge through this little slit, he would have to be pushed out. He would have to be born.

  My doctor gave birth to my baby.

  I didn’t even particularly like my doctor. I liked her as a character. I liked her from afar. I admired her. I would never have chosen to socialize with her. She made me uncomfortable. Every interaction with her, I was left feeling like What was that? Why was that so hard? Somehow, this helped me trust her.

  So my doctor, the anesthesiologist’s assistant said to me, would be climbing on a chair and leaning all of her weight onto my abdomen and literally pushing my baby out of me. She’d knead him down from the outside. Shove, shove, shove, so that he finally stopped bobbing and was forced out, once and for all. As the anesthesiologist’s assistant explained how strange this would feel, they started cutting. They whispered so that I wouldn’t hear. What were they whispering? She’s bleeding out, what should we do? I don’t know, but look at this gigantic tumor here. Wow, is this woman fat. I mean, I know she’s pregnant, but still.

  While I shook and smiled at the anesthesiologist’s assistant and strained to decipher the whispering, my stomach flipped with excitement. I was thinking I’d meet him soon, that this might be it. Was he really going to live? What would they find wrong with him that they hadn’t seen on ultrasound? Just then someone yelled, “Where’s Dad? Did we bring in Dad? Bring in Dad!”

  Before I could turn my skull full of chattering teeth to the left, there he was, hovering over me as if in a dream. I’d never been so happy to see him in my life. My love. Everything was better in this room with him in it in a shower cap, looking like dads do in the movies, in shades of hospital teal and baby blue. He had a gown on, too, over his clothes. And a surgical mask. Something about him in this uniform, this signifier of childbirth, helped what was happening seem okay. It was precedented, normal, familiar. I’d seen it on television. This was just our turn. He sat on a stool near my head and held my hand, tangled in IVs. His surgical mask was wet with tears and snot.

  Our baby. His baby. I felt that for the first time, then. This baby was ours, yes, but it was also mine and then it was his in ways that our relationship couldn’t encapsulate. This baby was each of ours, privately.

  My woman, my new mother, told Dustin to get his camera ready. He only had his cell phone—our new camera, bought with this moment in mind, was in the hallway with my actual mother. She told him that he could stand up and look when they were pulling the baby out, that when she said so, he could take a picture.

  He got the phone ready and I could tell by his eyes that he was smiling under the surgical mask. He told me later that I was out of it, not myself, but I didn’t feel that way at all. I felt tuned in, like the thick fog of bodily horror had finally receded and I was all brain, all soul, at one with the universe and the immensity of the moment.

  “Okay!” she said, tapping me. “They’re going to start pushing him out! It’s going to feel really weird, okay? But that’s normal!” She held my right hand, Dustin my left. I tried not to play with her engagement ring. The diamond was huge. Her hands were perfectly manicured. I loved her in that moment, this woman I’ll never see again. I wouldn’t recognize her even if I did.

  They started to tug, and the force of the tugging had my half-dead body swaying like a canoe. I stared straight ahead as if to focus on the task at hand. The task at hand was to not scream, to not use whatever strength I had left to fling myself off the operating table. The task was to endure the most bizarre experience of my life, the feeling, painless, of someone yanking all of your organs out. I am a vessel only. I am something to be pillaged. A cabinet, a pantry door. I am lying naked on a table in a cold room under bright lights, my arms splayed out to form a T, and a team of people are gathered around my body, peering into it, excavating it.

  The doctor, my doctor, put a knee up on the table for leverage. I could see her ponytail bobbing above the curtain. She made a little joke, I don’t remember what, her voice straining with effort. We laughed nervously.

  And then I heard a cry.

  This isn’t possible, it’s an incorrect feeling, if feelings can be described as incorrect, but what I felt above all at that moment was recognition. Hearing his cry was like seeing a familiar face in a crowd. I was lying on my back staring at the ceiling, shaking, tears streaming down my cheeks. His cry, I was surprised to find, sounded like him. He sounded like his own person. Before that moment, all baby cries had sounded the same to me, but his cry was a voice. A self.

  I couldn’t see him but this fact didn’t bother me. I did not pull him out of me and straight to my chest, the way women did in the videos I’d watched while pregnant. No one shouted, Catch your baby! Reach down, Meaghan, and catch your baby the way I’d been imagining. He did not crawl up my stomach and latch onto me. Nothing was how I pictured it when I’d pictured “the perfect birth.” Although Dustin was, now that I think of it, telling me I was “doing so good.”

  I was doing so good, in that I wasn’t having a panic attack. I was enduring. My baby had lived. I had lived through this. They hoisted the baby up, and Dustin stood up from his stool and took a picture with his iPhone. We were crying and kissing through his snotty surgical mask and the anesthesiologist’s assistant squeezed my hand and kept telling me, “Oh, he is really, really cute.”

  All of the doctors and nurses commented on how big he was. I couldn’t see any of it at the time, but in photos he looks big and blue, like a slimy teddy bear in my doctor’s hands. The umbilical cord snakes around the blue sterile paper. There is a hole in my body. My doctor is smiling, one hand on my kid’s swollen balls and another behind his neck. He’s screaming. Why is my doctor in my son’s very first photo? I like to look at it, like hearing about a party I didn’t go to. (“Are those my boobs”—Dustin and I squinted at the photo for a very long time; we turned the phone this way and that—“or my thighs?” They were my thighs. “Wow,” I whispered under my breath.)

  I never even saw my placenta, despite all the back-and-forth about whether or not I should get it encapsulated. That I’d even considered this option struck me as ridiculous once it came down to it, as did so many of the ways I had suspended my disbelief around childbirth, imagining that I would instantly become a different person the moment he was born.

  Soon I heard a great sucking noise; someone was suctioning liquid out of the baby’s lungs or out of my body cavity. We were the same in that way—underwater.

  They called Dustin over to watch him get weighed, measured. The baby looks so alone in the photos, lying by himself on that scale. A minute or two later, there they both were, with me, the baby wrapped in a blanket, subdued in his father’s arms. I tipped my head back, my chin up, to get a good look at him. I struggled to lift my arm, to touch his cheek. I put my face to his face. I didn’t know what to say, how to touch him. “Hi, baby,” I said, still crying. He looked so distinct, so himself, so…cute. That hackneyed word was all I could think of when I looked at him. (“I mean, he’s objectively cute, right?” I’d say to all the nurses in the following days, forgetting that I was in an oxytocin haze and anything but objective.)

  The anesthesiologist’s assistant took a photo of the three of us using Dustin’s phone, and then the baby and Dustin went somewhere for tests or baths or who knows what while I stayed on the table, immobile, emptier, unraveled. “Are we almost done?” I asked, laughing weakly.

  The anesthesiologist’s assistant patted my hand. “Yes. Almost there. You’re doing great,” she said, peering over the curtain. “It won’t be long. Looks like they’re putting you back together right now.”

  Sleepless Nights

  In the beginning there was only me on our green couch and the baby in my arms, on my breast. Dustin paced around the fixed point of us, bringing me food and water, taking the baby from me occasionally so that I could sit back with my breasts exposed and try to catch my breath before he cried a
gain. It was mid-June, summer in New York, but we barely noticed. I was sweating, and bleeding, and covered in dried milk. I felt like I had been camping for a week with no running water, except that on camping trips you get to sleep.

  We slept in short bursts. Whether the baby was crying or not, I woke up with a start and rushed over to him to make sure he was alive. Day and night bled into each other, coalescing into one big nightmare. My clothes were indistinguishable from pajamas. A lamp was always on. We were in the middle of what felt like an ongoing emergency. Like someone was playing a practical joke on us. Endure the car crash of childbirth, then, without sleeping, use your broken body to keep your tiny, fragile, precious, heartbreaking, mortal child alive. Rock, sway, bounce, pace, sing, hum—Dustin did anything to keep him from crying but it always came back to me, my swollen breasts, nipples scabbed over, milk dripping everywhere and the baby flailing. My arms were sore from holding him, my shoulders so tense from anxiety they were up to my ears. To stand up and go to the bathroom without searing pain and the feeling of my guts threatening to come pouring out of my C-section incision, I had to lie horizontally on the couch and then gingerly roll off it, like a stuntman rolling over the hood of a taxicab.

  As the days accumulated, getting through them got harder. We had been home with the baby only three days and I kept waiting for some sort of plateau, some easing up. Instead, he became more and more precious to me and, with every sleepless night, the world more full of sharp edges. I was injured and sleep-deprived and trying to figure out breastfeeding and trying to reckon with the intensity of love I felt, and its attendant fear. The future stretched out in front of me with menacing blankness. Anything seemed possible. Any horrible thing. Eighteen years, I thought, and my breath caught.