by Hope Jahren
“What?” I cry out, more terrified than angry. “How can they do that? It’s my lab; I built that place—”
“I know, I know…,” sighs my husband. “They’re assholes.” But he says it gently, to soothe me too.
“I didn’t know they could do this,” I respond as the hurt starts to sink in. “Why? Did he say why?” I ask, and the many, many times in my life when I have pleaded this question “Why?” to those in power come back to me, as does the fact that I have never, ever been given an answer that’s good enough for me.
“Oh, some bullshit about liability and insurance,” he answered, and then continued, “They’re cavemen. We knew that.”
I begin ranting, “What the fuck? Half of these guys are drunk in their offices…and hitting on students…and I’m the liability?”
“Listen, here’s the reality. They don’t want to look at a pregnant woman, and you’re the only one who has ever set foot in this building. They can’t deal. It’s simple,” he says softly, and his anger is calmer than mine.
Part of me is still flabbergasted. “He told you to tell me? Why didn’t he come and tell me himself?”
“He’s afraid of you, is my guess. They’re all cowards.”
I shake my head and clench my teeth. “No, no, no!” I insist.
“Hope, we can’t do anything about this,” he says quietly, wretchedly. “He’s the boss.” Clint is wearing the same soul-worried look that I once saw on a magnificent and ancient elephant that had lost its mate of thirty years. He knows how much it hurts me to be banned from my own lab, from the place where I feel happy and safe—especially now—and from the only place that I truly regard as home.
In frustration I grab my empty coffee cup and hurl it to the floor with all my might. It bounces on the carpet and does not break but instead rocks itself into a smug and leisurely sideways pose. In it I see yet more evidence of my powerlessness, even over things small and meaningless, and I sit down, put my head in my hands, and sob onto my desk.
“I don’t want this anymore,” I choke out while practically keening, and Clint stands and witnesses my pain, and the weight on his heart doubles, and doubles again. After my crying has abated, we sit together in silence and sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof.
Two years later Clint would tell me that all his affection for Hopkins died on that day, and that he had never forgiven them for hurting me. We talked about it with the benefit of distance and hindsight—how it probably was just for liability reasons and nobody’s fault—but then we stood together, joined hands, gathered all of our loved ones and a few of our belongings, and moved thousands of miles away. And yet again I built up my lab from zero, with Bill at the middle of it. But on the day that I throw my coffee cup, I cry because I can see only what I am losing and not what I will gain, which is hidden from me by my two-inch-thick uterus.
After I am banned from the department, I am at loose ends during the day, so I schedule my prenatal visits for the morning. I show up and the nurses and techs weigh me and ultrasound me and deliver the astounding news that I am one week more pregnant than I was one week ago. Strangers ask me how many “months along” I am, and when I answer “eleven” they expect me to laugh with them, but I fail even in this small thing.
I know that I am supposed to be happy and excited. I am supposed to be shopping and painting and talking lovingly to the baby inside me. I am supposed to celebrate the ripening fruit of love and luxuriate in the fullness of my womb. But I don’t do any of this. Instead I grieve long and hard for the part of my life that is over now that this baby has come. I should revel in expectation, and daydream in circles about the mysterious identity of this person coming together inside me. But I don’t, because I already know him. From the first, I sensed that he would be a boy, and I knew he would have blond hair and blue eyes like his father.
I understood that he would have my father’s name and his own personality. That he would be as hardy as all Viking men and women are, and that he will justifiably hate me for being an unfit mother, that part of me having grown up under too much shade and wizened without flowering properly. I breathe in and out, I drink gallons of milk and eat buckets of spaghetti and sleep many hours each day, and I try to focus on the fact that I am at least sharing my rich blood with him, passively giving him what he needs, for now. I try not to think about my troubled mind. I try not to wonder when will be the next time that I lose my mind.
I sit in a waiting room with fifteen-year-old pregnant girls, each facing a wall of trouble much taller than mine, but I am numb to the gratitude that this should inspire. I am so sad that I cannot cry, and so empty that I cannot pray. The doctor calls me in and I notice that she is not wearing earrings. Neither am I. I reflect incongruously on the relative rarity with which I meet a woman who is not wearing earrings.
“Well, you’re pretty big, but otherwise you’re right where you should be,” she announces, looking at my chart. “The baby’s heartbeat is strong, and your blood sugar is normal. This is almost over,” she says, and she looks at me hard. She hands me some pamphlets and asks, “Have you thought about contraception for after the birth? I suppose that you know that you can get pregnant even if you are breast-feeding.”
My mind spins. This last stage of pregnancy has been positively surreal. Acquaintances ask me when I will have my second kid. Doctors prod me toward contraception. How bizarre to question a woman who can’t even picture herself with one baby about the logistics (or not) of a second.
I stammer confusedly, “I don’t think I can breast-feed. I mean, I have to work, and if I need medication or something—”
“It’s okay,” my doctor interrupts. “He will grow fine on formula. I am not worried about that.”
Her forgiveness for the very first of my failures toward this baby is so automatic and freely given that it pierces me. I feel the old childish hope involuntarily stirred, that perhaps this woman cares and understands. After all, she has my chart. Maybe she noticed all the ECT and hospital stays and medications. Then I catch myself and listlessly wonder again for which of my sins I am being punished. I am sick to death of this wound that will not close; of how my babyish heart mistakes any simple kindness from a woman for a breadcrumb trail leading to the soft love of a mother or the fond approval of a grandmother. I am tired of carrying this dull orphan-pain, for though it has lost its power to surprise, every season it still reaps its harvest of hurt. This woman is my doctor; she is not my mother, I tell myself firmly, and I am humiliated in my need, even to myself. More immediate is the fact that someone somewhere who makes the schedules has already decreed that we have exactly twelve minutes for each other.
After we confirm my next appointment, I leave the doctor’s office. On my way out, I go into the bathroom and I vomit and shake, and afterward I don’t recognize the person in the mirror. She looks so sad and tired and greasy that I feel sorry for her, even before I fully understand that she is me.
After five o’clock, when everyone in the building has gone home for the day, I take Reba and sneak into the lab. I cannot do anything productive, but I instinctively resist the cruelty of my department chair’s order by staging a sort of one-woman pregnant sit-in. When Bill walks in at seven-thirty, returning from his first meal of the day, to find me sitting in the dark, I hastily rub my face in order to hide the fact that I’ve been unable to stop crying. He turns on all the lights and systematically begins to update me on each of our projects, reciting a detailed status for each one, a long, comforting litany providing concrete evidence that everything is actually okay. He is exhausted from doing both of our jobs, but the rockier the ground, the harder he pulls the plow.
He doesn’t know exactly what’s been wrong with me or why I’ve been so absent. Neither do my friends or family, such as I have. And no one asks. I suppose that my lineage has been hiding the crazy for so many generations that my secrecy on these matters was genetically hardwired.
Bill assures me that it’s okay for me to
just stay home. “Seriously, no one is going to come in here; you don’t have to guard the place at night.” He looks around surreptitiously and adds, “Not with all the knives and shit I have in here,” as he pretends to fumble nervously with one of the cabinets. This preposterous statement represents a new high-water mark in Bill’s desperate efforts to make me laugh, or at least to provoke a sign of the old me when our paths do cross. Although we are both at a loss as to how to kill the despondent zombie that has taken over his best friend’s ballooning frame, he does keep trying.
“Jesus, you look miserable,” he says. “Why don’t you go slaughter a pig or something? Isn’t that what makes your people happy?” Bill is exasperated.
“Well, I am hungry…,” I offer.
With much effort, we walk (I waddle) to Bill’s house and then watch reruns of The Sopranos while I eat the box of doughnuts that we bought on the way. At nine o’clock, when Clint comes to pick me up and drive me the three blocks home, he opens the back door and hands me in, and tears roll down my face as we pretend that our car is a taxi.
It is a good omen when you observe an experiment closely, prepared for the data to be subtle, but what you see is clear, forceful, and obvious beyond misinterpretation. I have been warned repeatedly that water-breaking could be ambiguous, but later that evening while sitting on the couch, I spontaneously find myself immersed in about a gallon of fluid. As the tide rises, I set my jaw and remark to Clint that we should probably go to the hospital.
As he helps me up, he notices that my hands are shaking. “We are going to the best hospital in the world,” he reminds me calmly, and his confidence proves contagious. I gather my weak determination and we pack up and drive downtown. It is about ten-thirty in the evening, and as we pass through the miles of Baltimore urban housing projects I see people trudging home after their long day out, needing rest but not anticipating any.
We enter the hospital, and I am immediately comforted by the bright lights and buzzing activity, and strangely enough, an old feeling of safety comes back from my hospital pharmacy days. Each one of these busy people has a mission, and taking care of me is just a routine part of their huge, choreographed collective task. Whatever happens, I will not be alone, and somebody else will be the strong, prepared, alert, and responsible one. A plan is coming together: everybody will stay up all night and we will figure this thing out. I start to relax.
We share the elevator up to the maternity ward with an older patient who is being wheeled elsewhere by a young and bored orderly. She looks at my mammoth abdomen. “You ready for this?” she asks, and then shakes her head in wry amusement when I stare back at her dumbly, unable to formulate an answer.
When we get to the registration desk, a huge woman swoops in after eyeing me and says to the receptionist, “I want her; she’s got good veins,” and thus designates herself as my nurse. I look at the backs of my hands that are like my father’s and upon which the blood vessels have always stood out clearly, and I decide that this is also a good omen. The nurse leads us to a private room and ushers Clint toward a chair in the corner; he is to sit near the foot of the bed and keep himself out of the way. He complies.
“This is not about you,” she explains to him over her shoulder as she guides me into the bathroom.
With great effort, I use the toilet and then change into a hospital gown. The nurse helps me up onto the bed and swabs both of my wrists with alcohol. She then pulls out ten or twenty needles, electrodes, clamps, and bands and begins to attach them to me in myriad ways and places. After she finishes she plugs each one separately into the machines and monitors that have begun to crowd around my bed as if they are eager to be included in whatever is going on. Once everything is turned on, I am surrounded by their friendly electronic faces on all sides, and each continuously repeats to me its own soothing story, as if they all understand that there is no upper limit to the amount of reassurance that I will require during my ordeal.
The physician’s assistant walks in. “Will you consider medication to help manage your discomfort during the birth?” he asks.
“Yes. Yes, I will,” I answer, using his same dry tone that belies the fact that I have never been more passionately sincere in my whole life.
“Good for you,” mumbles my nurse under her breath. “Ain’t no reason for you to be in all that pain.” When I hear this I realize that I have just made her shift a whole lot easier.
Every couple of hours a different doctor who is also a professor herds a gaggle of medical students through my room and introduces me as a case study. He summarizes the results of all of my prenatal visits and lists the medications that I have taken in a terse and disjointed monotone, making the whole thing sound like an e. e. cummings poem that didn’t quite make his editor’s cut. Then he asks his cohort, “So what do we surmise about the fetus in this situation?” and the group responds with the same dumb silence one would get upon querying a flock of sheep.
Finally my nurse breaks in, saying, “Well, look at her. That baby ain’t premature, and it ain’t underweight neither.” As she shakes her head in disgust, I see one of the students standing in the back yawn massively while looking right at me, and without even bothering to hide it.
I suddenly become incensed and it probably shows up on the electrocardiogram to my left. Instantly thrown back fifteen years, I am again a college girl who desperately wants to go to medical school but knows from the start that she doesn’t have the money and has no way to get it. I came from a line of women who could catch and pluck an owl, boil it up for the kids and crack the marrow out for the baby, then drink the boil water because that was all that was left. I was the girl who could pull leeches off of herself and wasn’t afraid of spiders, snakes, dirt, or the dark. I am suddenly again the girl who, having secured a scholarship that also paid for books, immediately went to the bookstore and bought all the medical texts in addition to the course books that she actually needed.
There these medical students are, on the other side of a heavy iron door that has been locked against me, and instead of glorying within the inner sanctum, they seem to be throwing it all away. I then proceed to wonder indignantly why these little bastards think they are even fit to measure my cervix. My rage awakens a bit of the old me, and in my head I edit the version of these events that I will relate to Bill, and here insert myself yelling: “Write it down, motherfuckers; I’m going to be on the test!”
The professor interrupts my internal tirade by announcing, “She has a severe risk for postpartum psychosis and will be observed accordingly,” and just like that, he has given voice to something we all suspected but that love and hope had both conspired to keep silent. I perk up, damned interested in what he might say next. Upon receipt of this novel tidbit of information, the students visually scrutinize me anew and appear so nonplussed with my sane presentation that I consider feigning a hallucination in order to validate the professor’s point.
While looking around the room in consternation I lock eyes with Clint, who is sitting meekly in his corner chair with his legs crossed. Using the telepathic bond peculiar to married couples, we communicate our mutual recognition of the moment’s absurdity and I burst out laughing for the first time in weeks. It then occurs to me that I am feeling the best that I have in months, now that I am perched securely in my wiry little nest of beeping machines.
Immune to both mirth and sorrow, the doctor consults his watch and walks out, with the students trailing behind like the world’s lamest paparazzi following the world’s most uninteresting celebrity. My anger relents when I suppose that they also have a long night ahead of them. My cooler head then leads me to consider the possibility that dreaming of being a doctor and the reality of navigating medical school are maybe not the same thing, and I also admit that my own demeanor during the past several months hasn’t put me in a good position to condemn flat affect when displayed by others.
A surgical nurse enters with what looks like a rolled-up beach towel and proceeds to unroll
it across the length of two stainless-steel trays. As he does this, I see that the inside of the sterile cloth is lined with dozens of scalpels, scissors, and various small glinting bladed objects. The assistant leaves and then returns with another towel, identical to the first, and repeats his actions onto two additional trays.
“Oh boy,” I observe. “That’s a lot of knives.”
The nurse looks at me and continues with his task, explaining, “Yeah, this doctor likes to have a second set ready, in case something drops.” I am not as comforted as I should be by this assurance that duplicates will be at the ready once the blades start to fly around, but I keep my misgivings to myself as he walks out.
I am gratefully surprised to see my breast-feeding-neutral doctor walk in and announce that she will be attending the birth; I had been told repeatedly to expect any of the doctors who populated my “caregiving team” and was prepared for a virtual stranger, unable to recall even half of the medical characters who had traipsed across the stage of my life during the past nine months.
“I am glad that it’s going to be you,” I tell her with the trust and affection of a child.
She looks over my chart. “How are you doing?”
“I’m scared,” I say, because it is true. I have always been convinced that I will die during childbirth. This is not only because I could never imagine myself as a mother; it is also fueled by my suspicion that this is how my maternal grandmother died. My mother never says much about her own mother, nor her brothers and sisters, except that the ones who survived childhood numbered more than ten. Diskutere fortiden gir ingenting (You can’t change the past by talking about it).
The doctor stops and looks at me. “If something happens to you,” she assures me, “we can have you prepped and in the operating room in forty-five seconds,” and I am momentarily enthralled by the idea that there must be another room around the corner with even more numerous—and far more sophisticated—instruments in it than this one.