An Excellent Choice

by Emma Brockes

  It crosses my mind that I will never know what it’s like to give birth. I’m not sorry to miss out on the pain, but a small part of me regrets missing out on the symbolism. Surely the only appropriate way to honor a transition of this size is by crawling down the labyrinth of labor? Without it, I fear, I’ll get whiplash. I look at the two empty bassinets at the end of my bed and my mind flips. How can a person go from having no children to having two children in the space of twenty minutes and with no discernible effort on her part? “I only hope they’re not bald,” I say on the phone to Oliver, trying to jolly myself back to normality. “No offense.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  Oliver is at his parents’ home in the north of England. Merope is in Cornwall, in the west. My dad is in London and cancels his plans for New Year’s to stay in and sit by the phone. He offers to come straight to New York, but I don’t want him in the air while I’m having surgery; I can’t add fear of his plane going down to everything else. At L’s that night, after she asks what I want for my last supper and we order a curry, I tell her to ask her mother to come across town the following day to watch her son for as long as proves necessary.

  “I’m so happy you’ll be there,” I say.

  “It’s only because everyone else is in England.”

  “No, it isn’t. I would want you to be there whatever.”

  As I say this, I realize it’s true. The hospital permits only one adult to be with the mother in the operating theater, and if my own mother were alive, I wonder if I would push L out into the corridor. My mother would be champing at the bit to be involved, but she had an innate sense of fairness and I think she would have seen this as wrong. It feels wrong to me, too. I went through the inseminations without L and didn’t care for her company during the scans. I gritted my teeth and got through the amnio alone, because I found it easier to do it this way. Fear pushes me inward, joy pushes me out, and while I am as frightened of having these babies as of anything, it’s a different kind of fear; not a shrinking but an opening out. I have been so stringent in ensuring I can do this alone, perhaps the reward is I don’t always have to.

  At some point during dinner, I raise my eyes from my plate to find L looking at me, eyes wide.

  “I know,” I say. It’s a law of relationship physics that you can’t both feel the same thing at the same time, and in the face of her fear, I feel myself strengthen.

  “Do you want to stay up here, tonight?” she says.

  “No, I’ll go home in a minute. This is my last ever night alone in my apartment.”

  Downstairs, I pack all the things they tell you to take to the hospital and for which no one has any use when they arrive: dressing gown, “boiled sweets,” industrial-size underpants, “photos of your loved ones,” as if I were emigrating, not going to a place twenty minutes from my house, to which three hundred restaurants and two branches of Duane Reade deliver. Then I call Phyllis, the baby nurse, to tell her the girls are coming early and she should stand by. “Praise the Lord!” she says. “He has a plan for us all.”

  The next morning is crisp and bright, a perfect December day. On the corner of the street, L hails a taxi. “Isn’t this great?” she says.

  “What?”

  “Not being in a rush. God, I love C-sections.”

  When we reach the far side of the park, we hit traffic and she turns to me.

  “Can I say it?”

  “I feel bad for the guy.”

  “Come on.”

  “But it’s a scheduled C-section!”

  “Go on, let me.”

  I sigh. “OK.”

  L leans forward in her seat and bangs on the driver’s window. “Hey!” she yells. “HEY! Excuse me? Sir? Excuse me? Can you put your foot on the gas? She’s having a baby!”

  * * *

  • • •

  FOR THE NEXT few hours everything feels like a dream. The balloons in the waiting area, bobbing over the large family groups patiently waiting for news. The rock star doctor walking past and coming over to see me. “How many weeks?” he says.

  “Thirty-four.”

  He nods and gives me a hug. “It’s time.”

  It is a good day to give birth. The hospital has a giddy, public holiday atmosphere to it that feels like a celebration put on just for me. Dr. Y comes out in his scrubs to say hi. Anticipation makes L and me giggly. She buys a salad and eats it ostentatiously in front of me, which is hilarious because I can’t eat or drink. When we enter the delivery ward and approach the front desk, we nearly trip over a woman on her hands and knees, crawling around on the floor and moaning with labor pains while nurses race down the corridor to reach her. “Aren’t you glad you’re having a C-section?” whispers L and we have to break into a run not to be heard laughing.

  In the prep room, the nurse putting the line into my hand keeps missing the vein and having to redo it. “I can’t get anything right today!” she says, giggling, an amazing admission of liability in these parts, and which in our own giddy mood strikes us as mad and delightful. The nurses hand L some scrubs and she puts them on and for the next twenty minutes we take photos of ourselves with a selfie stick and behave as if we were on a school trip to a maternity ward, blissfully unimplicated by any of it. In the next cubicle, we hear a couple—a “regular couple,” as I know we both think of it—murmuring to each other in low, anxious tones. It must be astounding and beautiful to give birth to a baby with the look-what-we-made aspect of having the dad by one’s side. But there is something beautiful and astounding about this, too. It isn’t, surely, supposed to be this fun.

  Eventually, the ditzy nurse comes back in and says the surgical team is ready for me. L and I sober up. She squeezes my hand. “See you in a minute.”

  I am generally an insufficiently grateful person. I am grateful for health, and love, and various accidents of birth, but I know I underplay luck to flatter my own industry. Now, perched on the edge of the operating table as the anesthetist prepares the spinal block, I feel a deep, overwhelming sense of gratitude. I have told myself these babies are mine because they were meant to be mine, but behind this conviction I feel the shadow of how things might have turned out. Now that they’re here, the enormity of their presence can be measured, in part, by the enormity of imagining their absence.

  “This is the worst bit,” says the doctor and for a second I shake so violently he has to wait for me to stop.

  “It’s so cold in here!”

  “It is,” he says kindly. Then he swabs my back and there is a deep, sharp pain. I lie down and L comes in, followed by Dr. Y and a handful of student doctors. Then three nurses from the neonatal intensive care unit wheel in the two incubators.

  It turns out the pain of the injection is not the worst thing. The worst thing is managing the fear—not that there will be anything wrong with the babies, but that the anesthetic won’t work and I’ll feel every cut.

  “Can you feel this?” says the anesthetist, tapping me somewhere on the abdomen. I hesitate. What does it really mean to “feel”? I am aware he has tapped me; the vibration registers. But is that the same thing as “feeling”? Might one be said to have an awareness of something that falls below an articulable level, but that still reaches the threshold of feeling? Luckily, I am a writer and can describe subtle states. “Kind of,” I say. “Not really.”

  “On a scale of one to ten, how acutely can you feel this?” he says and I say a number at random—“Six?”—then he moves up and does it again. We carry on this way for several moments, the doctor tapping my flesh while I throw out numbers at random, until he stops and says, “Good.” I brace myself for the cut of the knife.

  When I was delivered by C-section in 1975, my mother was knocked out with a general anesthetic and my dad wasn’t allowed in the room. Now L is sitting on a stool by my head and the only propriety is a low screen drawn across my chest, so that neither of u
s can witness the carnage. There are strict rules about filming in the OR, presumably for legal reasons, but as Dr. Y leans in to start work, L pops out of her seat and begins taking photos over the screen with her phone. Abruptly, she sits down.

  “How is it?”

  “It’s crazy.”

  I am suddenly euphoric. “I don’t feel a thing!”

  A moment later, there is a tremendous pressure, as if I were being pulled apart lengthways by two teams of horses. L stands up to take more photos and Dr. Y’s voice carries across the OR like a school principal spotting disorder in the back row. “Sit down!” he booms. She sits down.

  This will sound absurd, but right up until the last moment a small part of me thinks, what if all this is a mistake? What if it’s a phantom pregnancy? What if Dr. Y turns to me and says, surprise! There’s nothing in there, of course you’re not pregnant! Did you really think you could have a baby without the machinery of marriage, or long-term commitment, or compromise with someone else’s parenting ideas, or an identifiable father, for god’s sake? Did you think that, by turning up at a clinic, signing a few forms and handing over your credit card, you could dodge millennia of evolution, not to mention custom, convention and common decency? Go home, buy yourself a cat and never speak of this again.

  At 4:17 p.m., a tiny, fierce cry fills the room. Baby A, whose existence I doubted even while I feared for her life, is removed from the basement of my body. I burst into tears. L grips my hand. A moment later, Baby B comes out and L leaps from her seat in the direction of the babies while Dr. Y, turning to his students, holds a quick pop quiz over my guts. Then the nurses bring over the babies to show me.

  L gets all of this illegally on camera. It’s not footage I can watch too often. The babies, two flat-faced Gloworms covered in gel, are blotchy and impossibly alive. I am insane on the gurney, head turned to one side, grinning drunkenly at my two girls. Over and over I say it, in the manner of a woman shortly to be given more drugs: “Oh my god, I can’t believe they’re both blond.”

  * * *

  • • •

  A FEW MINUTES LATER, one of the nurses says gently, “We need to take them downstairs.” Both babies are breathing on their own, but they are very small and will need constant monitoring. I lie in the recovery room and, after begging L to go to the drinks machine in the corridor, throw back the best can of Coke of my life. A few hours later, I’m wheeled up to a room on the maternity ward and L goes downstairs to the NICU. She comes back with phone footage more miraculous than the moon landing. Baby B is in an open bassinet with monitors on her chest. Baby A, the smaller of the two, is in her tank hooked up to a nest of wires. “Hey, Baby A!” says L softly in the background, while the baby looks around as if she’s just been pushed from an airplane at thirty-five thousand feet. “Oh, no, wait—you’re Baby B! Hey, Baby B! How are you doing?”

  I used to see pictures of premature babies in the newspapers and wonder how their parents could love them. I don’t mean because preterm infants are ugly. It’s just that when they’re that tiny they don’t seem to be human in scale. It would, I used to think, be like trying to make an adequate pet of an insect. I assumed that in place of love, the mothers must be relying on pity and hormones. Well, ha. Within moments of the birth I feel a tide move within me. The entire universe whittles down to a bright knot in my core. I think of Merope after the birth of her first baby all those years ago, saying, “It’s like being punched in the face by love.” I think of those stories of women who overturn burning cars to get their children out. I have seen the babies for only a few moments and I am desperate, livid, raging with love.

  L sits by my side, late into that night and for hours over the coming days. She brings me pizza, and chicken soup, and fried chicken from the deli. She instructs me on how to go “off-menu” and get better food out of the hospital kitchen. She brings in her son who is not my son but who is drawn closer to me by the birth of my children. I have yet to do a single ounce of parenting, but something discreet between L and me shifts. A balance is achieved, not only between the two of us, but back through the generations. “You know,” she says, returning to me after visiting the babies downstairs, “their hair isn’t blond. It’s red.”

  The morning after the birth, I get in a wheelchair and ask to be pushed down to the locked ward of the NICU. I am barefoot, in my hospital gown, shuffling over to the incubators in the company of half a dozen other women, all crazy on drugs and anxiety. On the way back up, the orderly accidentally wheels me into a garbage can and an hour later, after taking more painkillers, I put on sneakers and, leaning at a forty-five-degree angle to protect my incision, walk down to the NICU myself.

  They are not the tiniest babies on the unit, but they are still not much bigger than the palm of my hand. How long they stay in the hospital will depend on how well they gain weight and whether any developmental problems come to light. Over the coming days, the bigger of the two’s heart rate will occasionally dip below safety thresholds and set off a piercing alarm, adding a mandatory five days to her stay. The smaller of the two will have a feeding tube inserted into her nose and contract jaundice, so that for hours of the day she will lie under a phototherapy lamp wearing cumbersome goggles. She hates the goggles and cries pitifully, pushing at them uselessly with arms no wider than my thumbs, while I stand stricken by the side of her tank. A nurse helps me to remove her, holding her wires like a bridal train so they don’t catch on the chair, and there she lies in my arms like a featherless bird, the veins on her eyelids picked out in blue.

  Four days after the birth, I walk out of the hospital alone, carrying only what I brought in with me, plus the Chanel gift bag the maternity ward issues to every new mother, while that particular sponsorship deal holds. In the taxi, clutching my middle as we go over bumps, I test out a weird new sensation. I am here, but I am also elsewhere. I am in this taxi alone but a part of me remains at the hospital. For what feels like the first time in years, I’m not conflicted about what matters most. Everything that mattered a week ago still matters, but this new thing matters more.

  That evening, I will go back to the NICU to see the babies for three hours, but until then I’m not sure what to do. At home, I skirt the doorman to avoid having to give an account of myself, then hover in the vestibule of my apartment. Because the babies came early I still have work on my desk and, reaching for the old masochistic buzz, shuffle down the hallway to my office. On the way, I glance into my bedroom and catch sight of the two empty cribs at the foot of my bed. I put my hands on my knees and sob.

  * * *

  • • •

  IT IS A STRANGE INTRODUCTION to motherhood. For the next two weeks, I get eight hours’ sleep a night, more than I’ve had for months. In the mornings, I go up to L’s apartment before she heads off to work, then come downstairs to deal with insurance and admin. The more forms I can fill out, the more substantial the babies’ existence will be and the stronger purchase they will have on this world. This is how it feels. I gather together what they need for their American passports and look into what they’ll need for the British ones. I even register their births with the British Foreign Office, an entirely unnecessary measure that requires an amazing amount of subsidiary evidence, including my dad’s birth certificate and my parents’ marriage certificate, and all of which keeps me going for days. Every day I ring my dad with an update on the babies and tell him to hold on for more news before flying. There is nothing anyone can do but wait.

  In the afternoons, I get a taxi across town to the NICU. The nurses jokingly call it the most expensive babysitting service in the world, and for all the anxiety on the ward, it is a comforting place. Monitors beep and winter light fills the room, filtering in across the East River. The nurses are cheerful. “Hey, Red,” they say to Jane, Baby A, whose hair is now a deep auburn. “Hey, Dee Dee,” they say to Baby B. “She’s so smiley!” They handle these tiny creatures with deftness and love and
handle the parents with the same loving certainty. One day, one of the doctors tries to put a central line into a minuscule vein in Jane’s arm while she lets out a high, bleating scream and I pace in the background, trying not to put my head through a wall. “Do you need to take a walk?” says the nurse, looking up at me sharply, and I go out to the waiting area to stare at the fish tanks. At nine p.m., I go home for another decent night’s sleep.

  Toddlers are too germy to be allowed in the unit, so L gets a babysitter and comes to sit with us in the evenings. Sympathy among the families around each incubator is absolute. There are some disheveled Brits on my ward, who look as if they were surprised by an early arrival on holiday, and whose insurance coverage I worry about. There are a lot of large, multigenerational religious families, both Muslim and Orthodox Jewish, all of whom deal unflinchingly with the number of naked boobs on display. (We are supposed to call a nurse to put screens up when we breast-fed, but most of us are too distracted to bother. Jane is still too small for the breast, but Dee Dee is big enough, although I manage to breast-feed her only one time in three. Trying to breast-feed a premature baby is like trying to get a kitten to blow up a beach ball.)

  Success is measured in tiny increments of weight gain and the size and contents of their diapers. When one of my babies does a poo that weighs more than some babies on the unit I feel like I’ve won the Olympics. One day, I am feeding Dee Dee when an alarm call goes off at a neighboring incubator. Within seconds, a team of doctors have crossed the ward to reach him and yank closed the curtains. That evening the mother emerges looking dreadful. “I don’t know if you . . . Did you see what happened this afternoon?” she says to me.