For what feels like the twelfth time today, I get undressed. I use the toilet. I contemplate trying out the enema but feel queasy at the thought. When I come back into the room, Dad is sitting on a built-in bench near the window, staring at the ground.
I get into the bed. The nurse works on me silently, taking my blood pressure, hooking me up to a monitor. She tells me she needs to take some blood. I nod, not knowing why or what this means, amazed by how docile I am, by the docility that hospitals seem to manufacture. If she had told me she needed a part of my frontal lobe, I might also have nodded. I have another contraction as she is drawing out my blood, and the needle slips out, and she holds my arm roughly as I quake in pain and she jabs around, trying to refind the vein. It slips out again and she tries two, three more times, before getting it in.
“Sorry,” she says, “that’s going to be a big bruise.”
I stare at her pale, impassive face, feeling almost impressed by her unconcern. I could be anyone, or no one, or everyone. I don’t matter. She is performing her job on my body, which would seem, by her demeanor, to have nothing to do with my person. After taking what feels like a gallon of my blood, she tells me that the doctor will be in soon.
“Is it Dr. Lang?”
“No,” she says. “Dr. Lang is off tonight. You’ll be with Dr. Howard.”
“Dad,” I say when she leaves the room. “You okay?”
He comes over to the bed. He looks confused. “Yes, of course. Are you? How do you feel?”
“I’m fine right now. Until the next go-round.”
The door opens and Dr. Howard strides in. She is Dr. Lang’s opposite—a tall robust black woman with shiny magenta lips.
“Dr. Howard,” she says, taking my hand. “You ready to have a baby?”
I start to reply and have a contraction instead. They seem to be happening faster. “You’re okay. Try to breathe through it. That’s good. You’re okay.” I realize that I am gripping Dr. Howard’s hand. She pats my back firmly with her other hand. My dad stands near the bed awkwardly. Of all his awkward days, I think, trying not to writhe, wanting to spare him the distress of seeing me writhe, this is his most awkward day.
“I want to check your cervix. If you want an epidural, now would be the time to get one.”
“Will it hurt?” I ask.
Dr. Howard smiles. “There will be some pain and pressure, yes. But it’s nothing compared to squeezing out a baby without one. Given your preeclampsia, we do not want a drawn out and unnecessarily painful labor, so I’d recommend it. I think Dr. Lang would agree. Says here your induction was scheduled for midweek next week—you beat him to it!”
“I’ll get one. An epidural.”
“Good. I’m going to take a peek at the baby too.” She turns to Dad. “Hello,” then, looking at me, “do you want your—friend?—here in the room?”
“I’m her father,” my dad says at the same time that I say, “He’s my dad.” He looks like he wants to hurl himself into the sealed window, less to escape than to knock himself unconscious.
“I think probably, um, outside—right, Dad?”
Dad nods, turns to go, then fumbles back toward me. We both wince—me as another wave of pain begins and him as he kisses my head briefly before bolting out the door.
Dear Mom,
Here’s what I remember:
Dr. Howard checking my cervix, which set off a contraction so powerful I temporarily went blind. A nurse—the same one as before—coming in to say there was a problem at the lab, and she needed to draw more blood before the anesthesiologist could give me an epidural. Me, shuddering in the aftermath of the contraction as the nurse sought out a vein yet again. The doctor telling me I was 9 centimeters dilated and the baby would be born sometime this morning, possibly before sunrise. Me, crying and asking for water. Not getting any water. Dr. Howard in the room, Dr. Howard leaving the room, two more nurses in the room, both of them women—girls—who looked barely older than me. I held and clawed the hands of one of them during a contraction that was so bad I felt I was actually ripping in half.
A handsome, sullen man coming in—the anesthesiologist—and telling me to sit up, hunch over, and stay completely still. Me, crying harder at his request as another contraction shredded through my ass and spine. One nurse holding me from the front, trying to keep me steady, as another one tried to brace me from the back, and the man repeating, “Hold still, hold still,” as he jammed what felt like a screwdriver into my lower back. Me crying and shrieking, shrieking and crying, burying my face in the nurse, repeating “I can’t, I can’t, I fucking can’t,” like some kind of Little Engine That Couldn’t. The nurse behind me murmuring, “She’s 10 centimeters,” and Dr. Howard’s voice ringing out like a field hockey coach, “Agnes, it’s time to start pushing,” and me asking what does that mean, and what felt like every three seconds a new contraction pummeling me, so that the moments in between felt like cruelty more than relief.
Beeping from machines. One of the kind nurses wiping my face and telling me how great I was doing. I felt as though I were mutating into Pain Itself. Then she told me that when it came time to push, to do it as though I were emptying my bowels. This is what life is. A shitting.
I heard Dr. Howard’s voice coming in and out. At one point the beeping was long and loud and her voice was almost entirely drowned out. And then it pealed—“time to push, honey, push for ten seconds, hard as you can”—and I focused on her beautiful shiny lips and shiny eyeglasses and took a deep breath and pushed like I was trying to disappear, like I was trying to rid myself of myself through myself. It hurt so badly that I wondered why anyone bothers with the epidural at all. It hurt in a medieval way—as in, how can we have skyscrapers and computers and this degree of pain? The nurse told me to hang in there, that the epidural would start working soon, and then that I had progressed quickly and the epidural had come too late.
I pushed and pushed, whenever they told me to push. I pushed for a long time. At some point the sky outside the window grayed and then pinkened, and I could notice it because the epidural did, in fact, start working, and the pain became more storied—I knew it was happening but it wasn’t happening to me, or something like that. At another moment I felt the need to go to the bathroom and I think I probably did. I kept turning my head to look at the sky, getting bluer, and I heard Dr. Howard say, “This is it, last push. I can see the head,” and I pushed with the dark force of everything I’ve ever wanted in my life, as though it wasn’t just the baby I could make emerge but every single wish, hidden and unhidden—your return, Simon’s return, Dad’s happiness, my own happiness, immortality for all of us, a better life for each of us—fulfilled. When I opened my eyes, that sky was bluer than a sky should be, and the room was filled with an otherworldly yowling and the cheers of Dr. Howard and the nurses.
“A boy, and he’s perfect,” Dr. Howard said, putting him on me, his face a squashed mask of alarm, his eyes squeezing shut against the light, the commotion, the indignities of being forced into this bizarre, nonviscous world. “You have a son.”
I started crying and couldn’t stop. I cried so much I soaked the baby, who had found my breast and gone quiet and busy with it. I cried so that I could barely see him, but what I saw through my tears was a face I somehow knew from the depths of me, a déjà vu face, as if from a dream I’d forgotten until that moment. Is this what it means, I wondered, when something is your own, when something belongs only to you? His eyelashes, the matted clump of dark hair on his head, his very intense little expressions—all of it was just astonishing to me, overwhelming beyond anything I’ve ever felt. When the nurses asked if they could take him to be weighed and cleaned up, I said okay, because I had no fight left in me, and because, honestly, I was afraid. Afraid that somehow all of this feeling would crush him.
The hours since then have been a blur. He doesn’t have a name yet. I’m scared to name him, to mess him up with a name. It seems he should just be able to be Mine, and His Own, and
not, say, Jack. He is 8 pounds, 4 ounces, and 21 inches long. I am sitting in my bright hospital room, propped up on pillows with two ice packs underneath me, and he is here on the bed with me, swaddled and still between my legs. There is not one part of me that isn’t sore, but somehow I don’t feel it, or I feel it but I’ve been expanded enough to feel past it.
Dr. Lang came to see me a little while ago and seemed almost miffed that things had gone on without him. He was courteous and curtly congratulatory. Nothing is bothering me. Everyone keeps telling me to try and get some rest. I’m not tired.
I am apparently pretty torn up down below. What nobody probably tells you is that babies seem to come more out of your ass than your vagina. At least that’s how it felt. Dr. Howard stitched me up, and the nurses have been plying me with stool softeners and pain medicine. I take all of it. I’m taking everything in. I feel incapable of saying no or feeling no. These wonderful fairies called lactation nurses have flitted in and out, holding my son to my breast, massaging my breasts, showing me the proper way to get him latched. They say my milk hasn’t come in yet, but still he sucks happily, greedily, his eyes opening briefly before rolling shut again, as if in ecstasy. I’m stunned by this new ability, to soothe and sate someone so completely, with so little effort. How can mothers not feel superhuman?
Dad seems about ready to fall apart. He didn’t want to hold the baby, which I think I understand. I don’t know if I’d want to if I were him, if I were anyone but me. He looked at him for a long time, his eyes filled with what looked like love and anguish. Finally he said, “He looks like you,” and squeezed my hand.
I did have Dr. Howard circumcise him. I don’t like to think of the pain it caused him, but I also don’t like to think about uncircumcised dicks. I had an experience with one once, and I didn’t like it. I know that’s entirely weird and subjective but the thought of some person far off in the future not enjoying any part of this boy bothered me more than allowing him to be cut. I’d just been cut, so it makes sense for us to heal together.
Dad stayed until just a little while ago, when I made him go home and get rest. He sat in a chair near my bed, leaning in to look at the baby, or pretending to, and when I’d try to nurse, he’d leap up to go stand by the windows, looking out.
A pediatrician is supposed to come look at the baby tomorrow morning, and provided everything looks as it should, we will be discharged. The two of us will go home to begin our new lives together—his new because he is literally hours old, and mine new because of him. I keep thinking about baptism. Probably because he feels like a baptism.
The absolute strangest part of all of this is that I’m not scared. I will never be alone again.
Finally,
Agnes
I don’t mind the wheelchair the hospital makes me take down to the ground floor while Dad goes to get the car. He’d come to my room first to hand me the car seat.
“Do you know how it works?”
“I’ll figure it out,” I said. “Thank you.”
I adjusted the straps and gently propped my sleeping son inside. His eyes fluttered open, and for a few seconds, he stared hard at me, the room, his foot. His eyes darting and lingering, until he closed them again, as if worn out from the effort. It took a few attempts, but I managed to maneuver the straps and buckle him in securely, his tiny body encased in plastic like a baby turtle in a too-large shell. I put on his hospital cap and hospital socks and covered him with his hospital blanket. An orderly wheeled me downstairs and outside, and a nurse held the car seat. “He’s precious,” she said to me.
“I know,” I told her. “Thanks.”
She hugged me goodbye and I hugged her back, hard. Martha. She’d been administering to the both of us for the past forty-eight hours with immense care, and I felt a lump in my throat as we parted ways. How peculiar, I think as I latch my baby into the car seat base that Dad must have installed, then strap myself in beside him, how intimacy has nothing to do with time. How you can feel bonded to someone in a matter of moments, if that person allows it. How you can spend years with someone—I look at Dad’s profile—and only ever remain adjacent. I remember how we were told in high school that there were certain SAT questions that you can effectively not answer and not be penalized for not answering, and I think, well, that is Dad’s idea of love in a nutshell. He would rather not answer than answer wrong. His biggest fear seems to be losing points, and you can’t lose points if you don’t hazard a guess. Dad turns on the classical station. I recognize the Mozart sonata, one I learned to play during my final year taking lessons. I tap imaginary keys on my lap.
“I’ve heard that babies like classical music,” Dad says.
I try not to smile, but I smile. I’m not going to ask him where he “heard” this from, because I know he didn’t hear it anywhere. I know he is trying to be with me, on my side, a father. A grandfather. We pull into the garage. My father turns around to me in the dim light. “Welcome home,” he says in a voice that can only be described as weird.
“Thanks!” I try to be sunny.
The house smells different. The dryer is whirring but the smell is not laundry. My son remains asleep as I nestle him against my shoulder and ascend the stairs to the kitchen. In my mind I am narrating to him each new scene: This is a house. This is your new home. This is a washing machine. These are stairs. This is a door, rhythmically, like some kind of lullaby. I feel uneasy, a fist of pain undulating down low, and I’m unable to separate my physical sensations from my emotional ones. Ahead of me in the kitchen, Dad is turning on lights, putting on the kettle.
“Can I make you some tea?”
“Um, sure, thanks.” The smell persists. The pain deepens. I want to sit down in the glider, at last, with this baby. To feel what it feels like.
“I’m going to change his diaper. I’ll be back in a minute,” I say to my dad.
My dad gives me a long, inscrutable look. I step out of the kitchen and shift the baby a little. These are more stairs. This is more carpet. This is a handrail. This is wallpaper. I move slowly, concentrating on my feet.
Midway up the stairs, I look up.
Standing at the top is my mother.
She is wearing the yellow dress and the red shoes but not the red belt. The absence of it makes the dress look completely different, almost frumpy. Pinned to the dress, over her heart, is a gigantic button that says #1 GRANDMA. The strange smell rolls off of her, the way the smell of the sea rolls off the sea. The smell is strange because it is her smell, but it does not match the smell in my memory of her. I manage not to drop the baby or fall down, although in my mind, I’m doing both those things—falling, falling, my baby slipping from my grasp, along with my vision of us gliding serenely in the nursery, cocooned from all harm.
“Agnes. Look at you.”
I can’t look at me. I can’t stop looking at her. I climb the rest of the way up the stairs and we stand facing each other in the narrow hallway, her back toward my bedroom and mine toward the Pink Bathroom. Something in her energy makes me draw the baby closer.
“You came back. Where have you been?” I manage to speak, to make words, but my voice sounds mangled.
My mother shakes her head. “Not important. We can discuss all of it later. May I—for now—hold my grandson?” She steps toward me hopefully. “I just washed my hands. It’s important to wash your hands every time you touch an infant.”
I don’t know what to do. To refuse seems harsh, punitive—and yet. “Sure,” I say finally, handing him to her. She cradles him, cooing softly, her eyes going slightly moist.
“What is his name?” she asks, without looking up.
“I don’t know yet. I’m still waiting for it to come to me.”
“He looks so much like Simon,” she says, touching one finger to his chin. “Simon is a good name. I’ve always thought so. I still think so.” She looks at me. “It’s yours to use if you want it, you know.”
“Thanks,” I say, the knot in my stomach getting
pulled tighter and tighter, fibers fraying. “I don’t think I’ll be naming him Simon, though.”
I hold out my hands. “I was going to change him, see if he needs to eat again.”
My mother looks at me, her face open but unreadable. “Would you like me to do it? Change him I mean?”
“That’s okay. I kind of need the practice.” I try to laugh, but the words just sound rueful.
My mother puts the baby back into my arms and the pulling in my stomach eases slightly.
“You’ve really changed,” she says, and walks down the stairs.
Alone in the nursery, I close the door and sit in the glider with my son. I wipe my clammy hands across the back of his swaddle to try to dry them and then feel guilty and use my pants. I have a strong, solitary desire to not leave this room, to somehow figure out how I can make it habitable for the two of us. A small refrigerator could fit on the dresser. The baby twists his tiny head to and fro and begins to cry, a shy bleat that becomes a throaty wail faster than I can unbutton my shirt. My breasts ache terribly, and as I try to connect the baby’s desperate mouth to my nipple, the pain becomes so acute that I cry out. A moment later there is a knock.
“Do you need help?” My mother’s voice seems like it’s coming from inside the room.
“No. We’re fine. Thanks.”
After a few minutes, I hear her footsteps descending the stairs. I switch the baby to my other breast. He is quiet now and seems to be working very hard for what must be mere milliliters. His brow is furrowed. I wish for floodgates to open and wash us both away, away from here.
I doze some with the baby. When I open my eyes, the room is dim. The sun has set. I’m thirsty and stiff from being in the same position, my top still unbuttoned. A moment before I feel his exquisitely painful latch, I hear little suckling noises—as though by making them he causes the breast to appear. His mouth goes slack after a minute or two. He does not open his eyes. I feel the pull of his world, the world of sleep and comfort, sleep only interrupted by discomfort, and I want to enter it alongside him.
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