He smiles. “As long as it’s just a stomachache, I guess that’s good. If this were three weeks from now, I’d be wondering if you were in labor. You’re making some pretty interesting faces every now and then.” He rubs my back, and it feels foreign. “Wanna drink?”
With Rick off in the house I feel better. I need space; I don’t want to be touched. Or watched. I want to move around, to pace the garden up and back, or at least just to rock. In labor? It’s still three weeks away, and I need to practice so much more before then. I’m not ready. Not ready for the pain, or to let this baby push its way into my life. I thought before that I might not be ready to let the baby sleep between us in our bed at night, but at least that part now seems okay. Rick doesn’t know this, but I haven’t wanted him to touch me for a while. There’s so much going on during the day on the inside of me, so much touching and fluttering and kicking, that at night I just can’t take any more. I try to brace myself for the patting of a hand or the good night kiss so I don’t pull away when he reaches for me across the too-soft tangle of sheets. He wouldn’t understand, and it would hurt him, even though it doesn’t mean anything. It’s hard to tell what anything means this summer, or what we, the three of us, will look like in the clear, cool light of fall.
The baby gives a good, sharp kick, straight up, and my whole body clenches. I stoop over, and while I wait to unfurl again, I am aswim in one of my earliest memories, one that is all flash and scent. I remember sitting in the front part of a shiny silver grocery cart, and all the wet green smells of the produce section. I was swinging my legs at the knees, idly, liking the feel of them dangling and moving in time. My toes bumped, bumped, bumped lightly into my mother’s stomach as she pushed the cart. “No. Stop that,” she hissed in my ear. I looked in her eyes, narrowed under dark brows. I pulled back my legs and kicked her as hard as I could. She gasped, and looked at me, in shock, then down at some peaches. I knew I had won something, a kernel of power over my mother that I could bury in cool darkness and wait for, even though I didn’t know quite what food I would reap from it to store against future famine.
Rick follows my pacing along the tomato rows to hand me a glass of ice water. When we first met, his eyes would have strayed to my breasts, compact and upturned, “expectant,” he murmured once, tickling my ear with his breath. Even just a few months ago he would have been looking into my eyes, studying my forehead to determine what mood the lines there revealed. Now, surrounded by all the growing things that are ours, his eyes rest on my stomach, the largest part of me, the one thing that grows without him pruning and prodding it into being. He watches me pace, my belly brushing the tangy, summer-scented leaves of the tomato plants that haven’t been tied to their stakes yet. “Are you ever going to stop?”
“Not yet. I’m thinking.” This isn’t exactly true, at least not as far as I can tell on the surface of things, but again, something is crawling forward in me while the plants grow and Rick pours water and my feet tread the grass down along the garden path.
The ringing of the phone slices the air and jars me awake. I haven’t been sleeping, exactly, but sort of floating in semiconsciousness on the sofa, practicing laying my hands on my stomach when it starts to hurt again. These pains come and go, and I press my hand low on the underside of the baby until I can relax away the gassy pains I’ve had all day.
“Julia, phone’s for you. It’s your mom.” I prop myself up, sweaty, and start to shake my head, but Rick is half-turned to the wall and can’t, or won’t, see me. “Yeah, we’re heading into the home stretch now. Hold on, Miriam, here she comes. Yes. Actually, I think she’s feeling a little under the weather today—”
I swipe the phone out of Rick’s hand. “Hey, Mom.” I glare at Rick, but he shrugs and smiles, sits in my spot on the couch and starts to flip through the channels. “How are you?”
“Hey Julia, I know you’re busy, but the reason I was calling is to see if you wanted some of the baby stuff I came across this weekend. I was going through your old clothes and toys and found Duckie and Blue Blankie. I just thought maybe you’d want them back now.”
I don’t really remember these toys. Their names sound familiar, but only as words I have heard in family stories, not out of a genuine memory of the things themselves. “Um, okay, but what kind of shape are they in? Good for a baby?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, I haven’t washed them yet. I’m a little afraid they might fall apart if we try to clean them up.” She pauses, and in the background I can hear the faint, canned applause from her television. Her talk shows: the self-help week in review. “I wouldn’t want to hurt them, so why don’t I just bring them over and you can decide what you want to do with them. You know, whenever you’re ready after the baby is born…” I feel my stomach clenching up again, and I breathe out around it, willing myself to relax against it, to do the opposite of what my body wants to do and un-stiffen. “…Do you think you have any idea of when that might be?”
I haven’t been listening, and her voice is falsely bright, irritating. I can’t listen to people talk and concentrate on breathing or touching away the pain at the same time. Rick has done the same thing throughout the day, too; he keeps chattering, offering drinks and snacks and pillows for my feet. Or worse, he reaches for me with hands that still have dirt under the nails and ground into the grooves of his fingerprints. I need quiet to remind myself to squash down the pricks of fear that creep up into the back of my throat: I am not in labor. It is not yet time to let go.
“No. I mean, I haven’t thought about it yet. Like I said before, we’ll probably want a couple weeks as a family. There’s no rush on bringing old stuff over; we’ve got lots of shower gifts, so I don’t think we need anything.”
My mother sniffs. “Oh, I know. And I know Rick is great at helping out around the house.” I cringe at this: What my mother sees as Rick’s benevolence is what I see simply as his fair share, and this is the thing she will never understand about our marriage. This discussion always makes me feel like I’m getting away with something. “But you’ll both be tired, and I just thought I could help…” More applause, then silence. I imagine the click of her lighter, think of her holding the cigarette as far away from the mouthpiece of the phone as she can. I will not pick up this thread, and the silence stretches tight into faintly desperate static. Another burst of applause is cut off abruptly, and she says “But that’s okay. It’s not like I have anything planned for the next couple months, so I’ll be here if you decide to call. Just let me know if you ever need me.”
I can’t tell whether or not this was calculated to make me feel like one of those newly-popular high school girls who suddenly realizes how awkward her best friend from middle school is, and has one last, good day before ignoring her the rest of the school year. I feel that pang of guilt, but also the frustration, the indignant counter that if she just tried a little harder, maybe learned to hide her feelings a bit and put on some makeup, acted cooler, she could fit in with the older kids, too.
Why doesn’t she try? When I picture myself with the baby, I can fast-forward through her childhood and see her as an adult woman: beautiful, kind, intelligent, of course; but also independent, a companion who no longer needs me to give something, but rather chooses me, wants me. This faceless daughter recognizes the part of me that I have saved for myself, and likes it that way, enjoys having a mother who is a person. We are not slick with tears and sweat and the wetness of things we can’t keep contained, so I don’t need to try so hard to hold onto something so slippery as my mother has made me.
My feet have made a little puddle of sweat on the floor. They are not hot, but so swollen that the arches have flattened out against the floor and there is no space between my toes. The wave of tightness in my stomach is gone, and I feel lighter. “So Mom, what other toys did you find?” Maybe I will remember one, or maybe hearing about the way I was when I was little will help me feel that my mother is somehow bigger.
Another dark wave crescend
os toward me, pushing in on my vision from the edges until I’m no longer seeing but only feeling as I lean forward to press into it, doing what it wants me to do. They call it pushing, call out numbers across the antiseptic room, but I have lost count and follow it through the haze until it recedes and my spine uncurls and I can see the outline of my husband and feel his hand on mine. Other people have their palms on me but I don’t feel them, only the stretching or the not stretching around the patch of hair that widens and shrinks in the tide of my flesh.
In the rosy glow there is a clock, white sheets, gloved hands. The crest of my stomach flanked by my knees: still-lifes of something done through me, not by me. Warm whispers in my ear, metallic tinkling at my feet. Graying light, muscles clench to attention. Again.
All afternoon when Rick asked I told him, “No, don’t be silly, it’s still three weeks away.” All through the pressure as it turned to a downward squeezing across my abdomen, until I could no longer talk when it was happening. Rick made me come to the hospital then, in the dusk that was humid and weighted, even though I told him the nurses would laugh and send us home again. I was sure I wasn’t in labor. It wasn’t time yet.
It isn’t time. It’s three weeks too soon, and the baby and I both are small and weak. I am not ready to push her out, to live through the blinding tremors that shake out from the center of me, vibrating me apart from the inside out. I want to keep her inside me, to hold her back. To keep her and me and even Rick from what’s coming. I don’t know what it is, but it doesn’t stop pushing through me to get to her. I’m not doing anything except trying to hold us together.
But nothing I think or do can keep my body from pushing her out. Muscles clench and crush so hard that it pulls me forward, sitting, and I push without wanting to, without thinking or listening to the counts the nurses call out so crisply. What else will come out of me unbidden? Is there anything left to keep inside, or will it all come roaring out and leave my husk behind on the birthing bed? Even these thoughts last only as long as the lull between contractions, and then are pressed out of me by the force of my labor again and again.
The yawning tightness at my core is the same each time, and if I am tired I don’t feel it as I am carried along by a force so insistent that it can’t be mine. Leaning forward into the blackness, a wet pop and slippery, fast slide as the taut skin suddenly deflates. And I know. “There’s her head!” someone says, and I am surprised at the way I imagine she must be, dangling halfway between me and the world, not yet a real baby but not totally swallowed up and protected inside me, either. I can’t tuck her back in. And for the first time, I don’t want to anymore: I need more than anything to get her out of me, to make her a person and not something attached to me. I let go of Rick’s hand.
They say to wait but I won’t, and for the first time I seize the oncoming surge and feel in charge of my body. Another crunch, some lumpy parts sliding through, and I fall into the starchy pillow behind. I close my eyes and hear her unmuffled cry, her first pain soaring out above my hours-old one. I am quiet while she pitifully wails: I’ve already spilled out everything I have with the unnoticed afterbirth, and will spend a lifetime unable to pull it back inside. I glimpse the thick, round sac of it, though, before the nurse tosses it into a stainless steel pan, and it is surprisingly blue, lined with veins as prominent the ones in a bodybuilder’s biceps. It is smaller than the baby; she has grown strong from its richness, and there will never be anything I can give her that will answer her needs as perfectly as the placenta that once curved around her ossifying bones.
She is on my stomach now, but I can’t feel her because we are still the same. Both warm: my sweat, her amniotic brine. Her eyes are dark and wide, brow wrinkled in concentration on my face. This is the creature who was kicking me so insistently on the inside, and I know looking in her shriveled, old-man face that she will kick me again here on the outside. I don’t know what she sees when she looks at me, but think maybe the slickness of it all isn’t messy to her yet, but comfortable. Looking each other in the face, recognition; and neither of us notices the cold gleam of the surgical scissors as they advance to cut the cord.
I have been stitched back together and wiped clean and left alone to wait for Rick to return from the baby’s check-up in the nursery. My legs are heavy; they feel a part of the scratchy sheets that are wilting beneath my weight. The sheets are damp with sweat, and when I pull up the blanket I shiver until the cool spot I have shifted into warms to the temperature of my skin. I don’t want to move, but somewhere in my chest I am too alert to sleep, and I am tired of waiting for Rick to come back so I have someone to talk to.
With a click the door opens and Rick shuffles heavily into the room. He rakes a hand up his forehead and through his hair, leaving it sticking up and ragged. “Hey,” he breathes out, almost in a sigh, “How’re you?”
I open my mouth to answer and don’t know where to begin. I want to tell the whole story to him, how it felt from the first pains early in the day, before I even knew they were contractions, to all the activity at the hospital and up through the things he missed while he was gone. I want him to fill in the parts I can’t remember, to help me understand all the things that have happened here. He can tell me the things I said, and what it all looked like from the outside. We can talk until I am finally sleepy, telling the story together.
Rick yawns, gaping and loud as a lion after a meal. His voice is low and raspy. “I’m actually not feeling so good. Achy, tired…I think I’m getting sick. I’m just exhausted.” He presses my hand, and his palm is dry and hot against my cool, clammy one. His eyes look puffy, squinting, even in the dim room. “I really need some sleep so I can function tomorrow. I think I’m gonna go.”
I nod and force out a cheerful “Okay.”
“I’m so sorry. I feel really bad about leaving you alone…so I called your mom. She’s coming to stay with you tonight.” He leans a little closer and squeezes my hand. “She was really excited to come to the hospital. She’s getting her bracelet at the nurse’s station, and will be in with the baby in a little bit.” He looks at me hopefully, then turns to cough into his fist.
“Fine.” I shake off his hand and turn away from him to lie on my side. “At least give me a chance to pretend I’m asleep before she gets here.” The energy in my chest spreads up my shoulders and tightens my jaw. This is not how I wanted this to be. These first hours were supposed to be for the two of us, the three of us, together. Now Rick is sick and weak, and I have no sympathy for him. He can’t see my face, and I try to keep the anger out of my voice. “Go get some rest.”
He pats my shoulder and sighs again. “Thanks. You get some rest too, and I’ll be back in the morning. I love you.”
“Mm hmm.” I shift in the cold sheets to find a comfortable position. I close my eyes. I am not tired, but I do not have the energy to answer all my mother’s questions when she gets here, or to brace myself against her stream of chatter. If she thinks I am asleep, maybe she’ll turn on the TV, and we can both drift off to the murmur of some late-night infomercial that pretends to be a talk show.
My mother comes in loudly, bumping the stainless steel baby cart into the door and the foot of my bed. I pretend to stir, but keep my eyes closed. “Oh no, no, no. Let your mommy sleep. I’ll tell you all about your mommy and what she was like when she was as little as you and I was the mommy. Your mommy kicked and squirmed and didn’t like to stay in her blankets, and the nurses didn’t know what to do with her…”
When I finally dare to open my eyes to see my mother, she is sitting in the red vinyl chair next to my bed, cradling her granddaughter in her arms. Her head is bent to the baby’s, murmuring her story. She looks conspiratorial; they could be sharing secrets in the predawn hush of the hospital room. I can’t decide if she looks young or old: it is impossible to know how other people see her.
The bundle shifts and I hear a low, muffled cry. It is probably time to try nursing her again, even though I don’t yet have a
ny milk to give her. My mother reaches into her pocket and slips a bright pink pacifier into the blankets where the baby’s mouth must be. “Your mommy liked these a lot, so much that when she was three I had to start hiding them one by one until they were all gone…”
When we checked into the hospital, Rick and I filled out a questionnaire for the nursery, and specifically circled “no” in the section about pacifiers and formula. All the advice about breastfeeding goes against using pacifiers, yet here it is, and I am now, finally, too tired to argue about it. Who knows how long it will take to undo what my mother has done. Or maybe I won’t want to: the baby is comforted, if only for the moment. But that might be enough.
I close my eyes and listen to my mother’s words flow out of her, whispery murmurs that wash over me like water. She is doing all the talking that I had wanted to do with Rick, overflowing with the effort of putting all the feelings she’s ever had into words for a baby who can’t understand any of it. Tomorrow this is what I will try to do, too, and what the baby overhears in her clear plastic bassinet will be all rhythm and cadence without sense. My prattle will wake her, hungry and screaming for more milk than I have to give, and she will be frustrated by my delayed and imperfect response to her need. For now, though, she is quiet, and so am I. My mother speaks softly, ceaselessly, and I am cradled to sleep on a tide of words that I am only beginning to understand.
Both Sides of My Skin Page 2