by Carole Maso
9 A.M.: My water breaks. This is one of the most moving and difficult moments of all for me. And I would like to scoop that pale oval as it falls now finally to the floor.
One would like at the last moment to go backwards, back to Rose in waiting, Rose not yet, Rose in hope.
My water breaks and I am heartbroken.
The little girl keening toward and away from home. Or away from one home and toward another—utterly unknown. Come to me. And I—am I out here or in there? Come to me. But where am I?
Vocalese—a song without words—only vowels, moans, and cries, and much sighing and begging—but not in words—no words for this. At last, to be at last, at the center of that speechless place. To have waited this long—my whole life—to get here.
So disorienting, so harrowing, an entirely new place is not only glimpsed, but actually seen. One is entirely reoriented—realigned—and allowed into a place that has been completely unavailable until now, utterly off-limits. Outside imaginative access. Opened up onto extraordinary mortal suffering never experienced by me before. I change from one kind of person into another. I enter, for what else is there? I step into it—a place of utter remove and estrangement. A reserved place. A place apart. I bite down. Utter house of pain. Populated by a cast of about three or four. No thought here, no words. At the worst, all, everything disappears—I look up onto a place separated by intense waves of heat and cold, blaring light, sound unlike any other. Helen, disappeared, but I know she’s there. When I can still comprehend, understand I and there.
Words fail, even more than usual.
And the two black angels, coming and going—Dr. Matheson and his accomplice—kind and terrible—adjusting the adjusters, at the controls—she keeps cranking it up I know—from the gloating, glaring center of it I can tell. I throw up, twice, three times—she cranks it up more—adjusts it again—I see Helen’s eyes slide over to the gauge. Carodean, angel at the adjuster—and my pain adjusts her—lovely, ghostly vision in white, calling from a remote place, It will be all right. So much pain and so much beauty. I try to ride it. I try to go to the center of it—meet it at the eye—but I’m no match. Look, I’m no match for it.
Intensity of the waves and I give in—for the first time in my life, perhaps—surrender like never before—in a life marked by what I thought once were surrenders, swoonings, descents. I enter its blackest, most deep center. I no longer think body or pain or baby—I am just there inside the center of my unbearable, mortal life. Where musical notes, little tiny musical notes seem to be playing—divorced from their song—out of context—and the bones of my dead. And the elements. Star, moon, sun. I am hallucinating. I must be delirious. Dark wind in the room. I look up through a veil of thorns and ghosts and disconnected speech. Helen is there and it seems she is shouting something. Shadows in the hall. I go back down.
And how I stare into where I am going, unblinking, exiting into pain—into the pure, ecstatic non-return. Stranger in a strange, secluded place. Wholly interior now. A place so bizarrely intense, so over the edge that to recreate it again—to get back there is impossible—to that place of pure and perfect and extraordinary hell.
I dilate from two to ten centimeters in four hours. I am hearing from somewhere now, great job. Music I can’t hear exactly on the whole time. The push toward light. Now on a table I am instructed to push, finally to push. I felt no longer acted upon, ambushed, but able finally to act, to do something—a moment of intense exhilaration. The urge to push had grown to an almost unbearable level. And yet to push too soon—the results, they assured me, could be disastrous. So I waited, but I am thrilled when I finally get to actually do something, exhilarated—like I’m actually going somewhere. To the next circle. Such divine transport. The baby wanting, wanting, in its raw need, to live now—to be born. Almost there. I am best at this part. I am rhythmic, I am contracting like wild, and I am pushing, and can I say it now—I am back, and I am loving this high now, every fiber of my being focused on the task, and I feel for the first time in my life, eternity. This opening and opening. Here comes the head. This incredible burning—like a billion suns passing through me. The moment before she breaks through. And I freeze it for a moment, before the next contraction comes—something so momentous, so impossibly, impossibly beautiful. That precious head begins to show. Someone is saying this. The antenna placed on it to monitor the heartbeat is taken off. The whole world there hovering. Carodean coaching not to waste the contraction’s pain—but to push—something so exhilarating, so close to a fearful eternity—the shock of the body opening and opening and opening onto forever—onto and past pain, past the waves and up and beyond everything one ever knew. Blasted with light. Vague waves of pleasure pass through me. Smashed into smithereens, I am a thousand shards. And the baby cries. And you feel as if you have or must have blacked out. What the body alone is capable of—the most extraordinary state. My eyes are shut. I feel a sucking now. The baby is at my breast. I can scarcely, scarcely…
A transforming, transfiguring thing. Walking into all pain and hope. Most grave and radiant day of my life. The room lit from within by roses.
TV cameras. Someone in a moment’s time asking crazy questions about a baby born that day on the Internet. I am apparently an example of a normal person having a normal birth at the same time the little cyborg is born. I start rattling off—God knows what. A low croaky voice comes out of me as I talk about the American penchant for spectacle—that sort of thing. They look at me mystified. Most surreal place. I am holding my baby. I am saying things in the delivery room to the camera. My sister Cathy will see the baby on TV, before she sees her in person. Angela arrives a few moments later, but I do not recognize her at first. Everything altered. I am not really back yet. I call my mother. Remember the words I say exactly: Rose is born.
16 JUNE, 12:48 P.M., BLOOMSDAY
Rose is born.
That incredibly odd moment between not being pregnant anymore but not yet really being a mother either. Or not being pregnant, but still feeling pregnant sort of—only there is a baby somewhere too. Where did the baby go?
Carodean wheels me down the long hall and I realize I have never been in a wheelchair before. The nurses and doctors congratulating me on my work. Why are they saying that I remember thinking. What had really happened? Where is Helen? Great through this. Our bond strengthened once more. We have done this thing. Come through it somehow.
The beautiful umbilicus. That sturdy, gorgeous rope from me to you—how it attaches me to worlds—worlds—and to time, my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother. It does boggle the mind.
That stubborn, extraordinary cord—what connects me to you forever.
The placenta with its little hood plopped into a plastic pail. Her little home of blood and veins and minerals and blue and gray.
It fades and then is gone—dark angel manipulating a pump, those increasingly large doses of hell. I don’t know how much more I can take of this, I say to her. This is her cue to see how I’ve dilated. Ten. You are ready.
Now you can push.
Now you can hold your breath.
Now you make no noise. It’s an entirely different thing all of a sudden.
Watch my facial muscles. When you push you should look like this.
Use the contraction’s pain to push the baby through.
Rupturing, breaking apart universe. Helen holding my hand.
At the last minute Carodean goes to get the doctor—it is happening faster than any of us could have imagined now—and for a moment it is just Helen and I alone in the room. An odd feeling. Austerity of the two of us at this precipice. The baby’s head peaking through. Just a guess but I don’t think she is up to delivering a baby now. It’s a strange moment. Like Helen, I and the pain are the only things left in this whole world. Two about to become three.
But then they are back.
The baby’s head appearing.
Do you want to see?
No.
A million s
uns.
Brilliance beyond description.
Sensation.
After the baby’s head is out—a curtain of blood—a collar of blood, fountain of blood.
I only hear about it later.
I am trying to see it now in my mind’s eye. What it must have looked like.
The wrenching of the self from the self. A solitude like no other.
I hear the doctor say the cord is around her neck. I realize I have given him all of my trust. I have been reliant on his judgments entirely.
Around her neck—but not tightly—around her neck like a necklace they tell me later. From the contraction graph, they knew this in advance.
I hear the doctor saying a great job.
He holds her up to me.
She is a squirmy, slippery thing.
She has a beautiful voice I think.
I close my eyes, and when I open them, what is that? I remember thinking exasperated—she is sucking, sucking on my breast. A little expert already. OK, OK.
And how I want to do it all over again. Perversely. Almost immediately. Replay the scene again and again. Never felt such extremity. Such life. Such rigor and recklessness.
She gets a nine out of ten on her very first test—in this world of tests. A point off for little blue hands and feet. If I could have somehow kept her safe and inside, away from the measurements and tests and assessments of this world.
Soon Angela appears, but I don’t recognize her at first. She has come from a far place to be here. And so have I.
The nurses saying great job. Maybe it is because I am old. The TV crew. The long hallway to the next room of this world. This life. The continual surprise of it.
The end of a time.
Mourning the end of one thing and the beginning of another. Pulled inexorably down the long hall into the future. Dark thrill of the unknown.
If one could scoop that pale oval from the hospital floor.
I am struck really by how lovely she is. I was expecting a red faced, wrinkly, pointy-headed thing. She is none of this. She is simply gorgeous. A real glamour girl. Long, elegant fingers. A little pouty mouth. This one is a cutie, all the nurses say, and what a beauty!
A perfectly round head.
The city behind my eyes—the place mortality opened, and you saw it for an instant fully. Actually saw it. You were on the leisurely way there—living your life—but then suddenly there is a brief look given, you are right close up to it. And then no, not yet, it’s not quite time—and you are ushered back, only you are holding a child in your arms. There’s still work to do.
It’s enough to be on the way. If I accomplish nothing else in my life. Just this is miraculous. That I plowed without illusion toward death. Even as I gave life.
And how you stare with your supernatural powers, which have not yet left, but which are wearing off quickly you can already tell—stay, don’t go… I write against its fading now.
The rose at the end of the mind.
The rose burning in the dark of that June afternoon.
The rose at the end of that white corridor. Who waits.
The rose of pain fading—and another rose taking its place.
One leaves that other world reluctantly at first, and then definitively. And there is nothing you can do.
Rien à faire, as Judith and Zenka loved to say. And it is true.
The connection through pain with all the women who are alive—who have ever been alive.
On to a whole new perceptual plane. Close to death, and the violence of life, the beauty and harshness of it. The wrenching of one being from another. The bitterness, the saltiness, something so elemental.
Her voyage toward knowing and back again, begins. “Now that you know all the letters and I have almost forgotten them,” Michael Palmer writes in that beautiful poem to Sarah, his daughter.
The fontanels—little fountains. The head pulsing its blood message.
The bones of the head open—they will slowly suture themselves closed.
It’s chilly. Ninety-eight degrees in the womb—and now—How hard it must be to take in breath on one’s own. And the heart—on it’s own, now.
The baby is perfectly fine, after all the worry. Through all those tests, she must have been sleeping.
The umbilical cord is cut, leaving that healed scar behind eventually—the navel. I can hardly fathom the strangeness.
Carole, exhausted, in a quoting mood. The baby asleep. What an astonishing sentence: the baby asleep.
Yves Simon:
Whence comes this nostalgia which we carry within us, the kind that makes us sometimes feel that we have lost an immensity?
There are, in these mysterious surges toward infinite spaces and our conception of them, the signs of an attempt to rediscover an immensity of which we were perhaps aware at a given moment, precisely when, at another moment, that awareness has disappeared.
Does each child that comes into the world see itself deprived of an immensity available to it before it was born, well before it had a brain and a consciousness, and which it was able to exploit without any location or landmark, here and everywhere freely?
Life might be the making of a cocoon which isolates from the world a fragment of infinity…
What streams away now? Vortex of stars, universe, the sucking away of everything (and the baby now sucking away her home). The uterus shrinking away. Good-bye.
Put on her belly she swims. On her feet, she does little stepping motions—don’t go—not yet. Stay a little.
The pigments of her eyes and her skin shift and shift again. The unstable, still-fluid self. All is possibility. All is beauty.
A strange empty feeling. I never knew I was a shell before. I never knew I was a pod. How will I live?
The baby crying.
Dread of the day.
Dread of the night.
Two take away one. To love somehow the take-away. To not see in her what has been taken away, but what has been given.
The placenta, that little hooded house that nourished her, now asleep in a plastic pail.
Embryo—from the Greek, to swell or teem within. I am still there—part of me is still there. My heart swelling. The world. Promise of the little girl.
Considerable loneliness—how odd in the end to have only one body.
“For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, which she put down by them and said, ‘This is what I have made of it! This!’” —Virginia Woolf
One and only one life.
She clutches the breast with her million years of monkey intuition. Holding my fur.
This little being asleep in her little hospital cap. In her see-through bassinet.
My father bought for you on day two Mozart for Babies.
I’ll start a baby book soon. For remembrance. Baby and book—the two most beautiful words in the language.
Baby and book. I write these words now. And the world opens.
This little being asleep before me now.
Breast feeding. Frozen bags of peas on my very sore breasts. Waiting for the real milk to kick in.
The little one holds her cup of witch’s milk and weeps.
Overwhelmed by mortality—by the mortal, fragile, tenacious life in front of me. Jemima Puddle-Duck in the form of a cloth rattle near her little chest—going up and down on her baby’s breath.
Her lungs the size of tea bags.
I love it high up above the city like this. A preemie flies by. Women in different stages of the dream. This sleepless, utterly narcotic state. I can scarcely believe any of it. I am still in the birth really. Not here yet. Oh, were there some time to recover.
I might have stayed there in that maternity wing forever. High up and safe. With all those women and babies and babies-to-be. In perfect white. Milky nights. The white waltzing across the polished floors. A prayer each
morning over the PA system. If I could have stayed forever… Blood and milk and the life stuff of this universe—placenta, umbilicus, wish, desire, fear, beauty, brutality—all mixed together—tears, all that makes this human world. I’m not ready to go yet.
Manhattan completely rearranged after such an experience. I’m surprised it’s there at all. From the maternity wing I could see from high up the avenues. God, it was beautiful.
Louis coming to visit in the hospital. Later I will learn he is afraid of hospitals and he is afraid of babies. He carries a little brass bell in the palm of his hand. She is here! A little panicked.
I must admit I am pretty shocked myself by her presence. As if she had been just dropped here in my lap out of the sky. As if I had not had those nine months at all. I suppose there was just no way to prepare.
The Moro reflex—which is a sort of gesture of astonishment in the hands, a kind of amazement in the baby, happening without the ability to control—first responses of the body. How very struck I am by the motion that so resembles a gesture at life’s end I witnessed almost a year ago to the day—another spring. How much like darling Zenka who at the end of her life, seemingly asleep, would suddenly open her eyes with this same astonishment it seemed and flex her hands in just this way—so that her palms were up and her fingers outstretched. She was dying. Zenka, how I would have loved you to see this—despite your protestations—you always came around when it came to me. I’m partial to you, my girl. You know that. I loved you more than I can say. Here you are back in the startled motions of this new little one. We will go to Judith. We will visit your grave. I know you didn’t think so, but with any luck I will see you again one day.