Distractions like the baby shower are welcome, even if I can’t get excited about them. There isn’t much else for me to do, really, other than brood. I can’t read past the second trimester in the stacks of birth books I’ve amassed. I can’t watch the middle bits of the labor-and-delivery shows on television, which is where they always stick the pain and the pushing and the gore. I home in instead on how happy everyone looks before and after the fact. Even when the birth is mere weeks away, I don’t think about it, daydreaming instead about how great a mom I’m going to be and how happy I’ll be once the baby is out of my body. My nights tell a different story, but I ignore them. Sleep deprivation makes it hard to concentrate on anything. I drift off in meetings, lost in reveries of how much more meaningful my life will be in a few short weeks. That’s what all the glossy guidebooks tell me, that I will be fulfilled by a seven-pound bundle of pure joy on levels that I had never before dreamed. The exact mechanisms of how this will happen are vague. But the books can’t lie, can’t they?
3
My baby’s birth made me less of a woman.
My doula and I made blue-sky plans. I would go into labor, shun all drugs because I am tough, and my child would be born after a few pushes and no episiotomy. Then like the Madonna, I would curl around my new joy, who would latch onto my breast, which would flow with milk like a creek after a summer storm. Women have been doing this for millennia. Surely I could do it just this once.
By the fifth laborless day after my due date, my sense of humor is as hard to find as shoes that fit my swollen feet. My toes look like Vienna sausages. The waiting makes me jumpy. Any minute now the ball could roll out. Every Braxton Hicks contraction makes me want to grab my bags and run to the hospital. But these little cramps never add up to anything but held breath and dashed hopes. Every other day I waddle in to see my OB, only to be told that nothing has changed.
“Everything hurts,” I whine to the nurse practitioner. She simply shrugs at me, her body language clearly telling me to suck it up, loser. I almost launch myself at her throat, but I know she can outrun me. I remember a pregnant dog that lived at a B&B in Asheville, where Scott and I had escaped when I was eight months along to enjoy some alone time. The smallish dog looked like a weird beagle/dachshund cross. The poor thing was a week overdue, so bloated with puppies that her little feet could just barely reach the ground. She spent most of her time in our room, lolling on the floor and staring up at us with big watery eyes. “Just kill me,” she seemed to be saying in her own doggie way. “Please kill me now. Or, if you won’t kill me, please go get me some peanut butter crackers. Either is good.”
My one solace is food. Anything that is good for me—like broccoli or bran flakes or tofu—makes me woozy. I start sucking down Oreos and cake frosting from plastic tubs. Some researchers suggest that a sugar addiction can be a sign of depression. For me, it simply was a way to distract from my constant anxiety. The cycle of sugar high then crash gives me something entertaining to do. I daydream about drinking beer and lying on my belly. Once the baby is out, I can sleep without a foot kicking my spleen. I fantasize about undisturbed rest like a teenager dreaming of rock stars.
I complain to my doula, who suggests I try black cohosh tea and evening primrose oil in order to induce labor, which I do, but they give me diarrhea. Everyone tells me that sex helps get the process rolling, but in my current state I feel about as sexy as the flu. Just pondering the topology of my body and the mechanics of sex wears me out, much to my husband’s chagrin. Stranger home remedies are proposed: enemas, Mexican food, long walks. The drawbacks of each are legion.
I have nothing to do. I’m on maternity leave and have tied up every loose end so thoroughly that no one calls to ask questions, which is vaguely disappointing, like I’m not actually needed at the job I’d built my life around. The baby clothes have already been bought, washed, and folded. Furniture has been assembled and the mobile hung. I try to read, but can’t concentrate because I try to interpret every twinge as a sign. We are as ready as we’ll ever be and, yet, nothing. Friends call to ask if I’ve had the baby. I don’t rip the phone out of the wall because I wouldn’t be able to get down on the floor to plug in a new one.
An induction is scheduled. My mother arrives about a week before the appointed date, on the off chance that something will happen before then. She and my stepfather pull up their trailer from Florida and are living at a campground out in the East Tennessee countryside. Every morning my mother arrives at my house. She makes me lie down whenever I try to do something more taxing than sitting. I don’t have the energy to fight her considerable will and retreat to the bedroom. The halcyon days of her previous visit, where we didn’t yell at each other once, have vanished. Her every word is an ice pick to the temple. Whenever she launches into her account of the Trinity—my dad, her hair, and the angel—I want to pull a van Gogh and slice off an ear, so that she can carry it around with her and talk to it.
When my mother is not physically at our home, she calls with alarming frequency to make sure we haven’t been sneaky and had the baby without her. On the day that I’m induced, she beats us to the hospital. Her excited hands are like butterflies, flapping all over the place, grabbing my things. I’m too terrified to be irritated anymore. I feel like a Pacific pearl diver, hyperventilating before a deep plunge.
We check in at midnight, gritty eyed from lack of sleep. I take off my clothes and tie on a hospital gown. Scott and I take down the crucifix that is hung in our room (and every room, since this is a Catholic hospital). We put the anguished Jesus into the top drawer of the dresser, right next to the TV. Microphones are strapped to my belly and an IV is started. The nurse accidentally nicks another vessel while tapping the main one and blood starts running down my hand and onto the floor. I apologize for making a mess.
By twelve thirty, I’m feeling tiny contractions, as if a muscle is being flexed. It doesn’t hurt at all. I start to think that this all might not be as painful as they say. The nurse turns off the light and orders us to get some shut-eye. The Hub is out in an instant. I lie in the dark and watch the monitor, one rhythmic line for the baby’s heartbeat, one line for my contractions. We’ve got rhythm, the babe and I, and may crack the Top 40 one day. I stay like that until dawn.
By morning, the contractions have started to hurt a bit, like intense menstrual cramps. Scott is holding my hands and we are watching Wimbledon, which amuses my nurse to no end. My doula has moved me to a rocking chair and placed a warm compress on my lower back. With every pain I rock forward and back, forward and back. At times, I can match the pace of my rocking to that of a tennis rally, each solid thock of the ball coinciding with the sound of my feet hitting the ground. I don’t know why it helps, but it does.
My mother comes in and tries to rub my back, but the doula, bless her, shoos my mother away, just like we’d asked her to. When the doula leaves my room to keep my mother informed of the progress, they pray together. I don’t know what to make of this.
An hour or so after daylight, my OB comes by. She checks my cervix, which is the most painful part of the process so far, and suggests that she break my water and that I have an enema. And so she does, with a tool that looks like a crochet hook. After the initial gush, which feels like sitting on a warm water balloon, amniotic fluid continues to trickle out of me, running down my legs and into my socks when I get up to go to the bathroom. By this point, it is dawning on me that labor isn’t as glamorous as it looks in movies.
Ten minutes later, the pain begins. Real pain, centered at the base of my belly, just above my pubic bone, it radiates out to my toenails and hair. Then it stops just long enough to offer a sweet taste of pain-free life, then starts again, more powerful than before. This must be what death feels like.
I try to breathe, to center on some distant damn happy place, but can’t remember where I’ve put it. The insides of my legs are covered in all kinds of ick, squeezed out of me with each contraction. The doula is whispering in my ear
, some hippie affirmation about experiencing only the moment I’m in and not focusing on the past or future and I’m trying to do this but I really just want to scream and hit and push and give this to someone else but I can’t because it is mine, all mine, and it’s what I deserve for not being nice to my mother and not being perfect and for making a mess and for not living up to expectations and for just being female. This will probably kill me, I think, and hope that it does so quickly. And I have a brief thought about the interconnection between death and birth. Then the pain starts again and all thought leaves, replaced by fear.
I am a failure. Rather than conquering the pain like a real woman, I whimper for an anesthesiologist. While I have long joked to my friends that I wasn’t set on a natural labor—after all, I don’t do natural dentistry—begging for drugs feels like such a cop-out and bourgeois admission that I’m not as strong as I’d thought. I hate myself, right then, disgusted with my own frailty. I imagine that the doula and the nurse see me as weak and annoying.
The six or so contractions between my white flag and the cavalry’s arrival are worse than the ones previous, now that I know I’m about to be rescued by a thin needle jammed into the space between two of my lower vertebra, an epidural. It’s a crude but effective anodyne. While modern science has refined and redeveloped most other medical procedures, childbirth “comfort measures” (as health professionals euphemistically call them) haven’t changed all that much. You either go natural or put a needle in your spine. We’ve come a long way, baby.
All of my friends had told me that, compared to contractions, an epidural isn’t that bad. What they left out is that, compared to labor, being set on fire wouldn’t be so bad. Having someone poke metal into your back still hurts, but at that point, if you thought it would make the pain end, you’d let someone stick a needle in your eye.
The anesthesiologist curls me up on the bed and snaps at me when I unfurl a bit during a contraction. I hold Scott’s hands like he’s the only thing keeping me tethered to the planet. The needle goes in, and it burns, and the drugs start. The relief is immeasurable. I start shaking and sweating and crying. Everyone pats my hands and tells me how brave I was and how strong. But I know they’re lying. I’m a coward.
I don’t tell anyone this and smile and nod and accept ice chips. For the next couple of hours, we watch tennis—although I’m finding it hard to follow the points. Every now and again the nurse comes in to increase the Pitocin and check my cervix. There is steady, if slow, progress.
By noon, Scott is starving. He’s had one granola bar since six the previous night and is about to swoon from hunger. When the nurse comes back, he asks for an ETA, so that he can sneak out to grab a quick bite. She pokes at my cervix, which, strangely, still hurts, and asks him if he can wait about an hour, because the baby should be here by then.
And so I push. And push. And push. With each contraction, which I can feel again in a distant way, I push for a ten count. Then relax. An hour passes. Then two. My doctor comes in and mentions that the baby’s head really hasn’t moved at all, but that she’s sure that I can push the baby out. Her confidence is oddly placed. What about me creates the impression that I am a champion pusher? She leaves. I feel like a slacker, like I’m too out of shape and lazy to get the job done. My mother pops her head in and asks what’s taking so long. The doula steps out to explain and I’m certain she’s telling her what a loser I am, how I’ve been kidding myself all along that I deserve to be a mother.
I am rolled onto my side and push from there. I am helped onto all fours and push from there. I am huge and clumsy and my legs don’t want to hold my weight. A tray full of the instruments that will be needed once the baby crowns is brought in, then sits unused. Three hours pass. The phone rings. It is a woman from my office who tells me that Diane had her baby an hour ago, even though she was due two weeks after me. I hate her. Her early birth feels like a betrayal.
At the start of hour four, I can no longer open my eyes. When I feel a contraction, I sit up just enough to push, then fall back and semisleep until I have to push again. I will be doing this for the rest of my life, this pushing. I am helpless, a collector’s butterfly, straining against the pins. Nothing ever moves. The baby’s head is jammed in my pelvis but her heart is beating strongly and they are going to let me push forever.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I whisper. And with that sentence, the nurse calls my doctor, who rushes down, gloves up, and feels around in my vagina trying to figure out what is wrong. The baby, she discovers, is facing my left hip instead of facing my spine. Forceps are brought out and they do look like salad tongs, just like in the movies. One side of the tongs fits easily. The second doesn’t. She keeps trying but is having a hard time getting them to close in a way that won’t damage the baby’s face. All of this rooting around in my pelvis hurts, like a dentist with enormous hands trying to rotate your back teeth with only his thumbs.
Eventually, she figures it out. The forceps are hooked together and I have to push again. And I do. My tiny doctor pulls. And I push again. She pulls again. And the baby’s head moves, finally, then she gets stuck at the chest. The doctor mentions that she has never had that happen before. How nice it is to be a medical marvel. I push again. She pulls some more. The tight fit is unexpected. I’m not a small woman. My hips could kindly be described as child-bearing. Descriptions are horseshit.
I am given an episiotomy and my baby is pulled into the world. Opening my eyes takes effort. I see her being furiously rubbed with towels under a warmer. The baby doesn’t cry, then does. Her hands are balled in fists. She weighs nearly nine pounds. She looks like a tiny, angry model of my father and there is a semicircular bruise on her cheek from the forceps. Scott is crying. The doula is taking pictures. It is just after four thirty in the afternoon, a mere sixteen hours after the whole thing began.
I am shivering again, violently this time, and freezing. No one is concerned. All eyes are on the baby, except mine, which are closed. The placenta is delivered and I am stitched up, which I don’t feel. The baby is being whisked down to the NICU because her lungs sound odd, a side effect of all the time she spent locked in my pelvis. But she is here, finally. I relax. Birth is always the hardest part. It can only be downhill from here.
All narratives break down.
After the birth, life got blurry. For the myopic like me, an analogy: it was like walking around without your corrective lenses, where everything—from oncoming cars to the living room sofa—is reduced to nice benign blobs of color, which can’t hurt you because they don’t have sharp edges. Sounds become squishy, too. Speaking voices ape Charlie Brown’s parents, if Chuck’s folks were trapped in a coal mine. Food loses its taste, simply because you can’t tell if that brown fuzzy thing is chicken or beef or bread. It feels safe, this soft world. It’s like living in Tele-tubby land while being gently stoned. But there are still sharp dragons out there ready to bite and they can sneak up before you spot them.
For those with perfect vision, whom I curse, an illustrative story, plucked from the first fourteen days that I was home postbirth:
The first big baby-free journey I made was to my boss’s wedding in July. I’m sure it was a beautiful event, but I don’t remember most of it, a faux pas that will probably land me in wedding-guest purgatory. The pageantry floated past this guest. I’m not certain that I ever gave them a gift. Miss Manners would be so disappointed.
All that led up to the bride’s processional is fairly clear. I had rummaged through my closet like a rat through a Dumpster, desperately trying to find some summery, dressy outfit to fit my new, deflated frame. None of my prepreggers clothes fit, but I tried them on anyway, which only made me feel crappier about my new form. After sifting through a dozen years of poor fashion choices, I got to the end of the rod, where all of the fat clothes lived. From there I made my choice, an elastic-waist skirt I hadn’t worn since high school and a peach T-shirt covered in thread pills.
I was crying, of course,
but also oozing other bodily fluids. Baby books warn you about this panoply of liquid that a new mother’s body produces, but they fail to convey the reality. My skin was constantly covered in a thin sheen of perspiration, partly because it was a humid Tennessee summer and partly because this is how one’s body gets rid of all the fluid it retained during the third trimester. Things were funkier below what used to be my waist. A lingering issue from the marathon of pushing was that my bladder nerves were no longer communicating with my brain. Not only would I sneeze and pee, but I could walk and pee or climb stairs and pee or just sit quietly and pee. Then, of course, is what is politely called lochia, which is the flood of gook that flows out of your newly contracted uterus and is contained only by the enormous sanitary napkins that my mother’s generation swore by. Luckily, they also absorbed all the urine. I did, however, have that not-so-fresh feeling.
I wasn’t sure that I could contain all of the liquid long enough to make it out of the house and into the car, much less through a whole wedding. The wisest course of action seemed to be to stay inside my quiet little house where I would embarrass myself only in front of my husband (who, since he hadn’t decided to run like a track star during labor, was probably going to stick around for a bit). Other people would be at the wedding, people who saw me as a mostly sane, professional adult, rather than a flabby bag that leaked the whole band—blood, sweat, and tears. My cover would be blown and there would be no cramming this shameful damp genie back into its bottle. I decided to not go and walked out to the kitchen to inform Scott of this. “Go,” he said. “It’ll do you good.”
“But…” I said.
“Go,” he said. Beneath his easygoing exterior lies an easygoing core. But occupying a very small corner of that core is a chunk of annealed iron, which I could see as I gathered up my cop-outs with the car keys.
Hillbilly Gothic Page 5