The more I got to know her the more I understood some of my husband’s more idiosyncratic personality traits, the most adorable of which was his habit of suddenly blurting out something that made no sense and had no context. We could be sitting in the car in silence, driving down the freeway, when out of nowhere he would say something like, “Junior Wixom had trouble doing that.” He was either continuing a conversation he was having with someone not in the car or completing a thought he had started in 1988, but I’d have no idea who or what Junior Wixom was or what he had trouble doing. And when I looked at him like, you do realize that you just said that out loud, right?, he always had this great way of connecting what he’d just blurted out with something totally relevant, like, “Junior Wixom had trouble doing that, and I think you’re really beautiful.” And with that sort of connection he could talk about Junior Wixom and the trouble with doing that all he damn well pleased.
I had every inclination to believe that this child would be born with the same blurting out disease, much like her cousin, who once announced to a car full of unsuspecting adults, “My mom has fur on her bottom!” I was actually looking forward to the years of hilarity our child would provide just by virtue of being her father’s daughter and her grandmother’s granddaughter, and it will not surprise me when she tells her first grade teacher that the reason she can’t complete her homework is because she caught a cold in the womb and came out diseased.
By week 39 I had not given birth, although every member of my immediate family and every member of my extended family, all eighty-seven of them, called my house to ask me about it. That wasn’t at all annoying.
I was beginning to think that the sac holding the baby was made of an impenetrable material, a special blend of steel, Teflon, and vacuum-sealed plastic. My sister had five kids and her water never broke, and my mother carried me for an entire four weeks after I was due, and her water never broke. So I’d come to terms with the fact that my water wasn’t going to break, but I was worried about what was going to happen in the delivery room when my doctor realized that the standard hook they use to break a woman’s water just wasn’t going to work on me. Isn’t that one of the last things a woman wants to hear when she is sprawled naked on the birthing table? BRING ME A BIGGER HOOK.
During a late-night birthing class we got to take a look at the water-breaking hook, along with the catheter and IV bag they hook up to the woman when she’s giving birth. We’d been attending a birthing class being given by the hospital where I’d be delivering the baby, and when we learned about all the equipment, including the epidural needle and heartbeat monitor they attach to the baby’s head inside the womb, I realized that the whole purpose of the class was to scare the living shit out of expectant parents. They were constantly showing us videos of women screaming during labor or saying things like, “THAT doesn’t look like a baby!”
The blond woman teaching the class had never had a baby, and she openly scolded me when I shouted out, “Cigars!” in response to the question, “What should you bring with you to the hospital?” I’m not sure what I was supposed to have said, the Holy Scriptures? A clean set of Heavenly Underwear? Because those are two very important items in a birthing plan, right up there with tequila and porn, if you ask me. I think I may have crossed the line during a discussion about the pros and cons of breastfeeding when I suggested that one of the advantages of formula feeding was being able to get back to my rock-and-roll lifestyle. You’ve never seen a more frightened group of pregnant women, many of them terrified that their child would one day encounter my child and be introduced to the evils of coffee and MTV.
The classes were causing me to have strange dreams, one in particular where Al Roker was demonstrating proper breastfeeding techniques to me and the rest of my classmates. He had enormous nipples and was handling them with an almost unlawful carelessness, just swinging them around and pinching them and mushing them like little red meat patties. He made sure to warn us that we shouldn’t try this at home, not yet anyway, because persistent nipple stimulation had been known to induce labor. And I knew he specifically mentioned that part because I had just read about the whole nipple stimulation technique, that there are some doctors who recommend that a pregnant woman past her due date try twiddling her nipples for up to three hours at a time.
Three whole hours of nipple twiddling.
I can hardly imagine doing anything for three whole hours. I did see that three-hour movie about the hobbit people, but I wouldn’t describe that experience as watching a movie for three hours. I’d describe it as more of a three-hour countdown until I could pee again.
Friday, 30 January, 7:00 PM: For the fourteen days prior to this evening I had tried every possible labor-inducing technique documented in pregnant folklore to get this baby here including but not limited to:
Furious stair running, which in my nine-months-pregnant condition was more of a furious stair waddling
Hour-long walks with the dog
Praying
Seducing my husband more frequently than should be legal for a swollen human incubator who had worn nothing but elastic-waist pajama bottoms in public for the last four months.
I even thought about twiddling my nipples.
We had heard about a local Italian restaurant that served Pregnant Pizza, a specialty dish that had sent at least five pregnant women into labor according to a local newspaper. Of course, local newspapers in Utah do things like feature spreads on polygamy that read like glowing advertisements for the fanatical offshoots of the Mormon Church, but I was desperate and willing to try anything short of agreeing to let my daughter be married off at the age of fourteen to a sixty-year-old who thinks he’s been ordained by God.
I ordered the Pregnant Pizza, which was just a 144-square-inch pool of garlic, and as an appetizer ate a dish that contained over one hundred cloves of roasted garlic. By the time we left the restaurant I’d consumed so much garlic that I expected to give birth to a daughter who would poop garlic for the first thirteen years of her life.
Saturday, 8:00 AM: Jon gave birth to his “baby.”
Saturday, 9:00 AM: I felt nothing. I hadn’t farted or belched or felt any gastrointestinal movement, although it smelled like a garlic bomb had been detonated in our bedroom.
Saturday, 1:00 PM: Chuck took a poop in the backyard and it smelled like garlic.
Sunday, 6:00 PM: Consigned to the reality that I would never give birth to my garlic baby, we settled into the garlic haze of the bedroom to watch the Super Bowl. Perhaps it was the garlic hangover or maybe because we’re reasonable adults, but we rewound Janet Jackson’s half-time boob malfunction only once. Jon asked with barely any interest, “Was that her boob?” and I answered, “I think so.” I had bigger boobs to worry about.
Sunday, 6:30 PM: I started feeling lower back pain in throbbing sixty-second cycles. The pain was noticeable enough that Jon broke out his watch and started timing the intervals. One interval was eight minutes. The next was five minutes. Some were fifteen minutes, but there was definitely a start and stop to the pain.
Sunday, 9:30 PM: After three consecutive hours of back pain I suddenly realized that I needed to poop! Pooping was glorious! Except! I spent the next hour in the bathroom passing My Garlic Poop, and it left me with gigantic garlic hemorrhoids. And then the random back pain completely stopped.
Sunday, 9:30 PM–11:30 PM: Jon spent two hours trying to reconcile the fact that he wasted three precious hours of his life timing poop labor.
Monday, 9:00 AM: My doctor told me that I was dilated to a three, meaning my cervix had opened to three centimeters, and that I was in perfect condition to be induced. I didn’t want to be induced, not with my garlic hemorrhoids, but he said that he was going to be on vacation for most of the week and that I may go into labor when he wasn’t in town. That would mean that some other doctor who had never seen me before would deliver my baby, some other doctor who might just like to give episiotomies for the hell of it, and I wasn’t ready to reli
nquish my intact vagina to a stranger.
He asked us if we’d like to do it today. Today? You mean, this day? The day that is this one?
Jon and I looked at each other like, was there anything we wanted to get done before the birth of the baby? Aside from 1) a honeymoon to Paris and 2) extensive experimentation with hard drugs, I couldn’t think of anything, so we both shouted, “YES!” Normally we would have emphasized our enthusiasm with a colorful word or two, but my doctor was very Mormon, and I didn’t want to upset the man who would be holding sharp instruments near my private parts.
The doctor made a call to the hospital and they said we should go home, pack a bag, take a shower, and wait for a call that should come by 11 AM, the earliest that they would have a free room.
Monday, 11:00 AM: We had showered. We had packed. We had called the family including my mother, The Avon World Sales Leader, who was canceling a flight to LA so that she could be here for the birth. We were staring at the phone. The phone wasn’t ringing.
Monday, 11:05 AM: Ring, damn phone! RING! Why wasn’t it ringing?
Monday, 11:07 AM: I asked Jon to check and make sure the phone was working.
Monday, 11:08 AM: Jon assured me that the phone was indeed working.
Monday, 11:09 AM: The phone wasn’t ringing. I began to hyperventilate.
Monday, 11:15 AM: The phone still wasn’t ringing. I began to pace the floor and contemplate the horrible words I was going to spray paint on the front door of the hospital.
Monday, 12:00 PM: I called the hospital to let them know that they were torturing me and that I was going to sue. They said that the woman who was giving birth in the room that they were going to give to me just needed to push the baby out. Oh, WAS THAT ALL. They said the room would definitely be ready in about four hours, and that amount of time sounded longer to me than my entire pregnancy.
Monday, 12:15 PM: We threw everything into the truck, including the dog, and headed to my mother-in-law’s house where Chuck would be staying for the next five days. We made sure that we noticed how cold it was outside, how cold and gray and dirty, so that when we told our daughter about the day she was born we could begin by saying, “It was a cold and gray and dirty day in February.” That just sounded like something a parent would say. We were going to be parents!
Monday, 1:30 PM: HOLY SHIT WE WERE GOING TO BE PARENTS.
I’d changed my mind. I didn’t want to give birth. I voiced my concern out loud. Jon’s mother, a woman who had given birth six times, gave me a look that said I pretty much needed to shut up. I shut up.
Monday, 2:00 PM: Back pain again. I guessed that I would need to go poop in about three hours.
Monday, 3:00 PM: I was still having back pain. I convinced Jon to call the hospital to check on our room even though it had only been three hours. The hospital said that the room would definitely be ready by 4:30 and that in order to get the room we would need to be there at exactly 4:30. I suggested we leave immediately even though the hospital was only fifteen minutes away. Jon was reluctant to indulge my irrational behavior, but we prepared to leave anyway and gave instructions to his mother concerning the dog: no potato chips, no raw meat, and she needed to make him work for treats.
Monday, 3:15 PM: We left Jon’s mom’s house. Chuck received his first potato chip.
Monday, 3:30 PM: Jon was driving slowly. We tried to enjoy our last car ride as a childless couple. It was the last car ride of our Old Life. I felt like I was going to throw up.
Monday, 4:00 PM: We arrived at the hospital and carried all of our luggage up to the fourth floor. I wanted to tell every single person I saw that I was going to have a baby. I had to physically restrain myself from singing in the elevator.
Monday, 4:05 PM: The nurses sitting behind the desk in the labor and delivery area regretted to inform us that they had given away our room just two minutes ago to a woman delivering triplets prematurely. As if that was any harder than what I was doing? Three was only two more than one, and that was not very many. I asked if we could share the room. They said no.
Monday, 4:07 PM: Despite Jon’s best efforts to comfort me I warned the nurses behind the desk that the Avon World Sales Leader had canceled a flight to LA just so that she could be here when I delivered my baby, and that if they knew what was best for them they would give me a room and not upset the Avon World Sales Leader. Accordingly, they told me to go wait in the waiting room and that a room should definitely open up within the next hour. And then they rolled their eyes.
Monday, 4:10 PM: The waiting room was filled with hundreds of little kids. Maybe not hundreds, but it felt like hundreds with all the bratty screaming. Jon and I realized that we’d made the huge mistake of trying to have this baby in Utah, the Baby Making Capital of America. It could possibly be the Baby Making Capital of the World, but there is probably a third world nation out there whose inhabitants have had no education on contraception, and that third world nation may have one or two more babies than Utah. We started to realize that we might not ever get a room.
Monday, 5:30 PM: Still no room, but my back pain had become really uncomfortable. So uncomfortable that I had to get up and walk around. My doctor had just delivered another woman’s baby and visited us in the waiting room. He regretted to inform us that they had yet again given away our room to another woman and that we might have to go home and come back the following day. I nearly clawed his eyes out.
I mentioned my back pain, and then he asked, “How far apart are the pains?”
“Four minutes,” I answered, which I guess in doctor-speak meant I’M IN LABOR.
Monday, 6:00 PM: WE GOT A ROOM!
Monday, 6:10 PM: I changed into the dreaded hospital gown and was introduced to my nurse, who was four feet tall and had a gray mustache covering her upper lip. I couldn’t stop staring at the mustache. It was just so hairy. And thick. I wondered if Jon noticed her mustache. How could he not notice her mustache? The nurse delivering my baby had a mustache!
Monday, 7:00 PM: I spent the hour giving The Mustache my entire oral history per hospital regulations. So many questions! None of their business! Just get this started already! GAHHH! She had a mustache!
Monday, 7:10 PM: Mustache hooked me up to a contraction monitor and a Pitocin drip, the hormone used to get the contractions really going. We turned on the television to CNN Headline News, just to have some background noise. And hey! There was Janet Jackson’s nipple!
Monday, 7:30 PM: I’d been on the lowest dose of Pitocin for about twenty minutes and my contractions were already three minutes apart and lasting sixty seconds each. These were contractions? These?? These here?? NO PROBLEM! I could totally handle this. This was easy! They were uncomfortable, yes, but to someone who had been constipated her whole life THESE WERE NOTHING! Hey! There was Janet Jackson’s nipple again!
Monday, 8:00 PM: I was dilated to a four. My mother, my sister, and my stepfather showed up. My mother, the Avon World Sales Leader, was dressed in her best business attire. She looked like she had shown up to fire Donald Trump. My bare vagina was lying right there on the hospital bed, and my mother was perfectly pressed. I hoped her suit had been Scotchgarded.
We all watched Janet Jackson’s nipple. Again.
Monday, 9:00 PM: I was dilated to a five. The contractions were becoming a little more intense but they were still manageable. Jon’s sister, who happened to be a labor and delivery nurse at another hospital, showed up. Mustache informed us that her shift had ended and that another nurse would be taking care of us. What? No more mustache? But I wanted my baby to be delivered by The Mustache! Come back, Mustache!
Monday, 9:30 PM: New nurse arrived and didn’t have a mustache. In fact, she was perfectly harmless and boring. Nurses should be required to have mustaches.
Monday, 9:45 PM: Jon’s sister was showing Jon how to help me breathe. The contractions were intense enough that I really needed his help. Together we pushed through the pain: hew, hew, hew, hew heeeeeeeee! Hew, hew, hew, hew heeeeeeeee! Hew,
hew, hew, hew heeeeeeeee!
Jon was wonderful. He was right beside me holding my hand. We couldn’t believe how easy this was! Bring on the baby! And look! There was Janet Jackson’s nipple again!
Monday, 10:00 PM: “Did you hear that?”
“What?”
“That.”
“What that?”
“That!”
“WHAT THAT?”
“That popping sound.”
“What popping sound?”
“You didn’t hear that pop?”
“What pop?”
“That pop! I felt it in the back of my mouth.”
“I didn’t hear any pop.”
Monday, 10:02 PM: My water gushed all over the hospital bed.
Monday, 10:03 PM: “Oh…THAT pop.”
Monday, 10:04 PM: I ran to the bathroom so that the nurse with no mustache could clean up the bed. While I was in the bathroom I had my first contraction post-water-breaking and it was curiously unlike all the pre-water-breaking contractions: REALLY FUCKING AWFUL.
Monday, 10:06 PM: I returned to the hospital bed and told Jon that the pain was getting a lot worse. In the middle of my sentence another contraction hit, and I almost bit off my tongue.
Monday, 10:15 PM: AWFUL AWFUL AWFUL. Contractions that were three minutes apart and lasting only sixty seconds were all of a sudden ten seconds apart and lasting ninety seconds. The nurse realized that the combination of the Pitocin and my water breaking had thrown my body into a transitional state—what is supposed to happen when someone is dilated between eight and ten centimeters—even though I was only dilated to a six. I started to shake violently, and my body was covered in chills. I could barely see straight. The nurse turned the Pitocin off.
It Sucked and Then I Cried Page 7