And there was Janet Jackson’s nipple, my constant, calming companion.
Monday, 10:25 PM: I was on the verge of vomiting all over the bed. The pain couldn’t possibly get worse than this. During one of the ten-second breaks I asked all the women in the room if it would get any worse than this. They all looked at each other silently. No one would answer me.
It was going to get worse? It could not possibly get worse. Worse than that was dead. There couldn’t possibly be a worse pain in the world. It felt like someone was trying to twist the top half of my body off my lower half, like I was a plastic Coke bottle.
Monday, 10:30 PM: I was going to die. Labor was going to kill me. Jon was trying to help me breathe, but my body’s pain-coping mechanism was forcing me to hold my breath. I was only getting ten seconds of a break between contractions, and I wasn’t getting enough air.
IT WAS REALLY AWFUL.
Monday, 10:35 PM: I was officially writhing. There was actual writhing going on. Unabashed writhing.
Monday, 10:40 PM: Jon forced me to look into his eyes and breathe: “Hew, hew, hew, hew heeeeeeeee! Hew, hew, hew, hew heeeeeeeee! Hew, hew, hew, hew GET ME THE EPIDURAL!”
Monday, 10:45 PM: The anesthesiologist showed up. Talk about service!
Somehow, in my awful, writhing state, I noticed that he was wall-eyed. His left eye was looking at Jon; his right eye was looking at me. It only confused me more. I had to tell him that I understood what he was going to do and all I could think about was how brutal his childhood must have been, having those wall eyes and all. Children are cruel. I knew, I was about to have one.
Monday, 10:50 PM: I signed the epidural release form. He turned me on my side so that he could stick the needle in my back. I realized that one of his eyes was looking at my back, the other one was probably looking at the ceiling.
I was in the middle of a contraction that was about to crush my body. Jon was holding both my hands and looking me straight in the eyes.
“You can get through this,” he assured me. I had to hold still so that the anesthesiologist could stick the needle in the right place. Holding still was the hardest thing I had ever done.
I felt a small prick in my back and my leg flexed involuntarily. The anesthesiologist said that he was done. I didn’t believe him. He couldn’t possibly be done. It was supposed to hurt and I was supposed to freak out about the needle! He was done?
Why had I been so scared? WHY DID I WASTE WEEKS AND WEEKS OF MY LIFE WORRYING ABOUT THE EPIDURAL NEEDLE! GIVE ME THOSE WEEKS BACK!
Monday, 11:00 PM: The epidural had taken effect. It was the best feeling I had ever felt in my life. I wanted to smoke a joint. I started to sing. My mother and sister started laughing. I asked Jon if we could name the baby Epidural Armstrong.
I was so happy!
Monday, 11:30 PM: Did I mention how happy I was? They should sell epidurals on the street. I would buy a hundred of them and give them to my friends.
Tuesday, 12:00 AM: Still happy! Everyone was talking and laughing and joking. And guess what felt good? The epidural!
Tuesday, 1:00 AM: I was dilated to a nine and I felt no pain. At that point we had seen the replay of Janet Jackson’s nipple over one hundred times.
Tuesday, 2:30 AM: I was dilated to a ten and it was time to start pushing. I didn’t feel like pushing but they assured me that it was time.
Jon stood on my right side; his sister stood on my left side. They held my knees to my chest and the nurse told me to take a deep breath and push.
“Huh?”
“Push.”
“Push where?”
“Just push.”
“How do I push?”
Tuesday, 2:35 AM: I thought I was pushing, but I didn’t really know if I was pushing. It didn’t feel like pushing. It just felt like I was holding my breath. Jon’s sister and the nurse exchanged a silent glance like, this is going to take a while. I wanted to tell them that there was no way that this “pushing” thing was going to get this baby here. This pushing thing was stupid. There had to be a better way.
Tuesday, 3:00 AM: Still pushing. I was pushing for thirty seconds every two minutes. Pushing was more tiring than any of the workouts I did during pregnancy. Pushing was hard. I looked into Jon’s eyes each time I pushed and noticed that he was unconsciously pushing with me. He was beginning to get light-headed.
Tuesday, 3:15 AM: Jon almost passed out from pushing so hard. I warned him, “IF YOU WANT TO LIVE TO SEE TOMORROW, YOU WILL NOT PASS OUT.”
Tuesday, 3:20 AM: Still pushing. My mom and my sister shrieked simultaneously. They could see the baby’s head. Apparently the baby had hair! The nurse asked me if I wanted the overhead mirror to see what was going on. NO, I DIDN’T WANT TO SEE WHAT WAS GOING ON. ARE YOU PEOPLE CRAZY?
Tuesday, 3:30 AM: My doctor arrived and stood at the end of the hospital bed to assess my progress, and I could see the reflection of the carnage of my vagina in his glasses. HORROR!
HORROR!
Tuesday, 3:40 AM: I wanted to ask my doctor to take off his glasses so that I wouldn’t be confronted with my own reflection, but at that point the baby’s head was crowning and I could feel my body stretching around her skull. Why could I feel that? That felt weird.
Tuesday, 3:45 AM: OUCH. BABY’S HEAD. BURN. BURNING. OUCH. OUCH. OUCH.
Tuesday, 3:50 AM: The doctor said something to the nurse at that point, something about how he thought he wasn’t going to have to, but now he had no choice, and he reached for something, and Jon whipped his head around to look at me, and then I felt a snip and a release of pressure. Thank God I hadn’t agreed to the overhead mirror.
Tuesday, 3:55 AM: The doctor made a second snip. I felt everything. The burning had subsided, but I could still feel the contour of the baby’s head. I couldn’t describe this feeling as anything but weird. My mom and my sister were literally jumping up and down at this point, both jabbering on about all the hair on the baby’s head.
Tuesday, 3:58 AM: I felt the baby’s head come out of my body, and then I felt her shoulders. OH MY GOD IT WAS WEIRD. She was twisting as she came out, and I could feel everything. I felt her arms. Then her belly. Then her legs.
Tuesday, 3:59 AM: My mother, the Avon World Sales Leader, started screaming. My sister was crying. Jon was more lovely than I had ever seen him in my life. The doctor dropped this thing on my stomach, and HOLY SHIT! IT WAS A BABY! I honestly didn’t know what he was going to pull out of me, perhaps an abandoned tire iron, or maybe a bag of potatoes? I felt so much relief that it was human.
Tuesday, 4:00 AM: Jon cut the cord. The baby was whimpering quietly. They wiped her down and placed her immediately on my chest, her right arm stretched out toward my face. She and I looked at each other directly. Jon leaned down, placed his left hand on my head, his right hand on the baby’s back. It was the most defining moment of my life.
We made a family.
CHAPTER SIX
You Have to Feed the Baby…Through Your Boobs
We named the baby Leta Elise Armstrong. She was named after my mother’s sister, Leta Kay, who died when she was five months old. Leta rhymes with Rita and pita and, of course, Dorito. At birth she weighed seven pounds, ten ounces, and measured twenty inches long. Her official birthday was 02/03/04, which should make it very easy to fill out forms when she applies for a mortgage.
She had long toes she got from her mama, but otherwise she looked exactly like her father.
Some women say that their babies look like an opossum, gerbil, or other type of lovable rodent. But ours? Ours looked like a frog.
The first seven days of having a newborn baby in our home were the most difficult, most humbling string of incoherent hours of my life. I’d never been more tired or more weepy or more terrified or more joyous. I couldn’t do anything but focus on making it hour to hour. I’d had really low expectations for labor, meaning I thought it was going to be a horrific, gory experience, and I know that it is for many women, but it was because of those low expectation
s that I could, seven days later, look back and say that labor had been a somewhat pleasant, perfectly manageable process. The lesson to take from this is, of course, to aim low in life and be thrilled when the worst doesn’t happen. I was a new mom, and look at all that wisdom!
What hadn’t been manageable, however, was the inhumane aftermath of labor that I hadn’t heard anyone talk about. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse—worse than the level two vaginal tear and subsequent stitches, the hemorrhoids of such mythological proportions that the nurses at the hospital were surely going to tell stories about them for the rest of their careers, the bleeding, the abdominal contractions and cramps, the fatigue—I developed a urinary tract infection and also became unbearably constipated.
Seven prescription drug bottles sat on my nightstand, among them pain relievers, antibiotics, prenatal vitamins for breastfeeding, and a huge container of stool softener. I was under the impression that stool softener was supposed to soften the stool, and maybe for normal people who pooped normally, stool softener may have done what it was supposed to do. But I’d never pooped normally, remember? And all the pushing I did during labor confused my entire system so that the stool softener did nothing but sit there pooling like freshly poured concrete in the lower half of my body. A few days after returning from the hospital I spent over four hours in the bathroom, and all the relaxation techniques I’d learned for labor became laughably inept as I screamed and screamed for mercy.
So I started drinking prune juice like it was water, and immediately it had a very interesting effect on the baby, who had finally taken to breastfeeding. Everything I’d ever read about breastfeeding had to have been written by a man with no tits, because everything said that as long as the baby was in the right position it wouldn’t hurt to breastfeed. THAT WAS A LIE.
The only way to describe it to a man is to suggest that he lay out his naked penis on a chopping block, place a manual stapler on the sacred helmet head, and bang in a couple hundred staples. The first two staples might hurt a little, but after that it just becomes numb, right? And by the eighty-eighth staple you’re like, AREN’T YOU FULL YET? But then the comparison really fails because a man doesn’t have two penises, and after stapling the first boob the baby moves on to the other boob and the happy stapling begins ALL OVER AGAIN.
I decided many years ago that when I eventually had kids I would try my hardest to breastfeed them. I knew it would be something I would have to work at because my sister, whose boobs are far bigger and seemingly more life-giving than mine, had such difficulty trying to breastfeed each of her five kids that the longest she was ever able to feed any of them via the breast was one month. And it wasn’t that she didn’t try very, very hard. It’s just that her milk had the consistency and nourishment of water, and her kids were left starving after each feeding. So she switched to formula, and now she and all her five healthy children are going straight to hell.
During my pregnancy I looked forward to breastfeeding and the possibility of bonding with my baby while simultaneously providing her with gobs of antibodies and tailor-made nutrients. I didn’t need to be convinced that breast is best, and every time I picked up a book to read more about the process of breastfeeding I had to wade through at least two to three chapters devoted specifically to convincing me that women who use formula are terrorists. Apparently, everything that has ever gone wrong in the world can be traced back to some evil woman who fed her baby a man-made imitation of breast milk via a plastic nipple. The literature on breastfeeding can sometimes be obnoxiously fanatical—there is one book that actually says that needing a good night’s sleep is a myth perpetrated by the bottle feeders of the world!—and if we took it to its logical conclusion we wouldn’t be looking for Osama bin Laden in the war on terrorism. We would be looking for his mother and her stockpile of deadly Similac and Enfamil.
I don’t personally think that my sister is a bad person because she decided to feed her babies from a bottle—my sister is a bad person for entirely unrelated reasons involving aerosol hairspray. I have a lot of respect for her and the difficult decision she made for herself and for her children, and after my own intense experience of wielding my torpedo boobs, I can say with a tiny bit of authority that breastfeeding is not easy. They will tell you that it is easy. They will say it’s good for you, it’s good for your baby, and it’s easy! And they will be lying to you. SHOVING A BLUNT PENCIL INTO YOUR EYE IS EASY, TOO, so there is no merit to that claim, and you shouldn’t believe them.
I think back to those first few days of breastfeeding, and I’m overcome with agony because I know that there is some new mother out there right now who had her baby hours ago, and she is trying to get that baby to attach, and that baby is just madly gumming at her bruised chest. I am so, so sorry, new mom. In case they didn’t tell you, breastfeeding isn’t easy.
Nipples learn quickly, however, and after a few days of successful feeding they become immune to the stapling, and the piercing pain turns into dull, uncomfortable throbbing. Some feedings are worse than other feedings, and in Leta’s case, the worst feedings were the ones in which she held conversations with my breast. And I’m talking pages of dialogue, single-spaced. Usually these conversations were upsetting, because she’d scrunch up her nose and throw her knee into my other breast, all while bobbing her head back and forth to emphasize her point. And that wasn’t particularly fun because when her head bobbed my nipple bobbed, and NIPPLES WEREN’T MADE TO BOB.
Perhaps the hardest thing about breastfeeding, which also happened to be the hardest thing about new parenthood, was nighttime when her sleep schedule often interfered with the agenda of my breasts. When she didn’t wake up for a few hours to eat, my boobs, normally emptied throughout the day, started to fill up with milk. Consequently, I’d lie on my back completely awake as my breasts hardened like mud in the afternoon sun. Sometimes it was so bad that my boobs were literally exploding, and the only relief I could get was in a handheld breast pump that creaked as I tried frantically to elicit milk from my nipples.
One night I sat in the dark, nipples creaking, my hand cranking the pump like a well in the desert, and nothing would come out of my boob. I cried quietly for a half hour, mumbling to myself, my boob doesn’t work! But Jon could only take so much, and he finally sat up in bed and put his hand on my right arm. “Put down the breast pump and go to bed,” he said. “Your boob totally works.”
I was feeding about every two and a half hours, and since I’d started drinking gallons of prune juice the baby was pooping every two and a half minutes. That’s an exaggeration, sure, but you should have seen these poops. Jon and I were totally fascinated with the color and texture, as if she were some sort of Picasso weaving neon orange creations into her diapers. I was very jealous of her ability to poop so regularly and with such artistic flare, but I was also elated that her body seemed to be thriving. Every time I heard her fill her pants I got so excited that I wanted to frame the dirty diaper and hang it on the refrigerator.
Every time I changed her diaper I was overcome with a sense of fulfillment, and I felt that way in the most un-hip, earnest way possible. My life before Leta felt like it had happened decades ago even though she was only a week old, and I never knew I could love someone or something so intensely or so achingly. I’d spend several hours a day just listening to her breathe. I couldn’t stop smelling her neck or sticking her little frog feet in my mouth. She was the most perfect creation in the world, the most innocent bundle of coos and yawns and mumbles, and my heart broke every time she focused on my face.
The weekend after Leta was born we picked up Chuck from my mother-in-law’s house where he had been staying since we left for the hospital five days earlier. It was the first time I’d left the house since returning home from the hospital, and I was certain it would be the last time I would see the outside of my own home for at least the next six years.
It took us over an hour to prepare to leave the house, stuffing everything we thought we mig
ht need into one tiny diaper bag, including shaving cream, conditioner, three medical journals, two rolls of toilet paper, all seven of my prescription drug medications, and no less than seven changes of clothes for the baby, all for what would end up being two hours away from home. But we needed all those things, just in case! After that experience I wondered why I would ever want to leave my house again.
I had remembered my thirty-five-pound mutt as being a somewhat lithe, gentle creature, very tiny in his thirty-five-pound frame, but when I opened the door and he came running to greet me, I was confronted with an enormous, unrecognizable monster. WHO HAD FUR. FUR! His size seemed odd, yes, but it was his fur that made me rub my eyes to make sure I wasn’t seeing things, I was just so used to dealing with a skin-covered baby. It didn’t help that Grandma’s house served as a five-day all-you-can-eat buffet of treats and pig’s ears and what else, Grandma? Popcorn. And? And toast. And? And apples. And? Okay, fine, and bacon grease.
We introduced Leta to Chuck in Grandma’s living room, a somewhat neutral space where Chuck wouldn’t have the instinct to protect his property. And from the rabid tail-wagging and drooling you could tell that Chuck thought she was some sort of enormous treat swaddled in yummy pink velvet. He couldn’t sniff her head or face enough, and he kept looking at Jon and me like, this is for me? The whole thing? All of it?
In the days that followed he behaved remarkably well in the presence of the baby, especially considering the fact that our daily outings to the dog park came to an abrupt halt. If anything, he’d become more attached to me and less likely to leave the room when I entered it. He was fascinated with Leta’s high-pitched coos, and whenever she made a sudden noise he’d sit up straight, stick his ears to the sky, and look at me like, you better not be hurting that treat!
In the mid-eighties there was a song about not having to take your clothes off to have a good time, that the good time could be had drinking cherry wine, and its video ran in regular rotation on Friday Night Videos. Somewhere in my basement I have a VHS tape with that video and the one for “Papa Don’t Preach” and that Peter Cetera song from one of the Karate Kid movies. I blame my parents for that serious lapse in good taste because they never taught me to look outside of popular radio and television for music, and they only smiled with pride when they found out that I had made a cassette filled entirely with “We Are the World,” taped off the radio, over and over and over again. Even before I became a parent I knew that I was going to make sure that my children grew up listening to Bob Dylan and Miles Davis. I’d teach them about Jimi Hendrix and the broad cultural significance of Milli Vanilli.
It Sucked and Then I Cried Page 8