* * *
I’ve thought about getting a home birth with a midwife. I mentioned it to my doctor, and she shrugged and said, “You can do it, but if something happens to your baby you’ll never forgive yourself.” And this specter of something happening to the baby is too frightening to overcome. Daniel says, “No way. I want you in a hospital with a doctor and a medical team.”
I know what the word midwife is conjuring up for him. A greasy-haired witch with dirty fingers and bad teeth, boiling water while I scream. We burned women in the early days of this country. Women who had too much knowledge of herbs and plants and who knew how to deliver babies. Those early witches, they were midwives, setting up competition for the new science of medicine. So they were burned and their knowledge was lost, and since then there has been this drive into the hospitals. A gleaming, sterile place to have a baby. A place where any risk can be managed and altered with the knife, with the drugs.
The most experienced midwives know how to deliver babies without knives, without drugs, but I am too scared to challenge the wisdom of modernity and science. I’ll have my baby in the hospital.
* * *
March 15 comes and goes. My bag is packed. At every twinge, Daniel looks at me with alarmed eyes. My body is huge, the baby moving all the time. I feel like a whale holding an ocean in its abdomen.
I am awakened by a movement, like a menstrual cramp but much sharper. I lie in the dark; he’s asleep next to me. Another hard twisting inside me, and I gasp aloud.
He’s instantly awake. “What’s happened? Are you starting?”
I say, “I think so.”
There are hours of walking and waiting. Holding his arm, I pace; the pain arrives and recedes. We walk around the block. I stop, have to lean on him, gasp and shudder. We go home and I bounce on the exercise ball. I won’t go to the hospital too early just to be turned away. The magic 3-1-1. It’s on our fridge door. Pains three minutes apart lasting one minute each for an hour, this is what we are waiting for. The pain mounts. I want to walk away from my body, leave it like a shroud fallen on the floor behind me. I realize this is not possible and am terrified.
It takes twelve hours. Then the worst car ride I have ever taken in my life. It’s a ten-minute ride, but it feels like hours. At the hospital we are checked in. Contractions are coming like a knife stabbing from the inside. I lean on him. He grips my hand. When the pains come, he looks into my eyes and counts while I breathe. It calms me down a little bit.
The nurse checks me. She puts her hand inside of me and sees how many centimeters my cervix is dilated. She says, “You’re a seven. That’s great. Keep working, mama.” I have become my cervix, this number more important than any other now. She pulls her gloved hand out; it’s covered in my blood and mucus. I turn my head and sob.
I can’t do this. I don’t want to do this. I’m so scared. I’ve been ripped away from my life, my normal life. Everything is pain, a kind of pain I cannot describe. Our cozy apartment feels a million miles away. Instead I have been dropped into some nightmare. The curtain has been pulled back and I see what we really are, glorified beasts that deal in blood and sweat. I try to remember that I’m a nurse. Bodily secretions are not frightening to me, but it’s different when you are the body on the table. It’s different when you are not the one in control. I refuse the epidural, of course. I know the right way to have a baby. No matter what, it is important to say no to the epidural. And through the raging pain I think, this is the way the species is perpetuated, what the fuck?
* * *
I want to die. It won’t matter. If I died, they could cut me up and take out the baby. She would live.
They call in the anesthesiologists for the epidural. I sit on the bed, curve my back into a C-shape, and hold a pillow to my stomach. I stare into Daniel’s eyes and try not to think of what they are doing or of the needle so big that they did not show it to us in the birthing classes. I try not to think of the fact that they are going to jam it into my spine. My spine. I try not to think about the fact that what they’re doing could paralyze me. But I’ll do anything to leave my body at this moment. The shot slams through me, an electric bolt so strong my legs jerk out.
I lie back, ignoring the tube entering my spine. How wonderful to be pain free. How miraculous to have that horror lifted. The monitors show that I am contracting wildly. But I have cheated pain. I’m shuddering all over. The nurse says it’s my body reacting to the trauma of pain. I fall asleep.
* * *
The nurse checks me. I’m finally a ten. It feels like I have to take the most giant shit of my life. The epidural is wearing off. They won’t give me another because they say I have to feel the pain to push. I’m terrified of the pain coming back full force. My vagina, my ass, it’s all already on fire. I’m on my back with my knees pulled up, Daniel and a nurse holding my numbed legs, another nurse with her hands in me as I’m grunting and crying and pushing as hard as I can.
The epidural makes me disconnected from my body, yet also and at the very same time, I am slammed into it in a way I have never been before. It feels like a war. I don’t want to be here. I want to be anywhere else but here. Any battlefield, any war zone would be better. I fall asleep for minutes and then am jolted back to this place. The nurse looks up at me from between my legs. She locks eyes with me, says, “You’re not trying hard enough. I want you to really try.” What the hell does she think I am doing? She says it louder, almost shouting, “Come on, harder, you can do this. Push your baby out.”
Delirious, I remember a friend in high school saying, “Do you want to see me feed my snake?” I remember her dropping in the mouse, the snake unhinging its jaw, the way it swung open unnaturally wide and open and then sucked up the mouse’s hindquarters, then its belly, until only its mouse face poked out of the serpent’s mouth, a moment before the rodent disappeared into that black abyss. And now my hips are dis-attaching like the snake’s jaw, carving an opposite trajectory, from darkness into light. I picture that curve inside me, the long slide that she must travel, and I push specifically into this place. I feel a wave, some specific energy flowing through me. I feel myself opening up; I feel myself tearing open. Everything is getting big. Pressure and expansion. The nurse says, “She’s crowning. Reach down and touch your baby’s head!” And I do and I’m crying because there she is, her head lodged between my lips. I push and grunt inhuman noises and the nurse tugs and then I open and she slips free from me. I’m crying, high as a kite. Daniel is leaning over me. They put the baby in his hands. He stares at her, his eyes huge, streaming. They put her on me, between my breasts. We watch astounded as she snuggles, moves her head looking for my nipple, smelling for it. When her mouth latches onto it, an electric current runs through my whole body.
* * *
She is born with her eyes open. Her gaze is regal and composed, like a queen surveying this strange new land she has come upon. Her head is elongated from the pressure of my pelvic bones, evidence of the journey we have completed together. I stare into those eyes, the strange shimmery surface of them.
I can do anything, go anywhere. I have completed this journey that lay unknown within my body all of my life, the ability to open and bring forth life. This secret knowledge held in my cells until the right moment; it makes me feel suddenly aware of the unseen rhythms of the world. I can sense the curved migrations of whales traveling the oceans, the opening of tiny flowers to minute winged pollinators, the pinecones that open in raging flame—all these unknown events and us too a part of it all.
We sleep and eat. She nurses. Daniel holds me while I hold her and it feels like hibernation or burrowing, like we are a nest of small furry animals—squirrels, perhaps, with our tails wrapped around us for softness and warmth. She lies on my belly. Her small face opens in my hands like a flower. She is fair, almost milky white. Nothing of me in her. She is all his from birth.
Later they will say that I didn’t love her, that I had no feelings for her. They are wrong. The fir
st time I saw my daughter, I fell in love with her. I could feel the chemicals running through me. It all worked exactly as it should. I fell in love with her; oxytocin was released in the right amounts. I felt warm and fuzzy. I felt deeply connected. Here was a creature that would love me, despite everything I am. His arms around me, my arms around her. We are perfect; we are beautiful.
Eighteen
Motherhood. With her birth a new person is released in me. A person who has nothing to do with the person I was before. I had not known until I crossed into this new land what would be asked from me. What is asked is everything.
* * *
In that first devastatingly exhausting week, I fall asleep with the baby in my arms and my mother walks into the room. I think this cannot be. She lives far away. She cannot be here; it is impossible. I try to tell her this. She waves away my words, says, “That is my baby. Give her to me.” I’m crying, but I know she is right. This is not my baby, this is her baby. She reaches down to grasp Bodhi. I don’t want to give her up. Both of us are tugging on her, so she wakes squalling.
We go to the throne of King Solomon. And he, magnificent, purple-robed, seated on his golden throne, pulls out of its sheath a curved sword. It catches the light. It is sharp enough to cleave the child in two. He will give us each a part to carry away, he says. I am happy. I hold the child out for the sword’s swing, and the king stands, comes forth. But my mother cries, “No, let her have the child!”
Then everyone knows that the baby belongs to my mother. Everyone knows she loves her properly while I am only an impostor. The king takes the child from me, hands her to my mother. She walks away with the baby and I am left alone, milk soaking through the fabric of my shirt, turning it a deeper crimson.
* * *
A year passes. What do I remember of that first year? There was sleeplessness and joy. A sleeplessness that felt like jet lag, the same suspension of night and day, the same grit-eyed, vertigo-tinged jolting between wakefulness and dream as comes from crossing the planet.
I kissed her face while she slept. We marveled over her feet, her hands, the small face like a flower. Her cooing laugh became my favorite sound in the world. She smiled at me and my entire body lit up as if we were still connected, as if the umbilical cord was still trailing out of my body and attached to hers. I could feel that tug at all times. I would steal minutes to shower, the hot water like baptism, and there would be a clenching of my abdomen and I would know she was crying, grab the towel, run out. Because she needed me. This need was huge and everywhere. It was the definition of my life.
What happened in that year? Everything changed. We were different people from who we were before. It wasn’t just her arrival, though of course that was the most important thing. In that year I was born as a mother, and Daniel too was born into a new life, not just as a daddy, but also as an artist. That’s the year he became a star. Those first paintings went to the woman in Woodside. They say she discovered him, as if he hadn’t existed before, as if he hadn’t painted before she saw his work. But then after the “discovery,” paintings flew off the wall. Galleries called. Everyone wanted him. Money flooded in.
We bought a house, of course. My beloved Mission apartment in those first months was already too small for the three of us. So we joined the flight out of the city and bought a house in Oakland, near the lake. This is where we live now. There are two bedrooms, one for her and one for us. Her toys are strewn around, the breast pump and bottles on the kitchen table, my rocking chair in the living room, her stroller folded up by the door. This is where I spend all my days. In these six rooms where the sunlight filters through the air, painting everything a pale gold in the late afternoon, where she sleeps in her crib in a room he has painted like a jungle. All around her, chubby cartoon lions and tiger cubs stalk one another through the grass, reach up to swat at flitting butterflies. Two long-eyelashed giraffes, necks entwined, reach up to puffy blue skies. What a lucky girl she is. How much love her daddy has spent making this jungle kingdom for her.
* * *
The making of Daniel had started like this. He had called, breathless. “A gallery show. In New York.” Relief flooding his voice. He had named the gallery. It had meant nothing to me. I had stopped listening, all my attention focused on the baby, who was starting to wake up, who would scream in a minute if I didn’t get my blouse undone in time.
A little later. His paintings sold. More than this, they wanted him for a solo show. He flies to New York when she is three months old. He comes back and says, “It’s happening. It’s finally happening. Everything I’ve always wanted.” I smile and say, “How wonderful.”
The art-handling job is long forgotten. Now they say he is the real deal. A painter the likes of which they haven’t seen in years. He gets a studio space across town. When she is seven months old, I strap the baby in, go to visit. It is cavernous, a row of giant oils along the walls. He comes to us, grabs the baby and kisses her, snuggles her against his chest, where she coos, gloriously happy.
He lives in a different world now. Peopled by art dealers, museum curators, rich benefactors. I leave her with the sweet old couple next door and go with him to an opening in the city. We walk in hand in hand, but then he is swirled away from me. Everywhere people in angular clothes, women in sharp lines and black that drapes away from exposed shoulders, large-framed glasses and red-lipsticked mouths. I feel my body under me still ungainly, still bloated, an oddity among all these slim and svelte physicalities. On the wall, his new paintings. They are huge, bursting off the wall in riotous colors, none of that disciplined illustrative style he had had before. These are bold figures, almost abstracts. I go from one to the next. Each of them is a stranger to me. I do not recognize our life together anywhere.
A woman slips next to me, says, “You’re his wife, right?” a glint in her sideways glance.
I nod, startled to be recognized.
She says, “What’s it like?”
I raise my eyebrows at her and she says, “You know, to be married to so much genius?” She waves at the vivid canvas in front of us.
I turn my eyes away from her. “Amazing. So inspiring. To see that his talent is finally being rewarded.”
“Oh yes, you were with him through the lean years, weren’t you?”
“Yes. We were together.”
“You supported him? Financially?”
“We supported each other. It’s what couples do.”
I walk away. She’s right. I had supported him. I had been the pillar and he the creeping vine. I had worked. And because of that, he can do this. I had been such a good nurse. It comes to me in a flood. I had been good. I had made a difference. It had been important. The difference between life and death, even. While what he does, this glorified playing with color, it cannot even compare in importance. But there he is, in a knot of people who will praise him, who will buy his work, who will pay him so much more than I could ever even have dreamed of.
But I am mommy now. Every single other thing is secondary. Even if I did go back to work, back to that other life, that umbilical cord stretched thin would nag and pull and then perhaps snap, and this I cannot risk.
* * *
We have agreed I will stay home for the first two years. These are the most important times of her life. These are the years that will dictate the whole of her life, that will set how she feels about love and need and desire. I will give her all that. The whole of my world revolving around her. She is the sun and I am every planet. I love my baby.
He’s gone a lot, but I don’t complain. I walk around with her. We sit in the rocking chair, her lips latch on my nipple, those eyes look up at me, her head rests in my palm. We follow the sun and the shadows across the rooms of the house. It is silent except for my voice, her small sounds, her crying. A sort of peace. Just her and me, like a big animal and a small animal curled together for safety. Like all the pictures of mother animals and baby animals in her picture books. Here is the mama duck with her soft ye
llow baby under her wing; here is the mother horse with her foal between her legs; here is the sow with a row of pink piglets suckling at her. We are just like them, I tell myself over and over. This is the most natural thing in the world. This is normal. This is only a mother and her child alone together.
But then why is there this noise like nails on a chalkboard somewhere behind my eyes? Why is there a thudding panic in my blood? Why do I feel as if some childhood door is inching open? Sometimes when he’s gone, something secret happens to me. Sometimes I put her in the crib, go into our bedroom, close the door, and fall into bed.
Her screams come loud and piercing, but the heaviness is stronger. I can lift no inch of myself. It is as if I inhabit a different planet where the rules of gravity are stricter, each of my limbs pinned mercilessly to the bed. I lie there listening to her scream and rage and sob, and then, maybe hours later, silence. Finally, finally, she has released me, and sleep drops over my head like a shroud.
I wake up in a panic, shoot out of tangled, humid sheets. She is tearless, her eyes huge as I lift her out of her crib. She is learning the unnatural lesson that crying is in vain. Already I have trained her well. Her diaper sags heavy. I clutch her to me, kiss the sweet slope of her forehead. I coo and rock her. I change the filthy diaper; I pull out my tit and attach her to it. I think I’ll never do that again, never. I won’t leave her despairing, unsure if I will ever return.
What Lies Between Us Page 18