Mama Mia
Page 24
Jason tries to aim the hot water towards my back as I brace myself against the wall. The sounds I’m making mildly surprise me, although in my head I’m already somewhere else. I can feel every wave but my brain is curled up in a little ball in the corner. With my discarded silk dress.
Time falls away. I have no idea how long I’ve been standing in the shower or if, in fact, I will ever stand anywhere else in my life. Later, Jason tells me we were there for about forty-five minutes. At some stage, I start to notice blood on the tiles. Bright red blood. Had I been in control of my mind, this would have worried me, but I’m detached, just focused on surviving between contractions.
Every so often, Jase says something like, ‘I’m going to try and find someone; will you be okay for a minute?’ I know he can’t help me. He doesn’t have an epidural needle in his pocket, so, frankly, I don’t care where he is or what he does. Labour is an extraordinarily lonely experience.
Eventually, he drags a midwife back to my shower prison to prove that I am indeed worthy of a delivery suite. The bathroom door is now wide open to the public waiting room. I’m past caring. I look up from under the shower, my hair plastered to my head, my body huge and wet, and the floor red with my blood to see a grey-haired midwife quickly taking in the scene. ‘Right, I think we can take you through now.’
You RECKON?!
Jason wraps a towel around me and helps me walk around a corner to a delivery room. Finally. ‘Epidural,’ I moan. ‘I neeeeeeed drugs now.’ In the relative comfort of a non-public place, my body decides it’s time to kick things up a notch. Or five.
‘Hi Mia, my name is Bianca and I’m the midwife who’s going to look after you. Let’s just hop up here on the bed and we’ll check the baby’s heart rate. Jason, is it? Jason, why don’t you go and run a bath for Mia. The heat might help as those contractions build.’
Build? BUILD?
‘And we’ll just check how dilated you are, okay, Mia?’
‘Okay,’ I wail quietly, like a broken child.
The baby’s heart rate is good and Bianca waits for my next contraction to subside before checking my cervix.
‘Five centimetres, very good.’
My thoughts turn to Amy. ‘Amy tried to send me home,’ I wail. ‘She. Tried. To. Send. Me. HOOOOOOOME.’
At this moment, more than anything else, maybe even more than drugs, I need everyone to agree that this was a terrible injustice. A grave error of judgement on Amy’s part. A travesty.
Bianca pats my arm non-committally. ‘Yes, dear, well Amy has been called upstairs for a caesarean, so she won’t be looking after you any more.’
It’s not nearly enough but it’s a start. ‘Good! Because she TRIED TO SEND ME HOME!’
Drugs. Back to the drugs. ‘I REEEALLLY need an epidural,’ I sob-wail. ‘Where’s the anaesthetist?’
‘He’s upstairs for the caesarean, too, but I’m sure he’ll be here soon, dear.’
‘I want to POOO,’ is my next thought, which goes straight from my brain and out my mouth with no filter. At full volume.
Dear Lord, what is happening to me? I am not that person. I am not someone who talks about poo. I am not the woman in labour who is out of control. Oh wait, I am. My hair is plastered to my head, my pretty silk dress is scrunched up in a wet ball somewhere—who cares?—and nothing is more important than making everyone understand how much I hate Amy and that I want to poo. I don’t think this was in the brochure…
‘That’s normal, dear. It’s just the feeling of the baby pushing down, getting ready to come out.’
‘But I want to POOOO,’ I shout, sliding myself off the bed and lurching towards the bathroom. As I sit there on the toilet, in agony, watching the stupid bath fill up, I can’t actually do anything except moan like a farm animal. This is not cool. Bloody Amy.
A couple of contractions later, I stagger back to the bed in agony and despair. How do all those women do that active birth stuff? All I want to do is lie down and die.
Every so often, Bianca comes and waves the foetal heart monitor over my stomach to check the baby’s heart rate. It’s always fine. This is a brief and remote comfort. Regularly, new people come into the room. ‘Are you the anaesthetist?’ I beg every time.
‘No dear, but I’m sure he’ll be here soon.’ Fucking liars.
Jason is conspicuously quiet. I find out later that this is because each time someone promises me that the anaesthetist is coming, the midwife catches Jason’s eye and silently shakes her head. They know with near certainty the drugs aren’t coming but no one wants to tell me. Bastards.
My waters break. A sudden gush all over the bed. Whatever. The noises are getting louder. At one point, I hear a terrible wailing sound and wonder who the hell that is. Hang on, it’s me.
When I do manage to form words instead of barnyard-animal sounds, it’s to wail one of the following three sentences:
‘Amy tried to send me HOME.’ (I am still finding it hard to move past this.)
‘I want to POOOO.’ (Having patiently explained to me twenty times that it’s not poo, it’s just the feeling of the baby pushing down, everyone just ignores this now.)
‘I want to DIEEEEE. Just take me outside and run me over with the CAR.’ (Jason ignores this too.)
The next time I am examined by Bianca, I am eight centimetres dilated. My response to this happy news is naturally to raise the subject of Amy. Jason reacts with slightly less vitriol and ducks outside to summon my parents to the hospital with Luca. At least I think he does because soon after I dimly recall him saying, ‘Luca and your parents are here. Just outside.’ I don’t care. Unless they have brought a big needle to stick in my back.
Now eight o’clock on Sunday morning, we’ve been at the hospital for what feels like three weeks but is actually three and a half hours.
Suddenly, a new man walks into the delivery room. Even in my out-there state, I can feel the energy in the room change immediately.
‘Epidural?’ I whimper, forever hopeful.
‘Good morning, Mia. I’m Stephen. Remember me?’
It’s the obstetrician. Dr Bob doesn’t do deliveries during the night or on weekends, so I had known there was a good chance my baby would be delivered by his back-up, Dr Stephen. I’d only met him once, for a meet-and-greet appointment, and I’d been nervous about the prospect of someone other than Dr Bob delivering the baby. Dr Bob made me feel safe and knew my history. But right now? I want to roll off the bed and kiss Dr Stephen’s feet. His voice is commanding and confident. Finally, someone with power and influence.
‘Hi, Stephen,’ I wail pathetically. ‘Thanks for coming.’ Then it’s back to animal noises, punctuated by wailing pleas for an epidural as he examines me.
While I’m still begging, whining and ranting, he comes up to the side of the bed, takes hold of my arm and puts his face quite close to mine to get my attention. ‘Mia, there is no epidural. There’s no time. We’re having this baby right now.’
This takes a moment to sink in but I’m swept up in his confidence. I love to be bossed when I’m feeling out of control. This is good. Had he suggested it, I would have agreed to adjourn to the car park to give birth there. I had that much faith.
‘Okaaaay,’ I nod in my now signature wail. ‘Thanks for coming, Stephen.’ This becomes my new refrain. It has finally dawned on me that it’s no use mentioning Amy again. And Dr Stephen is the first person to actually do anything constructive like suggest I give birth now. My gratitude must be expressed ever five or six seconds.
As I begin to follow his instructions about pushing and stopping and breathing and panting, it all feels very…organic. Simple. Unadorned. With Luca, there had been so many people in the room, and I’d been hooked up to so many machines. But now it’s just me, naked on the bed, Bianca over one shoulder, Jason over the other and Dr Stephen in a shirt and chinos gently and carefully easing my baby’s head out of my body.
Dr Stephen looks up. ‘The head’s out. Lots of hair!’
Another contraction and Dr Stephen asks casually, ‘Do you want to pull the baby out?’
Really? Oh, um, okay, sure. I reach forward and he helps me hook my fingers under the baby’s armpits. ‘Now pull.’ And I do. My baby slides out of me, as slippery as a tiny seal and I automatically pull it onto my stomach. Dr Stephen helps to gently turn the baby over.
A girl. My girl. Our girl.
I look at Jason and a sob escapes from me. It holds everything we’ve been through over the past nine years. As I look down into our little girl’s face, it hits me that it’s all been for a reason. Losing the baby, the pain and grief, and Jason and I finding our way back to one another—it’s all been so she could come into our life. Our daughter. Coco.
FAMILY OF FOUR, PLUS BOOBS
SMS to Karen from me:
‘This is it. I never want to work again. I just want to stay home and fold teeny tiny socks. Bliss.’
I’m never happier than the first couple of weeks after I’ve given birth. God bless those hormones. I do go a little bit strange but in a good way. A self-imposed media blackout is how I approach the post-birth period, which is quite a turnaround for a media junkie.
Before Coco, it was not unusual to find me with my computer on my lap in front of the TV with remotes close by for channel surfing and a pile of magazines for flicking through during those microseconds of mental space while a website loads.
Bombarding myself with pop culture, diving in deep and splashing happily around is my idea of relaxation. It’s how I unwind.
But nature speaks loudly to me during the whole pregnancy process and never more so than directly after the birth. I’m highly sensitive to any negativity and it feels a lot like my chest has been cut open and I’m walking around holding my beating heart in my hands. I feel exposed and full of love but my ability to feel emotional pain on behalf of others is unbearably heightened. So dealing with the pain and brutality of life via the news is unthinkable.
In the weeks after having Coco, all I could manage to watch on TV was the Food Channel while I ate fudge. It was as if watching people cook was somehow helping me make milk. That and the fudge.
Unfortunately, no amount of watching Jamie Oliver and Nigella and Bill Granger prepare delicious meals could stop breastfeeding from quickly turning into a disaster.
I’d loved breastfeeding Luca. It went swimmingly. I fed him for about a year and continued even when I went back to work, expressing on the days I wasn’t with him.
I’m one of those women who are quite happy to breastfeed in public, probably because when I’m pregnant or feeding I see my breasts as being about as sexual as my elbows. The first time we took Luca out for a walk in the park when he was a week old, we sat down for a cup of tea at a café so I could feed. Various people walked past although I was only dimly aware of it because I was concentrating. ‘That was subtle,’ Jason remarked mildly at one point.
‘What do you mean?’ I replied.
‘That guy had such a long look, he almost walked into a tree.’
‘Oh don’t be silly,’ I scoffed. ‘He was just looking at Luca!’
‘Babe, adult males are not that interested in babies but they are very interested in breasts.’
Point.
Another time, a couple of months later, I opened the front door to a courier who was delivering some work from the office. His face was startled, but it was only when I went back inside and ten minutes later walked into the bathroom that I realised why. Looking back at me in the mirror was a dishevelled scarecrow with her shirt open to her waist and the flap of her maternity bra open, exposing one enormous breast. I’d read I should ‘air’ my boobs as much as possible between feeds to help heal my cracked nipples, and somehow between doing this and answering the door I’d completely forgotten to put them away.
The only problem I ever had with breastfeeding Luca came right at the end when I was trying to wean and got mastitis.
Mastitis is when one of your milk ducts becomes blocked and then infected. Another way to explain it is like this: FUUUUUUUUUUCK.
It starts with pain and sometimes a red or hot patch on your breast. Because my body doesn’t like to do anything half-heartedly, for me it escalates within hours to a sky-high fever, an agonisingly sore breast, convulsive chills and generally feeling like I’ve been hit over the head slowly and repeatedly with a cricket bat.
The books make all sorts of suggestions about massaging the area to clear the blockage under a hot shower, and for some women that perhaps does the trick. More power to you if it does.
But for me, the only thing that worked is an urgent ten-day course of antibiotics and Panadol every four to six hours for forty-eight hours. I also have to get into bed immediately and cover myself with eighteen blankets for when the chills and shakes hit. This all lasts for two to three days. In short, it’s a fun fair.
When Coco was about four weeks old, I felt the telltale pain in my boob. The books—and the doctors and midwives—say you must keep feeding when you have a blockage because otherwise the build-up of milk makes things much, much worse. It’s apparently not harmful at all for the baby to feed through mastitis, but for the mother it HURTS LIKE HELL. Imagine a hungry baby sucking on an open wound. It’s a bit like that.
Within an hour of feeling that first pain, my fever had kicked in and Jason drove me to the closest medical centre. He stayed with me in the room, holding Coco, and the female doctor asked me some medical-history questions before saying, ‘Now, take off your shirt and bra and hop up on the table so I can take a look.’
Much to my surprise, she then pulled the curtain around the table so Jason couldn’t see me topless. I’m sure this was simply protocol and possibly I was delirious with fever but this struck me as completely hilarious. I felt like saying, ‘See that baby over there? The one in my husband’s arms? A few weeks ago, he peered into my vagina and saw her come out of it, okay? And also? Nine months before that, we had sex to make the baby and I’m pretty sure he saw my boobs then.’
Fortunately, we got through the examination without Jason glimpsing any nipples through the protective curtain, the doctor confirmed it was mastitis and we high-tailed it to the chemist to get my antibiotic script filled.
The next forty-eight hours were delightful. Chills. Aches. Nausea. Coco was brought to me to feed in bed. I had to take my antibiotics at least two hours after food and two hours before food. This was impossible to achieve because I was unable to go more than an hour without eating something. Even though I felt sick, I also felt hungry. In the first few months of breastfeeding I am a starving, ravenous beast. Impossible to sate.
When I recovered, I booked an appointment with a lactation consultant who declared I was expressing too much, and that was stimulating my breasts to make an oversupply. This was blocking the ducts and causing the mastitis. I sighed with relief. ‘That’s easy to fix.’ I pumped less and tamed my obsession with freezing as many bottles of breast milk as possible. You know, just in case.
A month later, it happened again. And again. And again. And then again. By the time Coco was seven months old, I’d had mastitis six times. That’s when I realised I had a problem. Well, two problems. The first was the recurring mastitis. I’d had an ultrasound to rule out any structural issues but no one could work out why it kept happening. My other problem was that I wasn’t ready to give up breastfeeding.
It had been such a beautiful experience with Luca and I was longing to replicate it with Coco. It took me forever to realise that Coco and my breasts never really got along. Supply didn’t seem to be the problem—she was gaining weight and growing well. It was that I wanted her to lie peacefully at my breast and gaze up at me lovingly while she fed before dozing off in my arms. Not a big ask, is it really?
But that never happened. It was more like wrestling with a small, angry midget. She fought my nipple, shoved my breast away and squirmed and cried
. Peaceful, loving and soothing it was not. Bonding, no. Jo and Karen had both their babies within a few months of me, and when we were together I’d watched enviously as their babies breastfed calmly and quietly while Coco writhed and fought me. The only way I could keep her relatively calm was to swap her from boob to boob every thirty seconds or so like a football in play. It would be years before I would realise she’d had gastric reflux. All that squirming during feeding was because her little throat was burning. That’s why she would never feed long enough to empty my boob. But I didn’t know that at the time. It was exhausting, dispiriting and demoralising. And yet I soldiered on like a martyr. I had this image in my head of being someone who had no trouble with breastfeeding and I stubbornly refused to accept that this time around I wasn’t that person.
This time around I was a person who was being made miserable by her inability to go more than three weeks without being bedridden for days and filling herself with antibiotics almost constantly.
In my post-hormonal, sleep-deprived haze, persevering seemed like my only option.
‘Babe, maybe you should think about giving up breastfeeding,’ Jason ventured carefully one day when Coco was about five months old and he was fetching me my ugg boots to wear in bed because I was shaking with cold under a doona and two blankets in the middle of a thirty-degree day.
‘No way,’ I shot back.
My reasons for refusing to even consider weaning were complicated. It was a combination of emotional nourishment (for me) and physical nourishment (for her). I knew I wasn’t ready to let go of that intense bond, that physical dependence. I knew I felt guilty that I was thinking about going back to work and leaving her. And I knew all the facts about the benefits of breastfeeding.
I wasn’t judgemental of other women’s choices to wean at whatever age for whatever reason, but I was very, very judgemental of myself. I hid behind a lot of the physical reasons for martyring on with breastfeeding, but the greater pull I felt was the emotional one.