Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me

by Karen Karbo

  On the third floor, in the labor and delivery wing, there was a board over the nurse’s station. It announced how many women were in labor, and how many babies had been born that day. It announced that the Blazers had advanced to the second round of the play-offs, and were up 2–1 against the Suns in the Conference Semifinals. Go Blazers!

  At 12:16 a.m., there were eleven women laboring, the number of newborns too long to count at a glance. I tried to count back ten months and concluded that despite the heat, people like to get it on in August. Maybe it’s the two-week vacation.

  A stocky nurse with an old perm led us to one of the labor/delivery suites and, reporting that an emergency C-section was underway, hurried out.

  We stood around. Mary Rose lowered herself onto the chintz-covered love seat. She pointed at a watercolor on the wall, an impressionistic French seaside village, with sailboats, sidewalk cafes, and men in berets.

  “That will help my labor go much easier, don’t you think?”

  “You can pretend you’re having a baby in an art museum.”

  The actual induction wouldn’t begin until the next morning. The purpose of early admission was so that Mary Rose’s cervix might be made more “favorable” by a direct application of prostaglandin gel. A favorable cervix was a happy cervix, soft and pliable, ready for the rush of Pitocin that would be administered through an IV drip. In normal labor, that is, labor that is not induced, the contractions begin and build gradually, sonata-like. Mary Rose’s fuel-injected contractions would start in a manner resembling an Indy racecar roaring away from the starting line. She would scream for the anesthesiologist.

  Another nurse appeared waving an enormous plastic syringe that looked suited only for shooting grout around the bathtub. The prostaglandin.

  “That’s going up me?” said Mary Rose. She had expected a discreet and tasteful suppository.

  “Pee now or forever hold your peace.”

  I left Mary Rose, returning a little after seven the next morning with the Laboring Mother’s Survival Kit: a sack lunch (packed by Lyle, who remembered how hungry he had been, hungry and loath to leave my side); a tennis ball for massaging Mary Rose’s back; a paper bag for her to blow into to prevent hyperventilation; a half-dozen sugar-free lollipops for reasons I could never fathom.

  Agreeing to an induction is also agreeing to be hooked up to a fetal monitor, which means you are stuck in a bed as soft and inviting as a dining room table for hours, if not days. When I walked in, the nurse was adjusting the straps around Mary Rose’s belly—one tracked the fetal heartbeat, the other Mary Rose’s contractions. Mary Rose lay on her side, head cradled in the crook of her arm, her not-fit-for-human-apparel hospital gown hiked up to her ribs, her feet, in turquoise sweat socks, hanging off the end of the bed. In addition to being hard, the beds were also designed for women who were five-foot-six.

  “How’d you sleep?”

  “I was supposed to sleep? I thought I was supposed to lie here and suffer for being a descendent of Eve,” said Mary Rose.

  The prostaglandin had caused enough cramping to prevent Mary Rose from dozing. When the night nurse came at 3:00 a.m. to read the fetal monitor, the faint blue scratches on the paper scroll could only be read in the fluorescent glare of the overhead light. Mary Rose’s hips ached. Her back ached. No one had instructed her on how to call a nurse. There was some kind of remote control dangling from the head of the bed, but this was for the TV. Once turned on, it could only be turned off manually.

  Another nurse, a mumbler named Laurie or Leslie, came in and told Mary Rose that she was not her labor nurse, but that her labor nurse would arrive first thing in the morning. The doctor on call would then arrive to check Mary Rose. Then, if everything looked good, they would be able to begin the Pitocin drip.

  “If everything looks good? I thought it was all set.”

  “Provided the prostaglandin worked.”

  “And if it didn’t?”

  “We’ll cross that bridge, shall we? In the meantime, you can take a shower.”

  “My last cigarette, huh?”

  “No. No smoking on account of the oxygen.”

  “It was a joke,” she said. “A bad joke, but a joke nonetheless.”

  “I’ll check your cervix after your shower to see where we are.”

  I sat on the love seat and read an article in Vogue on the return of the crocheted shoulder bag, while Laurie or Leslie stuck her rubber-gloved index finger up Mary Rose until her hand threatened to disappear. Mary Rose yawned. She was still only dilated one centimeter, ten being the number to which all laboring women aspire.

  This didn’t seem very encouraging, considering how severe the prostaglandin-inspired cramps had been. Laurie or Leslie didn’t think so either.

  The doctor on call was someone named Dr. Madboy, not the most comforting of names. He introduced himself, displaying a ferocious, big-toothed smile, his gums receding and puffy. The obstetrician with gingivitis. As a doctor, you think he’d be hip to the importance of flossing. I felt a haiku coming on.

  “Should we give her another six hours with the prostaglandin?” Laurie or Leslie asked Dr. Madboy, his hand resting on Mary Rose’s side as if it were a fender. “Her cervix is still unfavorable.”

  “What kind of a name is Madboy?” I asked. Everyone ignored me.

  “It’s all my fault,” said Mary Rose. “I’ve spent all these months trying to keep her in there, now she won’t come out.”

  I laughed, since everyone ignored her, too.

  Dr. Madboy ordered another round of prostaglandin. I went downstairs for a cup of coffee, and bought a stuffed duggie in the gift shop for Stella.

  I returned just in time to watch Mary Rose receive a needle inside her left wrist. Her labor nurse had finally come on and was preparing Mary Rose to receive the IV. The nurse was in her fifties, gum-cracking and weathered, wearing a number of pins on the lapel of her smock. One said: NEED DRUGS? ASK ME! I don’t think it was hospital-issue. Her name was Betty; her gum, Juicy Fruit.

  Betty shuffled out to get the bottle of Pitocin. Mary Rose stared at her wrist, a piece of white paper tape holding the IV in place. “This hurts,” she said. “Is it supposed to?”

  “It’s because the skin is so tender,” I said.

  “Betty said it was because the skin was so tough.”

  “That, too.” I said.

  At 9:00 a.m. the Pitocin drip began. A bottle of clear fluid hung upside-down in a metal frame posted at Mary Rose’s shoulder. An infusion pump released the drug into the narrow tube connected to her wrist one drip at a time. We watched the drip as though any minute it might say something we might want to write down.

  Mary Rose still had no idea that between the excruciating moments, labor could actually be quite boring.

  Outside Mary Rose’s labor/delivery suite—it must be called a suite because there’s a Jacuzzi in the bathroom—people rushed back and forth on soft-soled shoes. Considering the number of women laboring up and down the hallway, there wasn’t much groaning and shrieking. Either the acoustics were great or everyone was up on their breathing techniques, which, incidentally, do nothing to ease the pain and do everything to keep you from embarrassing yourself by shrieking at your husband: “Kill me now, asshole!”

  While we were waiting for Mary Rose’s contractions to start, Ward appeared in the doorway. He’d gotten his hair cut too short, and the movie-star forelock stuck out at an odd angle, dorky, not beguiling. He wore a white T-shirt from a Seattle film-developing company that had a stick drawing of a person holding a movie camera that said, in a child’s endearingly lousy print: Why grow up when you can make movies? He ducked his head, cowed a little by all the medical technology, the beeping monitors, the IV, the thick straps around Mary Rose’s big moon of a belly. If he had had a hat, it’d have been in his hand.

  “Knock, knock,” he said. “I hope these are visiting hours.”

  “There are no visiting hours in labor, Ward. I thought you’d done all
that reading!” I sounded hysterical, even to my own ears.

  “Ward,” said Mary Rose flatly. She turned her head on the pillow to look at him, seemed neither happy nor unhappy to see him. It was almost as if she didn’t know him, or as if he was simply another intern passing through.

  “Dicky called and told me.”

  “Told you what?”

  “About being early. About the due date being wrong.”

  “Dicky? How did Dicky know?”

  At that moment, Betty shuffled in to crank up what in labor-nurse parlance is known as the “Pit drip.” “Who’s this?” she asked.

  “Ward Baron.” He moved to shake her hand, but thought better of it when he saw she was wearing plastic gloves. “It’s my baby.”

  “Actually,” said Mary Rose, “she’s not your baby. She’s my baby.”

  “We’re having some problems,” said Ward. “The mother is angry with me.”

  “Well, if she is, I am too,” said Betty. “Skedaddle! Shoo!” She nudged him out of the way with her hip and checked the fetal monitor. “No speaka da English? Get lost.”

  Mary Rose said nothing but did something oddly conciliatory, considering the circumstances: She extended her hand to Ward. In three big steps he was beside her. Impulsively, he kissed her knuckles.

  She said, “Why does the bride always wear white?”

  Ward grinned. He does have a grin. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that men don’t use their looks to their advantage. “I don’t know, Mary Rose, why does the bride always wear white?”

  “Because people like the dishwasher to match the stove and refrigerator.”

  “Groan!”

  “You can wait in the waiting room,” said Mary Rose.

  The contractions of labor are famous for being indescribable. You can only know them if you’ve had them, but if you’ve had them you won’t remember them. It’s nature’s underhanded way of ensuring we’re not all only children.

  When no one was around, Mary Rose’s contractions began. “Uh-oh, uh-oh,” she said. “I think that was one. Was that it?”

  Betty shuffled in to crank up the drip.

  A minute after she left, the contractions escalated.

  Mary Rose tried the breathing she’d learned. She stared at the word STRETCH on a box of gloves sitting on the counter, on the sprinkler hanging from the ceiling. She tried to avoid the gold-plated crucifix hanging on the wall beneath the clock. What help could He possibly be? He was the one, after all, who thought live birth was an improvement over an egg in the nest.

  “Oh noo noo noo noo noo,” whimpered Mary Rose, clutching at the sheet.

  “These are really unpleasant, aren’t they?”

  Betty shuffled in to crank up the drip.

  Rex was the anesthesiologist. He was tall and stooped, with a crooked nose that didn’t sit square on his face, and long, gentle hands. He walked with tiny stiff steps, obviously in pain.

  “Tell me this is not the result of your own handiwork,” said Mary Rose. Between contractions she was more sardonic than usual.

  “It’s from chopping wood. Not to worry.”

  “I’ve never had one of these,” said Mary Rose. She sat cross-legged on the bed, her pale back bared to Rex. Betty held both of Mary Rose’s hands in hers. Rex told Mary Rose to lower her head, some reason having to do with the pressure of the fluid of the spinal cord. Not done properly, an epidural can leave you with a migraine for a week. “I’m afraid!” squeaked Mary Rose.

  “Nothing to be afraid of,” said Rex. “You’ve got a perfect back for this. Nothing to it.” He hummed while he worked.

  Mary Rose turned to look at him over her bare shoulder. “That’s not ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ you’re singing there, is it?”

  He blushed. “You’ve got good ears, too, I see.”

  Anesthesiology is an art, not a science. Epidurals are meant to anesthetize the fluid around the spinal cord, not the cord, the dura mater, itself. But the needle is inserted by feel. It’s a matter of centimeters between an epidural and full spinal block.

  During this procedure Rex asked me to leave. Hospital policy. One too many coaches fainting from the sight of a nine-inch needle being threaded between the vertebrae of a loved one.

  Next to the nurse’s station was the nursery, and it was here, standing outside the window looking in, I ran into Audra Baron. I’m beginning to realize I was born to run into her, and would from time to time, even after the Barons left our city and only returned to visit.

  There was a moment when I could have easily passed by, so engrossed was she in watching a big-cheeked Asian newborn, black hair springing straight up from his scalp like wild grass, lying naked beneath a heat lamp. Audra and I watched while a nurse collected his wrinkled feet between her fingers, pressing the bottoms to an ink pad.

  “Mary Rose probably won’t want visitors after the baby, and certainly none of us, I imagine. Maybe you’d be so kind as to come by the waiting room, just pop your head in and—”

  “Sure,” I said. “Of course.”

  The relief offered by an epidural costs. You trade pain for freedom. Now Mary Rose was bedridden. Without the epidural she could at least struggle to the bathroom by herself, dragging along her IV stand, fetal monitor cords slung around her neck in the manner of rock climbing gear. Now she was stuck.

  After a few hours in the same position she said, “Now I know how veal feels.”

  Betty shuffled in to crank up the drip.

  Due to the way the needle sat in Mary Rose’s back, she could lie only on her right side. The TV was mounted on a ceiling bracket to the left of the bed. There was a full-length mirror in the corner of the room behind the love seat.

  “Move that over here,” Mary Rose said.

  “You’re supposed to watch the birth in this.”

  “Isn’t there a game on?”

  I rolled the mirror over. She had to read the score backward. Mary Rose sighed, her head cradled in the crook of her arm. “This’ll be a piece of cake.”

  “I presume you mean the birth and not the game.”

  “Of course I mean the birth. You think I’m an idiot?”

  The birth, as it turned out, was, relatively speaking, a piece of cake. Still, Mary Rose’s labor went on and on.

  It was the fourth game of the Semifinals and the Blazers gave the entire city hypertension by scraping out a two-point win in overtime. They had been up by as many as twenty-one, then, in the final minutes, the score tied, Ajax Green caught the ball off an inbound pass, tripped over his own feet, and fell out of bounds. The win was due only to a pair of free throws by the Comet.

  The next time Betty shuffled in to crank up the drip and check Mary Rose, who was, after nine hours, only five centimeters dilated, she said, “Can you believe those guys?”

  We shook our heads.

  At 6:00 I was halfway through a book about mothers and daughters and how to keep your daughter from hating you when she’s fifteen. I called Lyle, who had valiantly offered to look after Stella. He had just put her to bed and was washing bottles. He said what men always say to women when faced with reality: “How do you do it?”

  At a little after 7:30 p.m., the contractions, previously foothill-shaped on the fetal monitor printout, began looking more like the Rockies.

  “I can feel this,” said Mary Rose. “I’m not supposed to be able to, oh nooo, nooo, nooo!”

  “Huh-pah, huh-pah, huh-pah, huh-pah,” I said, leading her in the advanced breathing technique.

  “What’s wrong? Why do I feel this? I’m not supposed to feel this. I thought that was the whole point of the epidural? What’s wrong? Something’s gone wrong!” Her voice was small, her big, callused hand damp.

  Mary Rose was a Piteous Moaner. I was surprised. I thought she would be a Raging Swearer. All that swagger in everyday life was just that. She was a woman, remember, who had prepared herself to live alone. Not because she necessarily wanted to, but because she knew she would never have how
she looked in a miniskirt to fall back on. She was tough, but a Piteous Moaner nevertheless.

  The anesthesiologist, whom we’d taken to calling Blushing Rex, hobbled in. “Hey, hey, hey, take it easy. I was on my way to do another one of these and decided you couldn’t wait.” He fiddled with the IV, adjusted the dosage, pulling Mary Rose back from hysteria.

  It happened fast. There’s just no telling, is there?

  Rex left. Betty shuffled in, checked Mary Rose, then left. Dr. Vertamini swept in, leaving the door to the suite open, but pulling a plastic curtain alongside Mary Rose’s bed with a snap. Betty unhooked the bottom of Mary Rose’s bed and attached, on either side, a pair of black leather troughs, misleadingly called stirrups, for holding Mary Rose’s legs.

  Suddenly, there she was. Flat on her back, butt in the air, legs spread wide. It was breezy.

  Mary Rose said: “I used to be so modest.”

  “Don’t start pushing quite yet,” said Betty. She had spit out her gum and was suddenly serious.

  She left, the plastic curtain whishing behind her. Dr. Vertamini reappeared and began pulling on scrubs. She tucked her hair into a paper shower cap, peered through a pair of red plastic-rimmed glasses that would have looked at home on the head of a welder. She buffed and peered, peered and buffed. She introduced Mary Rose to the hand grips by the side of the bed.

  “Push-push-push-push. C’mon, Mary Rose. Come on, Mary Rose. Only you can do this, Mary Rose. Only you can do it.”

  Betty rested her hand on Mary Rose’s belly, anticipating the next contraction, which she could do more accurately than the fetal monitor.

  I stood beside Mary Rose and together we breathed. Inhale, exhale, inhale, PUSH! But the contractions came too fast. The first two breaths became a luxury.

  Inhale, then PUSH-PUSH-PUSH-PUSH-PUSH.

  Mary Rose squeezed her eyes shut, for fear her eyeballs would fly from their sockets.

  Inhale, PUSH-PUSH-PUSH-PUSH-PUSH.

  “Do you see anything down there?” she kept asking. “Do you see anything?”

  Betty said, “A head of dark brown curls, it looks like to me.”

  Then another nurse wheeled a plastic crib from the supply closet. A warming device hung above it, not unlike something you’d see at Pizza-by-the-Slice. Mary Rose saw it and sobbed.