by Laura June
That’s what I told myself as I put off reading books about the process of birth, opting instead for those about child-rearing and baby caring. I mired myself in the details of sleep training and feeding, of identifying ailments and fevers and rashes. I studied the CDC’s immunization schedules and did research on pediatricians.
What I didn’t do was make a birth plan.
A birth plan is one of those things that no one has heard of until they’re pregnant, and then suddenly everyone has them when they are. “How do you want to give birth?” Dr. Moritz asked me very early on. A fair enough question, one that I’m sure most women have an answer for.
“I-in a hospital,” I stammered.
“Okay, good. Good to know.” He laughed. “Not everyone does!”
“I mean, I can just imagine what a mess it would be. Even thinking about it is upsetting,” I said, getting lost in the moment of considering a home birth. “The dog barking, the FedEx guy ringing the doorbell.” It was sudden—I’d never considered such a thing, and then in seconds I was dead set against it.
A birth plan, I learned, was my sketch of an ideal way for things to go down. Dr. Moritz didn’t seem too big on the concept, as he was the one, after all, who said, “Nothing is in your control,” but he encouraged me to go for it if I wanted. “Plan away,” he said. I remained suspicious and pragmatic and maybe just a little superstitious. So I strenuously avoided developing a birth plan.
When the doula popped over to our place, I remember so distinctly having that first conversation.
“Do you want to avoid pain medication during labor? Do you want a natural birth?” she asked.
“I guess . . . so?” I said, standing in our kitchen, looking up at the ceiling. “I have a pretty high tolerance for pain, and the competitive person inside me sort of likes the sound of that,” I went on nervously. I hadn’t really thought about it. That was clear.
“Why would you want that?” Josh almost yelled. “That’s incredibly dumb! Who wants more pain?” he exclaimed.
“You should do what you want, though.” He turned the corner as quickly as always.
“Here’s the thing,” the doula said, looking me deep in the eyes. “If you go into the labor unsure of what you want, you will almost certainly end up with medication or interventions of some kind.”
Interventions sounded bad. But after she left, Josh and I had a long conversation.
“You don’t have to be a hero for me,” he said.
“I can so very much do this without any medication,” I said. I had caught a glimpse of that beautiful area where privileged mothers can push out a baby without any pain medication in the full care of a great, modern, New York City hospital, feeling empowered and emboldened, and I wanted it. I thought of my mother, imagined her slipping out four kids, telling me, “It’s nothing.” I felt, now that I knew there was supposedly some better way to give birth (without drugs) in the minds of doulas and midwives and Brooklyn mom groups, challenged by the idea, even if I couldn’t explain why it would be “better” at all.
“Why would you choose pain over less pain?” Josh asked.
None of this, he said, had to do with the baby. All of it was about me. He was right. She had her own plans.
The baby, whom we would later name Zelda, was breech. We knew that from pretty early on; she’d seemed comfortable just hanging out in the “wrong position.” Breech, I was aware, meant that if she didn’t turn, we’d probably not have a “natural” birth. Breech meant C-section. Breech meant drugs. But there was “nothing to worry about,” everyone assured me. Babies turn all the time! It was a breezy “Oh, she’s breech” at first, the doctor assuring me there was “plenty of time” for her to turn. But by thirty-five weeks, she wasn’t just breech; she was transverse.
Transverse in Latin means, I think, “sideways.” The sonogram images of her in this stage are very cute: she’s laying, yes, sideways, as if my lower body were her couch, her feet pushed against the left side of my abdomen, her head pushing against the right. As she grew larger, comfortably snug against me, we could see the outline of her head pushing out the side of my body, like an alien trying to emerge. It hurt. A lot. By the end, I thought I could feel every time she turned her head. Doing things—anything—became agony. Though I worked until days before I gave birth, I worked from home in the final months, because it became ever-increasingly clear that I was getting sick. And I was still getting fatter.
As I said, I started pregnancy at 135 pounds. I see the chart now, and it fills me with anxiety, not because the numbers the nurse copied from the scale during each visit got so large, but because in hindsight it was clear that something wasn’t right.
In fact, rapid weight gain is only one sign of preeclampsia, but it wasn’t one that I was predisposed to be suspicious of: I was supposed to gain weight, right?
The first sign was when I noticed something was wrong with my feet. I was getting out of bed one morning and swung my feet over the side of the bed. I looked down at them, and they looked fat. They looked like sausages, just slightly more toes and less angles than I expected. I shoved my feet into my shoes: they fit, but barely. I have been a size 8 since I was fifteen. By the end of my pregnancy I was a 9.5 wide if I was lucky: I couldn’t really get shoes on anymore. I emailed my doctor, and he said he would take a look the next time I was in. That was in early September, nearly six months before my daughter was due. It was mild, and when I saw him he didn’t seem particularly worried. He warned me to stay hydrated and to try to stay off my feet.
“I’m only four months pregnant!” I laughed.
The swelling came and went at first, but again, in hindsight, it was some kind of progression: each time it came back, it was a little worse. I began to tire a lot easier, and my weight gains seemed to ramp up. But by mid-October, I was monitoring my blood pressure at home a few times a day and emailing it to my doctor. Because it was high.
And one morning in November, sitting in Dr. Moritz’s office alone because my husband was at work, I stared across the room to the mirror on the wall at myself while waiting for him. When he walked in, I said, “Does my face look swollen to you?”
It did.
He sent me home with a large jug that I was to pee in for twenty-four hours and then take back to the hospital with me to test for protein in my urine, one of the signs of preeclampsia. I can’t remember when he actually brought up that word, but preeclampsia is a condition often seen in pregnant women that is mainly characterized by high blood pressure and protein in your urine and, often, sudden weight gain. It used to be, sometimes, fatal. I knew this because I had watched Downton Abbey. Sybil died an agonizing death from her preeclampsia. If it’s not caught, seizures can follow. My blood pressure was high, I was gaining weight and retaining water, my daughter was transverse. But I passed. It was negative. My doctor had monitored all of this closely, never really alarming me, but keeping us aware that this was not exactly an ideal situation. I kept monitoring my blood pressure at home a few times a day. It fluctuated from a little above normal to quite high. I felt like shit; I was worried all the time. And the fetus? She was doing just fine.
Early one morning, a month and ten days before my daughter was due, I felt what I could only describe as contractions. I emailed the doctor. “Don’t worry,” he wrote back almost immediately, “but go to Labor and Delivery.”
Ha! Don’t worry, but head to the hospital. The nurse in L&D seemed sure I wasn’t having anything more than little early-warning contractions—until she strapped the monitors on me. My baby was fine, her heartbeat was strong, but I was indeed having fairly strong contractions. They pumped me full of fluids, hoping that I was simply dehydrated, which I learned could cause contractions. Eventually, after sitting in a hospital bed for six hours, the contractions subsided, though not completely. I was thirty-five weeks pregnant, and they told me it was possible, though not likely, that I
would feel the contractions on and off until my daughter was born.
And I did. It was sometimes a simple, dull background noise, but others were a severe, almost toothache pain, worse than menstrual cramps and mentally anguishing. I worried I was going into labor constantly. I couldn’t tell anymore what was normal, and my daughter remained stubbornly in a bad position. I tried to keep my complaints to myself. Many of my friends were childless, and anytime I described the feelings aloud, they became alarmed. But I’d been told so many times not to worry, which was impossible, so I settled for trying not to worry anyone else. I complained to Josh only when necessary, though I also worried about worrying him.
This state of affairs didn’t dampen my excitement completely, but it did bring me back into more well-worn territory, where I felt anxious and unsure that everything would turn out all right.
Finally, a week or so later, I went in for a checkup, probably around thirty-six weeks, I weighed in at 191 pounds, and my blood pressure was above normal but not terrible. I was having contractions.
“If you didn’t know this already,” Dr. Moritz said, “it’s unlikely that she is going to turn into the correct position. Now,” he went on, “the entire game is seeing how close we can get you to forty weeks.” But I think he knew that she would likely need to come out before then, around thirty-seven weeks, which is when a baby is finally considered “full term.”
By then, preeclampsia was unquestionable. The best way to get rid of preeclampsia is to have the baby. My daughter was transverse. She was not going to be born “naturally,” a description of birth that I rejected by then. Natural as opposed to . . . what? Imaginary concepts of natural birth vs. C-sections and drugs slipped out of the conversation as I was faced with reality: I wasn’t being offered a choice because there wasn’t one. The baby was in a position that meant she couldn’t be labored out on her own without one of us dying or causing an emergency medical situation, and my preeclampsia made it extremely unlikely that I could wait until labor arrived anyway. I think of this now and feel a little terrified in hindsight, but at the time, I felt relieved to hear that we were nearing the end. I felt as though we would do better, the baby and I, if she was outside my body, which seemed to be turning on us both.
The first day of officially hitting thirty-seven weeks was a Monday, the first one in February. I woke up at dawn to terrible cramps. I had an appointment at 2:30 that afternoon. The last email I sent to the doctor was at 1:51 p.m. “My contractions are worse in the morning, I think,” I wrote. “I’ll see you soon.”
An hour later, he told me to go home, lay down, and come back to the hospital early the next morning to have my daughter born, via C-section.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
So we did just that. She was born at 1:45 p.m. after a mostly painless epidural and a painless C-section. I never went into labor, and I never pushed even once, but I can’t say that I have ever felt, for one second, like I missed out on anything. I’m not saying that in some completely imaginary, otherworld best-case scenario I wouldn’t have done it differently; I might have. But this is the only birth I have known or seen, and I remember it in excruciating detail. What more could a mother ask for? An unnatural, beautiful birth.
I don’t know the details of my own birth. I know that my mother thought I was a girl but wasn’t sure and that I was a week late. I don’t know what her labor was like, though if her accounts of “birth” in general are any indication, my guess is it was easy and complication-free. I don’t know, to be honest, if she breast-fed me. It simply never came up while she was alive, and though I’ve wished her back to life many times since my daughter was born, it was never to learn how I came into the world. I am here, and that’s enough.
And that was how I felt about Zelda when she arrived: I could recount the details, I remember them minutely, but they weren’t important at the time. She was here.
I weighed 199 pounds the day that I checked into the hospital in February of 2014 to have Zelda. I was feeling very bad: much of my weight (though less than I would have liked, to be honest) was water, and that is painful to carry. I felt as though the skin on my swollen feet and ankles and hands was going to split open. My face was swollen, my neck was fat. All of me felt unwell and overwhelmed. My daughter was literally sideways and backward. I could see her head sticking out the right side of my stomach at all times. I’d like to say that I was overwhelmed with worry about her, and I was, to some extent.
But I didn’t know her yet. I knew me. And I wanted her out.
I checked in and faced an apparently normal wall of paperwork. I signed forms giving them the right to do whatever needed to be done in emergency situations. “Isn’t this an emergency?” I wondered. It wasn’t. There were other, far worse ways that this could all go down. I distinctly remember the form that asked if I wanted to be put to sleep for the procedure, because this wasn’t an option I realized was even offered any longer.
“I could literally peace out on this? LOL,” I thought, as I declined. I’m not a fan of anesthesia or even of painkillers, to be honest. I assumed the epidural would be enough to get me through the day. My mother had been awake for all of our births. Surely I could handle this.
At some point they split up my husband and me; at some point I was put on a hospital bed that they started wheeling me around to various rooms on. I had to be wheeled around, they told me. I couldn’t walk into the operating room. I wanted to. I was still me. “Can I walk in?” I asked. “You can’t,” the kind attendant said as he wheeled me in, an invalid perfectly capable of walking.
I’ve learned since that day that experiences with epidurals vary pretty wildly. Mine was uneventful and not painful. I remember the exact sensation of it kicking in. “I feel static-y, like there’s static inside my whole body,” I said happily to the people in the OR. I faded out, drifting almost to sleep. “Little too much there, ha-ha,” one of them said as they pulled me back from wherever I’d been off to. I wanted to go away, then, briefly. I hadn’t had a drink in so long; I’d been so conscious and aware of every little thing. Just for a second, as I felt the drugs overwhelm me, I thought, “Let me go.” They brought me back.
“Do you have a name for the baby?” another guy, somewhere up around my head, asked me. I was staring at the ceiling, which was probably twelve or thirteen or twenty-five feet high. The room was cold and bright and vast. “Yes,” I said, not sure if I should tell him or not. “Zelda,” I blurted out, realizing for the first time that that would be her name. We’d basically decided it already, but I don’t think we’d told anyone before, and there I was, telling this guy I couldn’t even see, this man I didn’t know. I felt so close to him. Where the fuck was he? I tried to turn my head.
“I can’t feel my legs,” I said.
“You’re not supposed to,” someone said.
“You know how one person can make or break an entire name?” I asked aloud.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean like how Hitler just ruined Adolf. You can’t name a kid Adolf now.”
Silence.
At some point Dr. Moritz came in, and I saw him in a different light than I had in the preceding months. I liked him; he was funny and nice and warm. My husband, who came in with him, liked him, too. They were cracking jokes, and suddenly I realized there was a huge divide between me and them: “I’m the only person in this room today on the verge of dying,” I thought. “The chances are very low, like, sliver chances,” I told myself, “but they’re so much higher than theirs that we’re not on the same timeline. I’m alone in a really particular way right now.” I thought this. I was alone.
Except I wasn’t: she, my daughter, not yet Zelda but no longer quite Laura, was on my timeline, in my zone, too. She could die as well, I knew, though I didn’t want to think of that. We could blaze out together; in fact, the whole reason we were there in that operating room, at thirty-sev
en weeks deep into the pregnancy, so much earlier than expected, was that one or both of us was going to be in some serious shit if we didn’t all take action. We, she and I, spending our last moments in the same body together, my body, we were on the same timeline, alone in that room. I was taking back my body and giving her her own timeline.
In previous centuries, one of us, probably both of us, would have been goners. I knew this. There are so many goners in my family tree. They’re hard to find, because dead babies at birth in history rarely even get names. They don’t get gravestones; it’s expensive, and nature is what it is. In nature, I would be dead. Instead, I have this beautiful doctor, these people helping me. I would have died. She would have died. I know this.
And I was aware of that when I looked at my husband, and more so at my doctor: here was the man who would open me up and pull my daughter out.
Moments later, Josh made some joke—I can’t remember about what but am too stubborn to go and ask him for fear that he will realize my memory isn’t infallible—and that joke was greeted tersely by Dr. Moritz: “This is my stage,” he said to Josh. I had a great view of him, as he was directly above me, while Josh sat on a stool behind my right shoulder. “I make the jokes here.”
For some reason, his making that clear reassured me. I was scared, but I couldn’t tense up my body because I couldn’t feel anything. I don’t know where my hands were. What were my hands doing? They hadn’t tied them down. Or maybe they did? They didn’t. But what were they doing? Did they tie my hands down?