by Laura June
Either right before or right after Zelda was “born,” Josh leaned over and whispered into my ear, “I’m afraid you’re going to die, there’s so much blood.” On the one hand, this seems, in hindsight, a really insane thing for him to have said to me, the person who was laying there, just trying to stay alive. On the other, it let the air out of the whole thing: “Me too,” I said. “But I’m okay; I feel fine.” I had someone to reassure. That felt good. It felt like living.
Zelda was born, as I said, at 1:45 p.m., only ten minutes or so after they’d rolled me into that room. Her umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck—“Three times!” Dr. Moritz marveled—but she was breathing, a little silent, a sort of bluish alien thing. They held her over the sheet that divided me from my internal organs on display, and I looked at her for the first time, still thinking about myself primarily. That mode of being—where I was mentally first—was going to end hard and fast in less than twenty-four hours, but I didn’t know any other way yet. I didn’t quite think on her behalf, and so she still seemed like a foreign object to me. Not really so far off the mark, honestly: a just-born baby is barely human, only partly among us. She was whisked over to the other side of the room to be tested and wiped off, to have her cord cut and to be dressed. Josh went with her for a moment but wandered back to stay with me while I was sewn up or whatever it was they were doing to me. I didn’t know who cut the cord.
I heard the baby cry and tried to look around to see her, craning my neck wildly.
“She’s okay,” Josh said. And she was: she was okay. Her Apgar scores were shit, but she was doing just fine. Her lungs worked, and she was, at six pounds, nine ounces, not even small for a baby who was three weeks early.
“Do we want to call her Zelda? Are we sure?” Josh asked.
“I’m sure,” I said back.
And so there we were. Three of us.
I was moved to a middle waiting room, where other women who have also just given birth were being stored, too. We would have a private hospital room for the three of us later. I didn’t know where anybody was, but my phone and a few other personal effects had appeared from somewhere. I texted my father. I lay back on the bed. I felt fine.
Josh reappeared, came to check on me.
“She’s so beautiful,” he said. “We gave her a bath,” he told me.
“Where is she?” I asked. He left.
Eventually, probably less than an hour later, they wheeled me down the hall and into our room. Zelda was there, and they unswaddled her to lay her on my chest. She was so tiny and beet red. She was hot to the touch. She was awake and looking at me. She could see me. I could see her. She held my finger, which seemed just impossible. How could a baby hold a finger?
These are mundane and universal observations, tearjerker moments about the birth of a baby. Their universality is what I valued: after a tough pregnancy, we were at a new beginning. The scoreboard was reset. We were just like everyone else.
People have asked me on a few occasions if I had any regrets about the way Zelda was born. The C-section, they mean. Those people, parents mostly, have a lot of opinions, and one of those opinions is that birth, especially in the United States, has become too “medicalized.” In the years since Zelda’s birth, I’ve thought about this more than I probably should have.
What they call “natural” birth, the kind of birth that often eschews pain medication, should never include a C-section. The C-section, to a natural birth advocate, is the worst-case scenario.
My opinion, the only opinion I find to be acceptable, has always been that the worst-case scenario is a dead mother or baby or both. I have never felt disappointed about my “birth experience,” mostly because I didn’t really consider it an “experience.”
I never formed many strong opinions about what would be ideal, I simply took what came toward me and tried to accept and make the best of it. People fool themselves into believing that the birth of their child is about them. It’s not: it’s about their children. They’re the ones being pushed or pulled out. We owe them a safe arrival. And so, that’s what we gave her. I didn’t want surgery, but we don’t often get what we want, and I am not a doctor. I do not presume to have a better solution to a breech baby and a preeclamptic mother.
My birth experience, such as it was, was about the best thing I could have imagined.
And even though I felt lonely without my mother, that day in February will always be what I consider to be the best day of my life. A turning point. A new beginning. And the day that I met my daughter for the first time.
When people ask if I was disappointed by my birth experience, I want to tell them to fuck off. I want to scream at them and tell them they’re terrible people who don’t know anything, that they’re one step away from vaccine deniers.
Instead I just say, “No. Were you?”
* * *
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We left the hospital at 5:30 p.m. the next day in advance of a snowstorm. February is arguably the worst month of the year in New York City. It is often bitterly cold, snowy, and generally grungy. Happily, however, it is also the month of the year that the fewest babies are born. I assume this is because February is the shortest month, but either way, the hospital, the busiest for births in New York City, was actually pretty quiet. We got our own private room at the end of a quiet hallway, and we hunkered down for what we assumed would be a few days but turned out to be only about twenty-four hours.
The rest of the stay passed in a weird blur that was almost all positive. The hospital food was good, and we had a private room, so the three of us slept together. “Slept” is a funny term for whatever it was we were doing in that time, awake every fifteen minutes, but we held together. The baby was beautiful. She was healthy. She was eating.
I recuperated easily. So easily, in fact, that the doctor warned me that I must take my medicine every six hours, like clockwork, because I’d refused the prescribed Percocet and insisted on taking only a large dose of ibuprofen. “If you don’t take it every six hours, you’ll pay,” the nurses kept telling me. My fear of becoming an opioid addict overcame my worry about postpartum pain. We filled the Percocet prescription “just in case,” but I never took a single one. Maybe I was like my mother after all: at least the postpartum period seemed not so bad for me, and I’d heard horror stories from women about pain and barely being able to walk. This seemed suddenly doable to me.
I was up and walking around by 11:00 the morning after Zelda was born, motivated by some hormones I couldn’t name and didn’t care about; I was ready to get on with it. The nurses didn’t exactly marvel, but they certainly commented on it when they saw me walk out the door of our room, dressed in sweat pants. “I’m just going for a stroll,” I said, looking in at the nursery to my left where several newborn babies lay. I walked all the way to the end of the hall, to the window. It was going to snow. I felt bad physically—just drained. The epidural had not totally worn off. I could walk and move, but I was numb in my middle. I’ve never liked being away from home, not even if the alternative is a luxury hotel or a new, exotic locale; within a matter of hours I am dreaming of the emotional comfort of home. I’ve traveled enough to learn to ignore those little calls, of my apartment or my own bed, my books and my kitchen, but I felt this acutely in the hospital after Zelda’s birth, just a few miles from home.
Dr. Moritz came in early that afternoon to look at my incision and declared it beautiful and healing.
“You will barely know it happened,” he said, as he confirmed that I could go home if I wanted to.
“What about the baby?” I asked.
“Not my territory,” he said, waving off my suggestion that he take a look at her. “The pediatricians will tell you.” He was joking but not: he dealt with me, and someone else handled my daughter. We were two things now; I’d just forgotten that again. “Oh, right,” I thought. “She has her own doctor now.”
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“Would you be more comfortable at home?” he asked me directly, Zelda laying in her plastic bin across the room.
“Yes,” I said, thinking about home as though I hadn’t been there in months. It had barely been twenty-four hours since we left, not even twelve since the birth.
What I should have thought or said to my doctor or to Josh was, “What equals comfort right now? What is best for us?” Walking was painful, and our house had two narrow, steep flights of stairs. There at the hospital, meals were delivered three times a day, someone came and gave me my medicine when it was time, and, if I needed, I could call a nurse to help me with the baby. I hadn’t sent Zelda off to the nursery yet, but I knew that it was there. But I wanted so badly to go home that I didn’t think about any of this. Like a child, I wanted what I wanted.
This was partly because I am a homebody. Josh loves hotels and often talks about how he would prefer to live in one. I prefer—need, actually—to be surrounded by my stuff. My books and my papers, my pillows and my bed. I sleep well only in a room that smells like me, and I think well only in my own office. I just wanted, longed, to be home.
But it was also, I see now, out of fear: this was my first-ever hospital stay. I simply wanted to go home. In fact, I felt the weight of my own childishness over and over those first few hormonal days. I wanted things. I wanted.
But now, I was a mother. I didn’t yet know that soon I would gladly saw off my own head with a butter knife to save my daughter’s life, that my own wants would subside, seem to be deleted almost from my mind. I was in a kind of limbo state between adult human woman and mother. I inhabited in that hospital a competing sense of self, no place or time, nothing pressing from life back home that couldn’t wait, but I was so excited to get back there.
I didn’t know that my old home was gone, that I would never get it back, that it had been replaced. That the same old rooms would suddenly seem different on a molecular level. That the light would hit the furniture in a way I’d never seen before, that I would be up at hours I had never been awake at. That I would learn how to avoid a creaking step, how to walk as if on pillows so as not to make a sound. That I would sleep lightly instead of as if I were dead, how I’d slept my whole life up until now. Everything was different: not just me but the house, the dog, my husband. My books would sit on shelves unread for months; my former life was gone. I would not get a haircut or a pedicure for months. Everything was different; not worse, nor even better, just different.
But I didn’t know that yet.
In the hospital, in the twenty-four hours after my daughter was born, I knew only my base impulses and desires. I had to get this newborn to feed, shoving my breast unhelpfully into her mouth. I wanted food. I had to have a bowel movement before I could leave. I had to get up and walk. I wanted a shower. Our daughter had to make wet diapers, she had to latch, she also had to poop. Everything was direct and simple, bodily and earthly. I texted friends and family, but no communications had any weight. Nothing mattered outside that room. That was clear, and the needs were pressing but so simple and direct. I had barely packed anything, and when people offered to bring me things I might need, I could not remember what I owned or even if owning things mattered. It was a Zen kind of feeling, which, when writing about it, sounds almost like apathy. Teetering on the edge of an ending and a beginning is a certain kind of not caring, really. What was next? Who cares.
I wanted to lose the water weight while I sat on the couch watching TV and eating takeout food like the old days. I couldn’t think beyond those basic needs. I tried not to laugh because of the wound in my abdomen that I was still too scared to look at.
I hadn’t given up my old life completely yet. That would take a few weeks to accomplish. For now, Josh and I were in a weird fog, and there was only one thing, besides the presence of Zelda, that forced me to admit that things had changed irrevocably.
I wanted my mother. On this, my first real day feeling like an adult after years of what now clearly seemed to have been “faking it,” I wanted my mother there. Not for guidance or even support, but simply for her to be there. A model to look at, my mother, of someone who had successfully transitioned so early in life from a woman into a mother. A woman who, it seemed to me, had done so quite easily. A very normal but impossible wish. Becoming a mother had reduced me to a child instantly.
CHAPTER 3
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My parents got married when they were very young, but they weren’t unique in that: growing up, most of my friends’ parents were young, too. This was something I thought of very much as I began my journey with Josh as the parents of a newborn. My parents were so young when they started having kids that I constantly compared myself to them. My mother would have been sixty-one years old when her granddaughter was born. That’s so young. When I’m sixty-one years old, Zelda will only be twenty-four.
I guess I worried a little that I wouldn’t have the same energy that my parents had had for us when we were kids. It wasn’t that I felt old; I didn’t. But having my daughter made me remember so many things about my own early childhood that I’d never thought about, couldn’t have thought about, in the way I saw them now, as a mother.
For the first few years of my life, my parents lived in a small town surrounded by other people who were family: my great-uncle and great-aunt and two of my father’s first cousins lived in houses up and down a small street filled with small houses. Because my parents were so young, so too were my grandparents, all four of them.
My mother and father grew up a few miles from each other and went to the same high school. My father was just about two years older than my mother. Not until they were in college, both of them going to Catholic schools in Erie, Pennsylvania, did they meet. Soon after my father graduated, our family began. So my grandparents were young, but they were also close geographically to us and to each other. This meant that family events were often large because they encompassed all of us, with cousins mostly nearby. My parents each had just one sibling, but the extended families were big and loud and always around.
My mother was—unlike me, her only daughter—chatty and outgoing, sunny and warm. I’ve struggled my whole life to make small talk. Like my father and many of the people on his side of the family, we sometimes are at a loss for words. Josh always remarks at how bad I am at even pretending to be having a good time in large groups of people, but as a child I don’t remember that feeling as much. Children are often generously given space to be simply themselves, before adulthood begs us to behave in ways that make those around us more comfortable.
But my mother never struggled to fill air space. Deep in the furthest recesses of my memory I can recall her talking on the phone, talking all morning to my grandmothers and friends and cousins, just chatting away.
My parents often hosted the holidays, and my mother was, unlike her own mom, a great cook. I don’t know where she picked it up, though I do remember her always sharing recipes with my grandma Elly, her mother-in-law. They were close too, and long after my mother was dead, my grandma Elly loved to tell stories about how she and my mother got along, talking and cooking and laughing.
There was never silence in our house; there were too many of us for that. I often wished, even when I was four or five, that things were quieter. Once my mother told me she’d woken up in the middle of the night to find me alone in a room, all the lights on, doing jigsaw puzzles. “I needed some quiet,” I told her. I shared a bedroom first with my two brothers and, once my youngest brother, John, was born, we moved to a larger house, and I shared just with him, the baby. I loved having a baby in my room, at five or six years old, and betrayed no hint of my adult ambivalence about kids to come.
In that smaller house, where we lived when my brother Daniel was born right after me, my mother told me that sometimes, when he was sleeping in his bassinet in my parents’ room, I would silently, quietly creep in and just stand there watching him. I
could barely talk, but once, when my mother came in and found me there, I said, “Shhhhhh . . . baby sleeping.” I loved my baby dolls as Zelda would eventually love hers, with a fervor that means she can now change a diaper faster than I can. I used to watch her on the baby monitor, early in the morning, awake and sitting up in the dark, staring up at the ceiling as she silently changed her baby’s diaper over and over, practicing, a neat little stack of used diapers bundled next to her. But the arrival of Daniel, and later John, meant that I no longer needed to care for baby dolls: I had real-life specimens.
Just before we moved to the larger house, and just before John was born, my father found out that he had cancer. He was twenty-eight years old, and my parents had three kids. It was melanoma, the bad kind. As children, we were mostly sheltered from the realities of this, that my parents and grandparents thought that he might die, which they did think. Only later did my mother tell me, as a preteen in one of our long conversations about the past, how serious it had been, that they’d thought he might not survive. “Your grandmother came to the hospital once with her dress on inside out; everyone was a mess,” she said. She was so candid with me, even as a kid. I was her friend and sounding board, in addition to being her daughter. “But,” I said, remembering that period, “that’s so strange. To me, that was one of the best times, because he was home for so long.” My father hadn’t worked for a while after his surgery. He’d spent a lot of time in bed in their darkened room. To me, it was great because he was just around all the time.
That larger house had a giant yard and a creek and woods behind it, and my brothers and I often spent the hours before I was in school yet roaming around outside all day. In my mind it was idyllic and normal enough, but I was also fairly rough around the edges, I think. My mother was always careful to dress me very well, but I had scrapes and bruises all over me from days spent climbing trees and building forts. I didn’t have many friends of my own yet, just my brothers. I was surrounded by boys.