One Good Egg: An Illustrated Memoir

by Suzy Becker

  When I came down for lunch, he was just getting out the juicer to start his citrus routine. “Sleep okay?” I asked.

  “I got a few hours.” He cleared his throat, part of the citrus process. “Yeah, look, I’m feeling a bit . . . I don’t know.” He sat down and eyed his piles. “I don’t think this is going to surprise you, I’m feeling a bit stir-crazy. You’re used to being out here in the middle of nowhere, you like it . . . ” He stalled out. I waited, trying to decide whether I was surprised or in denial or whether they were mutually exclusive. “Look, I’m totally dependent on you guys for transport, for everything. I just don’t think it’s good for any of us.”

  “I don’t really feel your dependence,” I said, which would explain why I hadn’t gone out of my way to make sure he was having a good time.

  “I talked to Bruce last night and he invited me to come stay at his place for a few days or a week or whatever.”

  “Oh. So what’s your plan?”

  “I’ll catch the tram in West Concord.” Train, you idiot.

  “I could have the baby any day . . . ”

  “I want to be there,” he said.

  Now that he’d said it, I pictured him there. “Did you mean there, like in the room?” Reality has always been the problem with my imagination.

  “Nah, well, up to you, really. You’ve got Lorene and Meredith.” As he was saying that, I remembered the whole thing about the birth certificate. He went on, “I think I did, but I can’t imagine I’d be of much use. I don’t know what I’d do.”

  “You can be right outside, first one in . . . ”

  “Yeah, that sounds about right.” Phew.

  After Steve left, I became the pregnant person I’d read about but never thought I’d have time to be. I was sure I’d have a preemie, like myself (six weeks) and Meredith (four weeks) and her son, Henry (two weeks). I thoroughly cleaned the refrigerator and stocked the freezer—cooking, apportioning, packaging, and updating the list of premade dinners tacked to its side. Every day felt like a bonus.

  My dad called. “Suetta, what do you think about my flying up this weekend to be there for Tuesday, the big day, right?”

  I hated to squash his enthusiasm, but I didn’t need an extra set of expectations hanging around. I pictured my cervix clamping up. “Would you stay at Meredith’s? Dad, I’m not dilated at all. There’s no chance of my having this baby over the weekend. How ’bout I call you after my Monday appointment?”

  He decided to stay put. Steve came home for the weekend and he left us with a big pot of his potato-leek soup when he went back to Bruce’s on Sunday night.

  All the women in my yoga class were reading to their unborn babies, which the instructor said was wonderful. I confessed I wasn’t. She encouraged me, at a minimum, to talk to my baby. Out loud. What if kids have a quota, a number of words after which they stop listening to their parents?

  We believe everyone, the developing baby included, has a right to an education. With your help, your child can start life as a successful graduate of our prenatal stimulation program.

  DR. VANDECARR

  Prenatal University,

  Hayward, CA

  I don’t think I could’ve felt any more bonded. We’d gone from being co-inhabitants to silent partners, especially since that last ultrasound. I know I said something if she had the hiccups or kicked me (her womb outreach), but I felt completely self-conscious when I decided to give her a pep talk the morning of the next ultrasound.

  I stood in our bedroom and looked down at my belly, clasping it like a ball, and I said out loud (to distinguish it from some self-conscious silent praying I’d been doing earlier) in age-appropriate words (steering clear of threats like “Pitocin” or “cesarean”), “Be big. Be healthy.” Then I added, “Eight out of eight,” just in case she got my competitive genes.

  It worked, or she did it anyway.

  She gave us the eight again, and she’d gained thirteen ounces, moving us up to the 12th percentile.

  However, I was still zero centimeters dilated the day before my due date. We asked Dr. Bunnell for some dilation advice. “Have you tried castor oil? It tastes really awful—that’s how it works. It nauseates you.” We hadn’t tried anything yet, but we were ready to.

  Lorene asked, “What about nipple—”

  “Nipple twiddling. That’s a serious time commitment. Twenty minutes an hour.” Never mind. Dr. Bunnell wanted to see us again in a few days; she could not, in good professional conscience, let the pregnancy go more than another week at my advanced maternal age.

  We bought the castor oil on the way home. Maybe it’d work the way the baby-extractor did for our contractor’s wife in the delivery room. One glimpse of them rolling it in, and the baby came flying out. I saved my castor oil receipt, just in case.

  We signed up for some needle twiddling. Our friend’s acupuncturist (the one who had righted one of the twins when she went breach a few days before delivery) could see us right after our next appointment with Dr. Bunnell. And we gave Indian food a try.

  On the way home from our spicy dinner, I called my dad with the non-news. “Do you think I should get an absentee ballot?” he asked.

  “Dad, I don’t know. I have no idea—I think you’ll be home in time for the election.” Although as I said it, it sounded implausible. It was hard to believe I’d have a baby by then. Or ever.

  The night before our next appointment, we went to watch the fourth game of the World Series on the big screen at the old movie theater in the next town. The Sox had won the first three. Johnny Damon led off with a home run and we were all out of our seats. A twelve-year-old boy jumped up and ran across the stage, swishing a broom back and forth, as we all chanted, “SWEEP! SWEEP! SWEEP!”

  “Maybe we should call her Jonetta or Ortizia,” I said to Lorene.

  The Sox won the game. The curse was reversed. 2004 would make history, a very auspicious year!

  I was three centimeters dilated the next morning. I didn’t feel any different. “We could get things started, make sure you keep progressing,” Dr. Bunnell offered. It was her euphemism for Pitocin. We shook our heads no. “Then I want you back in here tomorrow, and I’m making an appointment for Saturday at the hospital—we’re closed here—in case we need to induce you.”

  The acupuncturist’s office was in a fourth-floor walk-up in Jamaica Plain. It was a beautiful, Indian summer morning, the first sun we’d seen after a run of gray, November-type days. I was silent-talking to my core, not singling out my cervix, as we hiked up the stairs: “Let go, let gravity,” I repeated over and over; it ran counter to all the years of “suck it in, suck it in.”

  The acupuncturist walked us through her kitchen to her office. I filled out a series of forms, and after she reviewed them, she asked us if we had any questions. Lorene specified our outcome: We were looking for labor within twenty-four hours. The acupuncturist smiled a noncommittal smile. I considered asking whether you had to believe in it for it to work, but I didn’t want to diminish her belief in me. She led us to a table in the middle of the room where she actually did the work and had me remove all but my undergarments and lie belly-down. Lorene and I admired the retro reflexology posters that hung on all four walls.

  The needles were whisker thin. I didn’t feel a thing when she put them in, took them out, or during the forty minutes in between. There was one in each hand—the muscle between my thumb and my forefinger—and the rest were in my calves, ankles, feet, lower back, and right shoulder.

  The only thing that stung slightly was the alcohol in the Sharpie when she marked the spots on my lower back that Lorene was supposed to massage during labor.

  The acupuncturist did some acupressure massage on my shoulders and lower back; we gave her our $90 and a hug and were gone. “Rest!” she called after us on our way down the stairs.

  I stopped and called back up, “Is it okay to take the dogs for a walk?”

  “As long as it’s restful,” she said, and we heard her
door shut.

  “That means no stop at Babies‘R’Us,” I told Lorene. We had planned to eat macrobiotic on our way home, but we couldn’t resist our old fertility haunt, Matt Murphy’s Pub.

  At 5:30, after we got back from our dog walk, we went upstairs to read and rest. “Feeling anything?” Lorene asked.

  “I’d tell you,” I snapped. About fifteen minutes later, I felt something that felt something like a menstrual cramp, but on second thought, maybe I just wanted to feel it. And how would I know if it, being the first thing I felt, was anything or not? A while later, I felt a second. The third one lasted a minute, so I mentioned it to Lorene.

  “Shit. I left the chart and my watch in the car.” She got up to get it.

  “Don’t. It’s probably nothing.”

  By 6:45, we were sure they were contractions and we were arguing over the length of time in between, since we still weren’t writing anything down.

  “Let’s go downstairs and have some dinner, while you still have an appetite,” Lorene suggested. I added some spinach to Steve’s soup, and we each had a bowl. Then I put the finishing touches on the spaghetti sauce I’d left on the stove and packaged it up.

  I called Meredith to let her know we’d be heading in to the hospital, stopping to pick her up in the middle of the night. Then I left a message for Bruce and Steve.

  Lorene rolled the big exercise ball into the kitchen. “Want to bounce?”

  “It’s really starting.”

  The phone rang; my freshman-year roommate was calling. I explained about the contractions, and she was happy to distract me, reporting out on her first marathon. About ten minutes into the conversation, I was unable to finish a sentence.

  Lorene snatched the phone and told her, “I think we’ll be going to the hospital now.” She called Dr. Bunnell’s office, called Meredith to scratch the pickup, snapped one last picture of me looking annoyed and pregnant, threw a towel onto her passenger seat (in case my water broke), and we were off.

  A Room with a View

  We arrived at the admissions desk at 10:30. I gladly accepted a wheelchair even though other contracting walk-ins continued on their own two feet through the doors and into the birthing center. When I was examined, my cervix hadn’t budged. Three centimeters and holding. I was evicted from my wheelchair and ordered to walk the hospital halls in my johnny for the next two hours.

  Meredith, Lorene, and I circled the floor, making stops for contractions. I took to resting my forehead on the cool wall, swaying left to right, saying “EEEEEEEEEEEE” at a decibel that caused my head to reverberate, drowning out a good portion of the pain. It was only a matter of time before I had one opposite the elevator doors.

  I was initially afraid of being sent home, stalling my labor, Pitocin, or a C-section. After an hour, I didn’t care. I just wanted to be able to sit down, lie down, or take a bath.

  I was finally admitted at 1:00 a.m., a paltry four centimeters dilated.

  Our nurse, Linda, picked the nicest room for us—not one with a tub. Both tub rooms were free—I was guaranteed a tub when the time came, but the tubless rooms were much more spacious. I didn’t mean to harp on the tub, but it was a key part of my visualizations.

  Linda explained how the tub-room transfer would take place: “We can only fill it once, so we don’t want to fill it too early or it’ll lose heat. Figure it takes fifteen or twenty minutes to fill. You just let me know when you’re ready.”

  I decided to hold out for transition, use it to get me through the worst part. There was an LED board displaying the word EPIDURAL continuously in my brain, but the word never crossed my lips.

  Transition

  The short phase of labor marked by the most powerful contractions just before the pushing stage

  A couple hours later, I still had two or four or four thousand centimeters to go until the magic ten when I could push three times, just like Meredith, and get this baby O-U-T. I called for the tub. In twenty minutes, we shuffled down to the new room. I looked for the cedar closet, and then I spied the “tub”—a freakin’ kiddie pool, on the floor, on the far side of the bed. The water was ankle deep and the hose wasn’t feeling any deadline pressure. I lowered myself to a full sit in order to take advantage of the water level, and BLAMMO! Major contraction. I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t sway. I couldn’t get out of the freakin’ tub. The sides folded in on me when I tried to hoist myself up. Lorene considered coming in, then she tried a lower-back massage. “DON’T TOUCH ME!” I screamed, and forgot to smell her hair.

  I’d had it. I couldn’t take any more. Nurse Linda refused to measure me, she insisted she’d know—when my voice got really guttural. Nurse Linda called the doctor in; it was Dr. Bunnell’s colleague who was eight months pregnant herself. She informed me I was ten centimeters dilated and I was beating the second-time mother next door. “Are you ready to push?”

  Oh yes, I am. I am ready to push. Three times. Or ten. NOT one and a half hours.*

  I had tried everything—sitting, squatting, hanging—and nothing seemed to be working. I gave up and resorted to lying on my back again. “There’s her head!” Nurse Linda wheeled a mirror over. “Do you want to see?”

  I knew if I could see her little eyes, I’d—“Ew, oh gross, no!” I closed my eyes. There was nothing resembling an eye in that mess. Oh, God, I hope those words weren’t her welcome to the world.

  “Not yet, not yet, not yet, NOW! PUSHPUSHPUSH!” I squeezed my eyes tighter shut; I squeezed everything as hard as I could. “There she is!”

  I opened my eyes. Lorene was lifting her up by her underarms. She laid her on my chest.

  I looked down in disbelief. Not your garden-variety Miracle of Life awe. She had latched on to my left breast (not the nipple, a situation that Nurse Linda rectified once we all emerged from our postdelivery stupor) and was peacefully suckling. Wait, this isn’t my baby. My baby, my baby, the one I’ve been carrying around for forty weeks and three days, is a dark-haired, red-faced screamer. Lorene must’ve pulled this one out of the drawer under the table while I had my eyes shut. I was looking at a beautiful baby—fair-fuzz hair, pink skin.

  “Does she have a name?”

  “Aurora,” we said. “Aurora Jean Becker.”

  After all the years of dithering, wishing, waiting, it is unremarkable as far as birth stories go. I labored a very average eleven hours. There were no complications, for me or the baby, not counting the tub. I left out my water breaking (somewhere in the shower sequence), and there will be no mention of my “mucus plug.” Everybody else seems to leave out the afterbirth.

  While Aurora was tranquilly nursing, I had to push out the placenta. (The third stage of labor and the second-most-underpublicized part of pregnancy, after the ten-not-nine-month gestation period.) It left the room before anybody had time to request a doggie bag.

  We said good-bye to Nurse Linda—her shift was ending—and there was a sudden rush to get us over to the postpartum unit. Some other delusional laboring mother must have wanted our tub.

  Lorene held Aurora while I showered in our new room. I double-padded the supersize mesh underpants in my self-care kit and pulled my sweatpants up and over. “It makes a nice package,” I said to Lorene, grabbing my crotch as I entered the room, and I heard my dad’s laugh. He had Aurora nestled in his arms, sitting in a chair at the end of the bed.

  “She’s quite a package,” he said, gazing down at her. “I couldn’t wait. I booked my flight for this morning and I talked to Jonathan after I landed. He had me take a cab to the hospital.”

  Steve and Bruce were the next to arrive. Bruce stood back while Steve held his daughter. Then Bruce cradled Aurora while Steve peered at her out of the same fog of disbelief. Just about three years ago, he had handed someone some jars and now, here she was!

  My mother appeared with a boxful of pastries. My sister Robin and Aurora’s “brother” David rounded out the day’s visitors. Visiting hours ended at 8:00, and everyone was gone well before then. At a
few minutes before nine, Lorene looked up and said, “Look who is . . . ”

  Dr. Finn, my neurosurgeon, stood in the doorway, his surgical mask hanging under his chin. “I hear congratulations are in order,” he said. Lorene handed Aurora over; Dr. Finn smiled at her and then snatched off her cap to inspect her skull. “Perfect, just perfect. C-section?”

  “No! 100% natural, awake baby delivery!” He’d bought Aurora a bunny from the hospital gift shop. I had to catch myself or I’d start believing he was worth it, the brain surgery, I mean.

  Lorene stretched out on the fold-out chair-bed by my bed. “It wasn’t even twenty-four hours ago,” she said. I looked at the clock. When I turned back, she handed me a small box. “For the amazing mother of our beautiful daughter.”

  “You’re the most amazing partner,” I said. (Not so original, but consider the sleep deprivation and perineal trauma.)

  She laughed. “Meredith and I both said you could’ve had her in the middle of the woods, saying, ‘EEEEEEE’ against some tree.”

  I shook my head and pulled Lorene to me with my baby-free arm. “I was way too scared to do this alone.”

  That first night, we were awakened for various checks and tests. Lorene would go with Aurora and report back. With each “pass” (and intervening nap), my confidence mounted.

  “Her ears are perfect!” Lorene announced as she rolled Aurora into the room. Her ears weren’t perfect; it was plain to see that one looked like a rooster’s comb, but a nurse had assured us that ears are made of cartilage and it would continue to fill in over the next few weeks.