Of course, all the writers agreed that breast-feeding was best, an assumption that wouldn’t be reexamined for another decade. Back then, if you weren’t committed to breast-feeding exclusively for a period of at least six months, well, you might as well be giving your baby Dr Pepper in a phthalate-filled plastic bottle, so of course I was determined to nurse.
There was also the debate about hiring help. Babies, we were instructed, needed their mothers, not day care or nannies or paid caregivers, so if you were a good mother and you had the financial resources, then you would stay home for as long as you could, no matter how high-powered your position or how much you’d invested in your work. The New York Times Magazine ran a story about the “opt-out” generation—bright women with Ivy League degrees leaving their jobs to stay home making baby food and crafting with their kids—and once again, my college classmates were pictured in the piece, their photographs Exhibit A of the opt-outers. Ambivalence about staying home, or boredom or dissatisfaction with life with a newborn, were never mentioned, and pregnancy and new motherhood were depicted as candy-coated, peachy-toned bliss. “I don’t want to be famous; I don’t want to conquer the world; I don’t want that kind of life,” read a quote from one of my Princeton sisters. Her words—and the story itself—told me that, as soon as I’d conceived, I was supposed to have stopped wanting these things, too, and made me feel uneasy—and guilty—because I hadn’t.
Not only that, but pregnancy was now also supposed to be sexy. I remember my own mom, pregnant with my younger brother, in billowy, peasant-style maternity tops (I remember them mostly because she continued to wear them for decades). I recalled Lady Diana, swathed in yards and yards of disguising white cotton. Pregnancy had been when ladies got to take a break from being toned and firm and cute and sexy all the time. It was when you could relax a little, when you could (however temporarily) retire your status as Object of Desire and be a glowing, loosely clad Madonna.
By the early 2000s, all that had changed . . . thanks, in part, to our Madonna, who along with other celebrities was flaunting her toned body and her baby bump, wearing sexy, revealing, body-con clothing for the duration of what the Victorians used to call her confinement. Not only that, but the stars would give birth, then emerge from the hospital precisely the size they’d been nine months previously, toting their babies as if they were the most desirable luxury-brand accessories, in a manner that made it clear that motherhood wasn’t slowing their social calendar, widening their waistlines, or dulling their sexual appetites at all.
Designers rolled out cutting-edge maternity fashion in the tiniest sizes. Shelter magazines and catalogues featured nursery porn—decked-out babies’ rooms with hand-carved cribs and cradles, beautifully upholstered gliders, color-coordinated curtains and comforters and crib bumpers and sheets. Every new issue of People or Us would have photographs of some famous new mom, babe in arms, with a husband or partner beaming in the background and no paid help in sight.
I read and watched everything I could find, every book, every TV show, every magazine. I studied blogs and birth plans, and devoted myself, like the A student I had once been, to having the best pregnancy, followed by the best possible labor and delivery, that I could, treating my journey into motherhood like another test that I’d ace if I studied hard enough.
Adam and I took classes in the Bradley Method of “husband-coached childbirth,” which instructed, “Natural childbirth is an important goal since most people want to give their babies every possible advantage, without the side effects of drugs given during labor and birth . . . Couples are taught how they can work with their bodies to reduce pain and make their labors more efficient. Of over 1,000,000 couples trained in The Bradley Method nationwide, over 86% of them have had spontaneous, unmedicated vaginal births. This is a method that works! ”
Together we interviewed obstetricians and midwives, going in with a page-long checklist of questions. How many of the births you’ve attended in the last six months ended with C-sections? How do you feel about medications? Will you let Jen labor for as long as her body requires, or do you expect delivery to occur within a certain time frame? We hired a doula, because, of course, that’s what you did, what our friends and birth-class buddies were doing, to ensure that the delivery would proceed as optimally as possible. In between the relaxation exercises and the high-protein diet and the pain endurance techniques, where we’d have to hold ice cubes in our hands,I we worked on our birth plan, which spelled out, specifically and at great length, exactly what we wanted and did not want. We wanted a calm, peaceful, dimly lit environment, with a diffuser scenting the air with lavender and a CD of whale songs playing softly in the background. We did not want fluorescent lights, unnecessary interruptions, loud noises, or Pitocin, a drug commonly administered to kick-start labor. We did not want an epidural, or any pain medication. We wanted me to be able to move around the room, untethered to monitors, free to crouch or rock or squat or get on all fours as my body—my body, which knew how to do this and was, in fact, made to do this—dictated. We did not want frequent internal examinations, continuous fetal monitoring, or any extraneous medical interventions. By the end, the birth plan ran upward of ten pages, and I was still worrying that we’d left out something important. Should we spell out, explicitly, that we didn’t want our daughter wrapped in a pink blanket if something gender-neutral was available? And that one of us wanted to give her the first bath?
By the time Lucy’s due date arrived, I was as ready as I’d been for any exam. My bags were packed, with clothes for me and two cute but non-pink outfits for her, both washed in non-allergenic, not-tested-on-animals organic detergent. I had a Boppy pillow and a Bugaboo stroller and a Baby Björn, which I prayed would fit over my newly extra-enormous chest. The wardrobe of onesies and cute little hats and socks had been washed and dried and lovingly folded in the brand-new dresser with the changing table on top. All was in readiness. We had everything but the baby.
Lu was due on April 28, and I made the rookie mistake of telling people the exact date—not “sometime this week,” or “the doctor says late April or early May.” When the day came, my phone rang from seven a.m. until ten at night. Unfortunately, that was the only thing that was happening. There was nothing to report. No contractions, not even a twinge. Nothing. Then it was the end of April. Then it was May. Then the baby was a week late. Nothing. Eight days late. Nine days past my due date. Nothing, nothing, nothing. At ten days—and at this point I was going in for daily checks of the baby’s heart rate, with the technicians assuring me that she was fine, just not showing any inclination toward leaving—my extremely understanding obstetrician sat me down. He knew, he said gently, that I’d been set on natural childbirth, but nature was not cooperating, and that at this point, the risks of continuing the pregnancy were starting to outweigh the benefits of letting nature take its course. “The uterine environment is decompensating,” he said, his face uncharacteristically serious, his voice grave. “What does that mean?” I asked through my tears. “Does it mean the schools in there are getting bad?”
I was sick with sorrow. I felt like I’d failed, like I’d flunked the test that I’d studied so hard for, the biggest, most important test I’d ever take, the one whose results would not only affect me but would also affect an innocent child.
I cried all afternoon as Adam tried to reassure me that things would be fine. I sobbed through dinner. I wept myself to sleep. My daughter hadn’t even been born, and I already felt like I’d let her down by being unable to give her the optimal birth that would have left her in the best possible position for the best possible health and future.
Already, I could see the dominoes fall—she’d be sickly from the drugs they’d give me. She’d have trouble forming loving attachments, having been unceremoniously ripped from my body instead of making her own leisurely way out. Of course she’d have trust issues. She wouldn’t get into the right preschool, which would keep her out of the best private school, which would pr
event her from getting into the top high school, which would end her chances for the Ivy League, which would doom her to a life as a scullery maid. Possibly one in my employ, because she’d probably also be one of those kids who never left the house.
I knew what my own unhappy childhood had done to me, how it had colored my view of the world, how I tended to see the majority of people as harmful and malevolent, ene-mies who’d hurt me and everyone else as much as they could. I wanted to do better by my own children. Now I had—already—failed.
About six hours before my scheduled C-section, I woke up with a stomachache. Oh, great, I thought. I’m a bad mother, I’m having major abdominal surgery in the morning, and now I’ve got indigestion.
Then the pain went away. Then it started up again. After three or four rounds of this, I realized that I was—praise God—having contractions. I woke up Adam, called my doctor, canceled the operation, and settled in triumphantly to wait.
After about twelve hours of on-and-off contractions, we walked six blocks to Pennsylvania Hospital, with me towing my suitcase behind me, like a brave pioneer woman preparing for a new frontier. Unfortunately, it turned out that I was barely dilated at all. “Go home,” said the nurse. “You’ll know when it’s time to come back.”
I went back home, and I did everything the books recommended. I walked. I took a bath in the tiny third-floor tub we’d installed for the baby. I drank teas made of raspberry leaf and nettle, applied evening primrose oil and extra-virgin olive oil to all the recommended places, and ordered spicy eggplant for dinner, except after I’d ordered it I remembered that I wasn’t supposed to be eating, in case I ended up needing a C-section, which I wouldn’t, I was sure, because now my body was kicking into gear, just the way God and Nature intended. I bounced on my giant inflatable birth-ball. I breathed through the contractions. I watched the timer on my BlackBerry. Twelve hours later, back at the hospital, I checked in again, underneath a banner that read AMERICA’S BUSIEST MATERNITY WARD. Was that a good thing? I wondered. Wouldn’t it have been more of a comfort if the sign had said BEST and not BUSIEST? And shouldn’t I have worried about this sooner?
In spite of all the home remedies and the contractions (painful but endurable), I was still barely dilated, but the nurses agreed to let us stay and put us in a small, rectangular room with the walls painted beige, a private bathroom with a shower, and a single bed. After twenty-four sleepless hours, Adam immediately claimed the bed, lay down, and conked out, leaving me to squat, bounce, shower, pace, moan, and endure, as the hours dragged by.
The contractions would grip me, leaving me groaning and breathless, fists clenched and brow furrowed. They were like nothing I’d imagined, nothing I’d read about, less like a “really bad menstrual cramp” or squeezing of a melting cube of ice and more like a previously unexplored force of nature, like being seized and tossed by my own private hurricane, something so powerful and enormous that I couldn’t even comprehend it. I had never felt so scared or so small. I’d have one contraction, then another, then another one after that, the time between them shortening, and I would think, This is it . . . then they’d taper off and stutter to a halt again. Finally, after twelve hours of laboring in the hospital (during which I’d had no sleep, nothing to eat, and nothing but ice chips to suck), the baby’s heartbeat was starting to dip.
So it was a C-section after all. All that pain, all that struggle, all that planning, all that hope, all for nothing. I hunched forward on the edge of the bed, shivering, trying not to think too much about how big that needle had looked before the anesthesiologist plunged it into the space between my vertebrae and my doctor eased me down onto my back. I couldn’t feel anything below my waist but pressure, and tugging, and I knew better than to look—even what I could make out from the distorted reflection in the lamp above my belly was distressingly bloody. I shut my eyes. Adam squeezed my hand. And then I heard a faint, indignant cry. I held out my arms . . . and there was my baby.
• • •
So motherhood did not get off to a propitious start. I was sick with guilt about the C-section, sick with the certainty that I could have toughed it out, talked to the doctors and convinced them to let my labor continue, convinced that the drugs and C-section had affected my body and hers. Back in my room after the surgery, I was so exhausted and dehydrated that I couldn’t stop shivering. My teeth chattered and my body trembled in spite of the heated blankets the nurses piled on top of me. Worst of all, my milk didn’t come in. Lucy wasn’t terrifically interested in nursing—as happy as I was to have her in the world, that’s how unhappy she was to be there—but even when I held her, skin to skin, and maneuvered her mouth where it was supposed to be, there was nothing doing.
So Lucy went to the nursery, where they fed her formula, which I’d learned to think of as the devil’s own rancid spittle, a few steps removed from poison. I was lying in bed, with IVs in both arms, shivering so hard that the bed was shaking, hating myself for being so weak, hating my body for betraying me and failing her.
At home, things did not improve. I’d imagined an easy recovery, easy nursing—I had breasts, didn’t I?—and a cheerful, easy-to-understand baby. I thought, after all of the studying I’d done, that I’d do as well at motherhood as I had on all of my tests.
Of course, that’s not the way it worked. I had a beautiful, perfect pink pearl of a baby—a perfect pink pearl who could morph, in the space of ten seconds, into a furious, red-faced shrieking dervish. I was using nipple shields, which would sometimes stay on my breast in the proper position but would usually fall off and need to be reaffixed. Even when they stayed in place, Lucy wouldn’t nurse—she’d turn her head away from my breast, sometimes slapping at it with her little starfish hands, like a bald man trying to shake a piece of candy out of a recalcitrant vending machine. She would only take bottles, she was crying all the time, and I couldn’t figure out how to soothe her—because, it quickly emerged, I’d spent so much time on the pregnancy and childbirth-preparation end that I hadn’t spent enough time on the actual raising-the-baby aspect of things.
I wasn’t sleeping. I was skipping meals, spending hours trying to feed and comfort my baby, then stuffing fistfuls of whatever food I could find into my face when I realized that I was starving. Not only did I fail to lose the baby weight, I actually gained weight in my first months as a new mother, which left me even more thoroughly demoralized. My breasts hurt. My stitches hurt and tore and got infected and took forever to heal. Lucy cried every time I put her down. She screamed when I picked her up. She shrieked when she was hungry, and when it was time to change her diaper, and when I settled her in her stroller for a walk or her crib for the night, and for no reason whatsoever.
I tried to do everything perfectly, but things kept going wrong. My attempt at round-the-clock baby-wearing ended when a combination of an imperfectly knotted Moby Wrap and the dishwasher that I’d been trying to load ended with Lucy narrowly escaping impalement on the knives in the silverware basket. Co-sleeping kept me up all night, terrified that I’d roll on top of the baby. Sleep-training didn’t work—it turned out that Lucy was perfectly capable of “crying it out” for a solid hour, and I usually cracked after ten minutes, going in to soothe her, which I was not supposed to do. And scheduling was impossible. The perfectly sensible-sounding routine of E.A.S.Y.—that’s eat, then activity, then sleep, then (ha!) you time—would fall apart, because Lucy would fall asleep immediately after eating . . . or she would eat, then do her activity, then want to eat again, without any sleep at all, or any of the promised respite that I was supposed to get.
“Babies cry,” my mother told me, holding her arms out for my squalling, red-faced child. Fran’s bemusement at my plans and my books—so this is how people do it these days?—was giving way to real anxiety. By then I was crying almost as much as the baby. I was going days without finding time for a shower; the piles of unwashed laundry were reaching mountainous proportions, there were dishes stacked in the sink, half-emptied
grocery bags on the counters, beside heaps of unsorted mail and unpaid bills, and I was angry all the time, angry at my husband for not being psychic and not knowing exactly what I wanted exactly when I wanted it; angry at the baby for being so hard to soothe and please; and most of all, angry at myself.
The situation was far from ideal. Adam had lost his job while I was pregnant and was taking some time to find a new one. Instead of asking for his help with the baby or with the housework, I was trying to give him the time and space he needed to conduct a proper job search. Of course, I ended up resenting him horribly—for every shower he took that lasted longer than thirty seconds and was uninterrupted by a baby’s shrieks, for every outfit that wasn’t lacquered in spit-up and applesauce, for being able to leave the house for hours at a time without the encumbrances of car seat or diaper bag or stroller or baby, even though I was the one insisting that he shower, dress, and leave. I was jealous of his freedom, angry that he seemed to have no problem dumping all of the child-care and financial obligations on my shoulders, and furious—red-faced, fist-clenched, head-spinningly furious—every time I came home from playgroup or a pediatrician’s appointment to find him on the couch, in the air conditioning.
He saw that I was frantic. He would offer to help with the baby, but I was determined to stick to the plan, where he worked and I took care of Lucy. Oh, no, I’d say. You need to spend your time on your job search. I’ve got this. Or, if I was exhausted enough, I’d let him try . . . but, of course, I couldn’t ever just let him change a diaper or feed her a bottle. With the words of whatever book I’d read most recently chorusing through my brain, I’d explain to him—sometimes patiently, sometimes not so patiently—that he was doing it wrong, wiping her wrong, holding her wrong, burping her wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
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