First there are the mysterious flames.
Must have been a small plane.
We zoom in on the falling debris with binoculars and video cameras.
Must be papers. Can’t be bodies.
A second explosion.
Our eyes move from one flaming building to the other.
The South Tower starts to fall from the sky—a silent, slow-motion top-to-bottom erasure, claps of dust billowing in all directions—until all that’s left is a swath of blue September sky.
Some scream. Some point in disbelief. Some spin in circles. Some drop to the ground.
I take off running. Away from what I’m seeing. M chases me down, catching me from behind, pinning my arms in toward my center as you would a tantrumy child. He guides me back to the crowd. We try to hold the North Tower up in the sky with our eyes. And then it falls. This time M lets me run.
We huddle in our apartments, windows closed against the 24/7 sirens and acrid smoke. Our throats burn, our eyes sting, helicopters pulse in our eardrums all night long. We pick up the paper every morning and read the names. We all know someone.
I braise meat, assemble pesto lasagnas, bake chocolate chip cookies. All I can do is feed people.
Three weeks later, we tape an American flag to the side of our car and drive out of New York City.
We barrel all the way to California, moving fast toward something new.
Get the chef knife.
It is under our bed. We are lying in the dark in our funky Venice Beach rental bungalow, listening to the creaks, counting all the points of entry, imagining our imminent deaths. We are used to New York City with the triple-locked front doors and windows with security bars. In Los Angeles, we feel exposed and vulnerable.
Then the sun comes up and we do what we came to Los Angeles to do. M auditions for acting jobs. I teach yoga in strip malls. We pretend New York City isn’t our everything.
At the farmers’ market, we buy bags of arugula and kale. We sit on the curb, with iced coffees and five-grain scones, and watch the people walk by. For lunch, we toss the greens with pesto vinaigrette, top them with avocado and salmon, and eat out on our front stoop in the quiet, in the dry heat.
We haven’t maxed out our credit cards yet. We don’t see the traffic and the smog. We are oblivious to the mold that is climbing up the walls behind our sofa, creeping down the arms of my winter coats in the back of the closet, lining the kitchen cupboards, making our noses itch.
It’s seventy degrees. In January. After twelve years in New York City, we just turn our faces up to the sun.
I can’t stop eating quesadillas filled with Monterey Jack, topped with avocado, sour cream, jalapeño pickles.
My skin has never been so clear, my eyes have never been so bright.
Dutch babies fall.
Cakes won’t rise.
Wine tastes metallic.
I am accidentally pregnant. We track its size from poppy seed to lentil to blueberry.
And then the barfing begins.
I have no interest in food, but if my stomach gets even close to empty, I start gagging. If I cough or sneeze, I throw up. I cannot be anywhere else except in the miserable nauseated present moment.
I drive all over Los Angeles teaching yoga. I float my arms up with my students, and then I fold my ever-expanding body down toward my legs. Soften your jaw, broaden your collarbones, follow your breath, lengthen your exhale. The only time the nausea settles is when I’m helping other people breathe.
Many evenings, just after sunset, as I start dreading the long nauseated night to come, all I want is for the baby to die.
At twenty weeks pregnant, my nausea lifts.
My baby will be made of cottage cheese pancakes.
We look at vaginal maps.
It’s down at the bottom. The curvy part.
We read about massaging the perineum with almond oil to prepare for the ring of fire during crowning: the moment when the baby stretches everything down there from a quarter-size hole into a softball-size exit. But first we have to find my perineum.
Here?
No. Lower.
Here?
Ow.
I want to skip the next part.
When my grandmother Phyllis goes into labor with my mother in 1945, my grandfather is told to stay in the waiting room until it’s all over. She puts on a gas mask and wakes up to a baby girl.
I drive around Los Angeles, six days overdue.
I have scrubbed the house every day for weeks. We have everything set up for a home birth. The freezer is filled with lasagnas, enchiladas, garden burgers, and chocolate chip cookies. There are no more lists to check off.
The baby kicks its legs around, curling its feet up into my lower ribs, pressing its head down.
I pull over to the side of the road.
You can stay in there.
I watch the baby push through my belly, a foot an elbow a knee gliding up, down, right, left.
You don’t ever need to come out.
When my mom goes into labor with me in 1970, my father is tolerated in the delivery room. I am occiput posterior and I get stuck on the way out. After thirty-six hours of Lamaze-guided labor, the doctor brings out the baby-extracting device that looks like a large set of kitchen tongs you might use to retrieve a blanched peach from boiling water. These forceps press too hard on one side of my head, leaving a half-moon-shaped scar next to my right eye.
I stand up and tell M to turn off the movie because it feels like someone is shoving a cattle prod up into my vagina.
I’m hot. No. Wait. I’m cold.
My insides are heading out.
Why am I crying?
M lights candles and puts on our birth mix CD. I put out my arms. He draws me in and we awkwardly sway to Björk. I throw up down his back.
He turns off the music and lights more candles we’ve set around the living room. I throw up again. He blows out the candles. I throw up in the kitchen sink. Out the back door. I throw up so vigorously that my mucus plug pops out, a red splat on the bath mat.
My body is making room.
For twelve hours, I walk, moaning, forearms and cheek pressing the wall’s cool paint, stunned by the newness of the pain, each contraction more impossible than the last.
The midwife-doula cavalry arrives at sunrise. They set up the birthing tub in the middle of the living room and halfway through filling it up we run out of hot water. M puts all our pasta pots on the stove and boils water. He is grateful to finally feel useful. They tell him where to place his hands during the next contraction, how to look into my eyes, how to pretend he’s not scared.
We climb into the tub together. M surrounds me, his belly to my back, his inner thighs to my outer thighs, our arms stacked on the sides of the tub. The warm water supports my heavy belly. The pressure on my pelvic floor starts to soften.
The shades are drawn. The light is gentle. The voices are calm.
After each contraction, I collapse back into a deep, snoring nap, waking up with another woman’s eyes staring into mine, just as the intensity starts to build again.
Phyllis, if you feel any urge to push, then just go for it.
After each contraction, like a buoy to the surface of the water, the baby elevators back up the birth canal to where it started.
Until finally, after three hours, it stays down and locked into position. I can feel it working just as hard as I am. It wants out.
This is when the burning begins. The ring of fire we read about. An excruciating slow-motion stretching of the perineum.
A midwife guides my hand down between my legs. I don’t recognize anything down there. All is taut and ready to pop.
And then I feel it. The warmth, the hair, my crowning baby. This is all I need. I find strength behind strength, and push like a motherfucker.
Out it swims. And bam its eyes open and lock on mine.
Someone tells me it’s a girl.
I look down at her perfect eyes and wonder why he
r lips are blue.
A midwife yanks my baby out of my arms and works on her for far too long, shoving tubes down her throat, placing an oxygen mask over her face, tilting her on her side to expel all the gunk her lungs collected on the way out.
I’m still wrapped in M’s arms in the lukewarm bloody water. I close my eyes. In my heart, I feel her die.
A midwife helps me out of the tub and wipes the birth muck off my body. I slide down to the floor. Another midwife stabs me with a needle filled with what feels like a rush of adrenaline.
Phyllis, you are hemorrhaging. I just gave you Pitocin to stop the bleeding. Your baby is okay.
My baby is not okay.
Look at her, Phyllis. Look at her.
I can’t look at her.
She is okay.
And then she is back in my arms. So warm. So soft.
The midday sun illuminates our crime scene: bloody sheets, overturned chairs, contents of birth bags strewn about.
My baby girl latches onto my breast. Colostrum coats her lips and rolls down her cheek, thick and yellow and sweet like condensed milk. We see her lungs expanding, her toes wiggling, her shoulder blades winging. She is doing it all on her own.
Oh my God, I am so hungry.
A midwife spoons vanilla bean ice cream into my mouth. Nothing has ever tasted so right.
A few weeks after my mom gives birth to me, she stops answering the phone. She stays in her nightgown all day long. She is twenty-four, living in a five-floor walk-up in San Francisco. For eight months, she doesn’t tell anyone about the darkness she feels.
My baby girl is in my arms all day long, tucked into my body all night long. We wake up in a puddle of breast milk that fills our ears, coats our hair, sinks down through layers of blankets and sheets and pads. My pee smells like her pee. My breath is her breath: sweet and milky and sour. We are a cloud of life and death and ferment.
Exhale down. Inhale up. Exhale down. Inhale up. Faster and faster. Bouncing up and down on an exercise ball is the only thing that gets her to stop screaming. On each bounce I hear my brain crack into my skull and I feel my organs—already displaced from nine months of pregnancy—floating around the cavernous insides of my torso, crashing into one another.
If I put her down she screams. If I hold her she screams. Swaddling, swaying, singing aren’t enough. I walk in circles around the block because I am scared to cross the street. I am scared to leave my nursing chair. I am scared I won’t be able to keep her safe.
One breastfeeding session leads into the next. I use one arm to hold her to my breast. With the other arm, I grasp the side of the padded nursing chair. I can’t look down because I am convinced the earth will fall out from under me.
Images pulse in my head, violent flashes in which I smash her brain in with a flashlight or throw her fragile body against the wall. Thousands of times, I watch her die.
We sleep through the night enough times.
I kiss her fingertips enough times.
She one-arm commando scooches on her belly from the kitchen to the living room to the bedroom enough times.
I start leaving her in the living room, walking around the corner to make coffee, believing that she will be alive when I return.
I teach yoga.
I cross the street.
Cakes rise.
We cover the living room floor with a tarp, strap her into her Graco Deluxe yellow-and-turquoise picnic-patterned high chair and open a dozen jars of baby food.
I watch her taste. I watch her smile. I watch her taste some more. She doesn’t need me. I start to fall head over heels.
We move to Berkeley, in the condo above my grandmother Phyllis. We worry a lot about how noisy we are. The barking dog. Our toddler’s tantrums. Our fights. My occasional throwing of a plate or a book or a clog. Every single episode of Six Feet Under.
If I hear a baby screaming in a restaurant, I have to leave the room, to shake the sadness out of my body, to blot the milk that flows from my breasts.
M and I talk about having another baby.
I get certified as a birth doula. It’s strategic. Maybe by helping other women, I can have an easier experience the second time around. Maybe I can change the way my own body works by watching others.
I hold laboring women in cars and beds and on bathroom floors. I massage their third eyes, swollen ankles, sacra. I hold their sisters and mothers and partners. I bring them ice chips and granola bars. I help them remember their birth plans. I help them let go of their birth plans. Drugs. No drugs. Phyllis, get me the motherfucking drugs. I tell them they can do it. That they are doing it. I watch them dance and squat. I watch them punch pillows and partners. I watch them hum and om and grunt and yell and scream and cry their babies out. Angrily. Defiantly. Ecstatically. Quietly. I tell them that softening the jaw can help relax the pelvic floor. I see husbands so strong and focused on their laboring wives that they forget I’m even in the room. Lights are dimmed. Candles are lit. Lights are thrown back on. Baby crash carts are rolled in. I watch planned C-sections and emergency C-sections. I see babies pulled and sucked out. I see stuck placentas and torn perinea. So much blood and vomit and shit. Needles into spines. Scalp monitors. Birth after stillborn. Birth after the loss of a parent, a partner, a child. All the stories so huge.
In 1971, twenty-four weeks pregnant with her second child, my mother bleeds through her white tennis dress and all over the bathroom floor. To stop the contractions, the doctor recommends bed rest and shots of alcohol. My dad has to leave on a business trip so my grandmother Phyllis wakes up my groggy mother every few hours with brandy. But nothing stops the down-and-out squeezing of her uterus. Alone in the delivery room, she pushes the baby out and he dies within a few minutes. She doesn’t hold him. She doesn’t name him. She doesn’t say goodbye.
I know I’m pregnant again when I find myself in the anchovy aisle, tracing my fingers along the tins, my mouth watering, my skin tingling, my body overly alive.
The headache comes first. Then the bleeding. Back to the beginning each time.
So, doctor, how are my husband’s sperm?
His sperm are fine.
So what’s the problem?
Your FSH is so high that I don’t even think you should waste your money trying IVF with your own eggs. You are experiencing early ovarian failure. You should look into egg donors. You will keep miscarrying.
I move on to the next doctor.
When the third fertility specialist tells me that I have a 4 percent chance of bringing another baby to term, I decide to stop listening to the numbers and start listening to my body.
The monthly pounding and aching of my right ovary is called mittelschmerz. When I feel it, I know that an egg is being released.
For the first time in my life, I look down and examine my cervical fluid. It shifts throughout the cycle. Sometimes it’s clear and clean-smelling. Other times it’s viscous like a glue stick or stinky like colatura di alici. When it stretches out like egg whites, I know it’s time.
After sex, I do precarious headstands on the bed to help the sperm move to my egg.
Another pregnancy. Another miscarriage.
I get chiropractic care, I take homeopathic remedies, I buy ovulation kits.
Four, five, six more miscarriages.
I do weekly acupuncture, I assist in a postnatal yoga class just to be near all those spiking hormones, I buy pregnancy tests in bulk.
Pregnancy number nine sticks. For two weeks, then four, then six, then eight. Like one of those Velcro balls that my four-year-old daughter throws at a dartboard, I keep expecting the baby to fall out of me onto the floor.
I press down on my belly with my fingertips. She flutters back. I name her. Willow Tassajara. A daughter do-over. This time I will love her right away. I will not want to hurt her.
I learn I’m having a boy.
I sit on the back porch with my daughter, pretending to smell the rosemary, the lavender, the matilija poppies. I want to scoop up the di
rt and eat it. The desire is a thirst. Not a hunger. I have pica. Nothing will quench this feeling until I push my baby out.
I pin my four-year-old daughter down, my hands to her forearms, my forehead to hers, all sticky with sweaty, stringy bangs. You are okay. You don’t need to scream. I am here to help you. I think she is calm so I roll off to rest. But she isn’t done. She throws a chair. This time, I hold her from behind, crossing her arms to her chest. I finally feel her body soften back into my very pregnant belly. I let go. She moves to her art table. She organizes her pencils. She draws colorful squirrels and rainbows with pots of gold. Hand in hand, we drift into the kitchen. Drained. Relieved. And we prep. We review the chocolate chip cookie recipe and place all the ingredients into mixing bowls and ramekins. Mama, I am ready. Her meticulousness reminds me to slow down.
At 6:00 a.m., my daughter takes my hands. You can do it, Mama, you can do it, you can do it, you can do it.
At 11:00 a.m., I peer down into the toilet, searching for my baby boy in the water, thinking he has come out with a gush of fluid and blood, unaware that my water has just broken.
At noon, I head to the hospital. They ask me to sign admission forms. I can’t work the pen. I can’t remember my name.
From my work as a birth doula, I know this hospital well. The shortcuts. How to get a nurse’s attention fast. Where to find the ice chips and the Jell-O and the extra pillows. But I don’t care about any of that. I just need the pain to stop. I head right to triage.
As the nurse maneuvers her gloved hand way up inside me, I try to guess my dilation from the look on her face. I need a big number. At one, the cervix is thick and almost closed, at ten it is completely thinned out and open. I want at least an eight. She flashes a five and throws the glove into the medical-waste bin. Fuck. A five. How is that possible?
Everything Is Under Control Page 4