In real life, ready to birth my second baby, I welcomed that big plastic crochet hook as our midwife reached up inside me to break my water. In the onslaught of amniotic fluid, Leo set fire to my body, and I warmed up in the way of machines, fortifying my sanity and strength for hours of work. Like a blacksmith or a welder, I’d been charged with converting nine pounds of iron into the shape of a baby, using heat and my vaginal muscles like grinding stones. Each painful contraction radiated from my uterine furnace like a convection wave, cranking up the temperature of my belly to what age-old artisans call “forging heat.”
When I closed my eyes, entering the dreamscape of childbirth, my insides glowed orange and I could see precious metal softening, ready to be pressed into the outline of my son. Fever could be measured on my forehead and across my breasts. I ripped off what clothes remained on my body and crawled onto my hands and knees, legs wide, opening my torso like an oven door.
When I was pregnant, I spooked myself imagining women drugged, bound, and gagged during labor, based on something I’d read once about pregnant women and Argentina’s Dirty War. As birth requires its own form of restraint and attenuated focus, my greatest fear about giving birth was doing so while attached to an IV, a gown, a bed, or any kind of authoritative regimen. In every real instance of childbirth, I was grateful to be free. Nearly febrile, begging for washcloths soaked in ice water, I’d enter the agonizing awareness that the real work of birthing was imminent, and I was free to curl inward, leaning toward the searing middle of my own hearth. Frightened but also snug and happy in my bare skin, I tucked my chin against my chest. “Please make him come,” I groaned, as the contractions intensified, my voice sounding possessed by some Brothers Grimm demon that enters a woman’s chest cavity for the sole purpose of hammering out a baby. “Get. Him. Out,” I growled. Afterward, I realized I was barking commands at myself.
After two hours of sweating against my own hot flames, I could feel my insides turning to embers, and at long last, I passed Leo through the forging press of my birth canal. When he emerged, he’d been stamped by the contour of my “labor”—another word feminist linguists critique—into a baby formed with the same mold, though with slightly less pressure, as Irie.
I could imagine but could not truly fathom Cabot’s prison birth. Cabot’s baby waited, confined within the walls of her womb. Now that Vaughn had passed away, this baby girl would become Cabot’s second living child. She shed grief as her body thickened and Pomeno waited for them both, working long days at the bike shop, transforming burned-out bikes into revved-up ones. When Cabot finally fell into labor, after long months, she was whisked to the local hospital but forced to give birth in ankle cuffs.
She was not free to spread her legs as wide as I was mine. Padlocked to herself, Cabot was deemed a flight risk by the state of Wisconsin, even in the throes of labor. If she was a machine, pressing a baby into existence, the Department of Corrections controlled her operating lever. What shape did she press that burning hunk of baby into, given all those restrictions? Did she nearly burn to death, or did she lose consciousness when it came time to push, as she realized even her muscles were weakened by the chain-link bracelets tied above her feet? Was she allowed to scream or would prison guards have muzzled her? Did she have any idea that, years into the future, her husband would beat the shit out of her first baby, just to teach him a lesson?
She must have wept, but then, I suppose, I did too, not for shame or sadness or even elation but for some small-scale release. Tears spilled from my pressure valve when the baby was not yet ready. Liberty Cabot and I certainly shared one thing in common: our babies were born tethered to our powerhouses, connected to our lifeblood, placentas gleaming like liver, cross-stitched with veins; and surely at both of our births, mine in Madison and Cabot’s up the road from Taycheedah Correctional Institution, those umbilical cords were cut to set our babies free.
Upon each of our four births, midwives offered Ryan an enormous sterilized pair of scissors, blades gleaming under fluorescent light, and each time, he declined their invitations to sever that fibrous bond, the cable that kept our children, for nine months, suspended in uterine safekeeping. The same squeamishness that impaired his enthusiasm for a vasectomy likewise stunned him in the delivery room, even though he faithfully stayed, helped, and watched me give birth from his weak and stupefied position. Once our babies were unchained, fully disentangled from the womb, by a nurse, not by their father, Ryan would became a co-provider, those little bundles of nerves and shared blood reliant on more than just my body to flourish and survive. Cutting the cord, as it were, was a moment of
