“I don’t feel the Pitocin yet,” my wife said.
“You will,” said the white nurse.
“Maybe it’ll be okay,” said the Asian nurse. “Latinos have thicker skin, so there’s less pain in labor.”
The white nurse narrowed her eyes but said nothing, and when they left Natalia turned to me.
“Uh . . .” she said, “that bit about Latinos and pain . . . was that science or racism?”
I wasn’t sure. Probably racism, but what good would it do right then to say so? “Science,” I said.
At first the only sign of contractions was on the monitor, nothing Natalia could feel. Just anxiety and boredom. For hours. When it started we were watching Maury, of all things, and Natalia said, “Ooookay. I think I need you for these.”
Soon she was on her hands and knees, making those noises from the birthing class videos.
Natalia held on until she couldn’t take it anymore, and she asked for the epidural. They put it in and she immediately passed out. I sat and held her hand, but the nurse told me to sleep, that I’d need my energy soon enough, so I rolled up my coat for a pillow and slept on the floor. I woke around midnight to Natalia screaming, ready to push.
Natalia would push, her face clenched in pain, looking like I’d never seen her before. It was animalistic, and not beautiful, exactly. Awe-inspiring, I suppose. I was watching this titanic thing, this thing I’d been waiting for and preparing for, this thing that clearly was taking every inch of courage and endurance Natalia had, and well . . . I was standing there like an idiot, saying, “You’re doing great, babe, you’re doing great.”
A nurse asked if I wanted to catch the baby and I went in and helped catch her and we brought her up to Natalia’s chest and she lay there. She was beautiful, or seemed beautiful to us, our vision distorted by parental love. Now, looking at the pictures, it’s clear she looked like a dirty little gremlin. Still. She was making small mewing noises. I wept. With the help of the nurse I cut her umbilical cord, hands shaking. She was on Natalia’s chest for forty-five minutes. We sang to her. We recited RinRin Renacuajo, a fairy tale my mother-in-law had told me to memorize. Before they took her away to the NICU, and Natalia went to sleep, they asked us her name, and we told them it was Inez.
Natalia woke me around 2:30 a.m. “I’m in a lot of pain,” she said.
The nurse on duty, a super-sweet Texan named Jacklyn, who’d worked in ER beforehand, examined Natalia, pressing here and there on her stomach until Natalia cried out. There was a gush of blood. Jacklyn’s hand came up bloody. And then the lights came on and there were people rushing around. I stood by Natalia’s head, holding her hand.
“I’m going to scrape your uterus,” a female doctor said, “and it’s gonna hurt.” And she put her hand up my wife’s vagina as Natalia repeated, over and over when not screaming, “Please stop, please stop. Please, please, please stop.”
When she withdrew her hand, a lot more blood came out. I’m a medic, you’d think I would be able to handle a thing like this. But I didn’t know much of anything about labor complications, so I didn’t have any base of knowledge that would let me categorize and file away whatever I was seeing, and besides, even if I did, this was my wife. I couldn’t just separate out the body in front of me, a physical object in need of mechanical fixes, from the presence of Natalia in pain. She was losing a lot of blood. A lot for a man, and my wife is a small woman.
It didn’t just come out in a stream. There were chunks, failed clots. All this, it was later explained, was the fault of the magnesium. I didn’t know that. All I knew was that I’d seen major blood loss before, even from men I’ve loved, but it had never felt like this. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my wife looking at me, maybe in the hope I’d let her know it was all okay, but I couldn’t stop staring at the bloody mess between her legs and spilling over the sides of the bed. The pool of it, filled with clumps of clot.
They put in an IV, fumbling a bit. I could have done it better and wanted to offer, wanted to take charge, but instead I stroked her hair, tried to stay out of their way, to not become another issue the doctors would have to deal with. Natalia was looking at me strangely. I smiled at her.
“You’re all right, babe,” I said.
They gave her a transfusion. The doctor explained in a very authoritative, calm way that it was okay. “Look around, there’s not a million people running around doing things right now,” she said. It was true. Where did they go?
“That means you’ll be okay. This is serious but totally normal. The magnesium is stopping your uterus from contracting so we’re going to put you back on Pitocin.” Then it was over, and Natalia fell asleep and so did I.
The next morning, I went to see my daughter in the NICU. I sang to her, and I wept. I don’t know why. It was still hard to conceptualize this small wrinkled thing as my daughter, or myself as a father. I wouldn’t feel like a father for some time, not until I’d spent time fathering—changing diapers, feeding her, reading to her, leaving her for training and then missing her. But even in the strangeness of it all there were physical things that made sense, that felt natural and right. Cuddling her in my arms, holding her on my chest, singing softly to her. It still surprises me how physical an experience it is, having a baby. Babies need contact and you, as the parent, need it, too.
“Can you imagine if we’d had a birth
