9
‘Today could be the day.’
The baby felt heavy and low in the morning and I’d dreamed all night of my amniotic fluid soaking our bed. The panic came quickly and pulled me to a place I’d consciously avoided for the entire forty weeks of my pregnancy. I whispered to myself as I boiled the water for tea. It’s okay if she comes. It’s okay if this is it. It’s okay to have this baby. I sat at the kitchen table and wrote these mantras on a piece of paper over and over until you walked into the room.
‘The car seat’s in. I’ll keep my phone in my hand all day.’
I slid the piece of paper under the place mat. You kissed me and left for work. I knew.
By seven thirty that night we were on the bedroom floor together, my knees splintered from the grooves in the old parquet flooring. You pressed on my hips while I tried to breathe deeply, evenly. We’d practiced this. We’d done the class. But I couldn’t find that sense of calm I’d been promised, the intuition that was supposed to kick in. You were keeping track of things with chicken scratch, minutes and contractions. I ripped the scorecard from your hand and threw it back at you.
‘We’re going now.’ I couldn’t be in our apartment anymore. She was volcanic and I was fighting to keep her in. None of what I’d prepared for felt possible. I wasn’t open, I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t visualize her dropping into my open pelvis, I couldn’t coax myself to expand like the mouth of a river. I was clenched and scared. I didn’t know what to do.
What they say about the pain is true – I can no longer remember what it felt like. I remember the diarrhea. I remember how cold the room was. I remember seeing the forceps on a cart in the hallway decorated with Christmas tinsel garland as we walked between contractions. The nurse had hands like a lumberjack. When she shoved them in me to check my dilation I would whimper and she would look away.
‘I don’t want this to happen,’ I whispered to nobody. I was exhausted. You were standing two feet away, drinking the water the nurse had brought for me. I couldn’t keep it down.
‘You don’t want what to happen?’
‘The baby.’
‘You mean the birth?’
‘No, I mean the baby.’
‘Do you want the epidural now? I think you need it.’ You craned your neck to look for a nurse and put a cold cloth on the back of my neck. I remember you holding my hair like a horse’s mane.
I didn’t want the drugs. I wanted to feel how bad it could get. Punish me, I said to her. Rip me apart. You kissed my head and I smacked you away. I hated you. For everything you wanted of me.
I begged for them to let me push on the toilet – I was most comfortable there and I was delirious by that point. I couldn’t follow a thing anyone said to me. You coaxed me back to the bed and they ordered me into the stirrups. Nothing about it felt right. The burning. I reached down to feel the flames I was sure were there, but someone pushed away my hand.
‘Fuck you.’
‘Come on now,’ the doctor said. ‘You can do this.’
‘I can’t. I won’t,’ I spat back.
‘You have to push,’ you said calmly. I closed my eyes and I willed something horrible to go wrong. Death. I wanted a death. Mine or the baby’s. I didn’t think, even then, that we would survive each other.
When she came out, the doctor held her over my face, but I could barely see her in the assault of bright light. I shook vigorously from the pain and said that I might be sick. You appeared at my hip, next to the doctor, and he turned toward you instead, saying the baby was a girl. You put your hand under her slippery head and brought her carefully to your face. You said something to her. I don’t know what – you had your own secret language from her first minute in this world. The doctor then cupped her belly, like she was a wet kitten, and handed her over to the nurse. He went back to work. My afterbirth splashed onto the floor. He tugged at my opening with suture thread while I stared at the light in awe of what I’d just done. I was one of them now, the mothers. I had never felt so alive, so electric. My teeth chattered so hard that I thought they might chip. And then I heard her. The howl. She sounded so familiar. ‘Are you ready, Mom?’ someone said. They placed her on my bare chest. She felt like a warm, screaming loaf of bread. She had been cleaned of my blood and bundled in the hospital’s flannel blanket. Her nose was speckled with yellow. Her eyes looked slimy and dark and they stared right into mine.
‘I’m your mother.’
The first night in the hospital I didn’t sleep. I stared at her quietly behind the perforated curtain that surrounded the bed. Her toes were a row of tiny snow peas. I would open her blanket and trace my finger along her skin and watch her twitch. She was alive. She came from me. She smelled like me. She didn’t latch for my colostrum, not even when they squished my breast like a hamburger and pried at her chin. They said to give it time. The nurse offered to take her while I slept but I needed to stare at her. I didn’t notice my tears until they dropped onto her face. I wiped each one from her skin with my pinkie and then tasted it.
