The Baby

I have tried to write this labor and birth narrative for over three months, and I keep going back over the paragraphs I’ve vomited up so far and I hate them. The writing--the detail, the dialogue--is boring and contrived; I don’t know why I can’t write this final blog entry with any flare or distinction. Perhaps it’s because three months have passed, and my child (a BOY, for fuck’s sake) is a marvelous creature and embodies every detestable cliché in existence about how much you love your newborn (I am not after all immune to sentiment). Perhaps it’s because now that the child is here and real, I’ve realized that a lot of the issues I blogged about while he was in my womb don’t matter as I watch him pull his mouth off my nipple and then stick his lower lip way out, stretch his neck to the heavens like a baby bird, his belly full and his cheeks round and pink and healthy; when I lay him on the changing table and his face becomes a giant, toothless, trusting smile; when he moves his mouth like a happy fish; when he grunts in his sleep like an 80 year-old man with a bad back; when he poops colossally and then the red of his face turns back into flesh and he coos with contentment; when he coos at all; when I lower him gently into his bath, his tiny testicles hanging low, and then he presses his arms into his sides and looks up at me, as if praying that I won’t do anything to alarm him; when I play Who’s That Baby on My Changing Table? and proceed to make sure that it’s really him by way of kissing and raspberrying his feet, knees, belly, fingers, and finally his nose as he smiles and gurgles and would definitely give me a huge hug if he could; when his head clearly takes up more room on my nursing pillow than it did the day before; when he cries for no concrete reason I can detect and leaves me in deep despair.

So I am occupied with other worries now, and many joys—something entirely new to me. But both are more profound than the ones I had while I was pregnant. But his (yep, his) labor and birth run through my mind in one form or another every day. So here is what I remember most.

Pain
From 3:30 a.m. to 10:45 p.m., every contraction was excruciating. The quintessential hypnobirthing text states that labor does not have to be painful, that it is actually not painful, and that the reason it is regarded as painful is because childbirth has been co-opted by the medical industry, and because of mainstream media misrepresentation. I must have internalized both to an extreme degree, because my labor hurt like fucking hell. Contractions were menstrual cramps times 100, and they came on so fast and hard I couldn’t tell how long each one was—they didn’t seem to distinctly separate—until I was at the hospital and a nurse hooked me up to a machine that measured the contractions and told me: 2 to 3 minutes apart, about 60 seconds in duration. This was six hours into it.

After the first two or three hours, when I was at home with the husband, who let me lean on him and moan with each surge, I was able to use the relaxation skills I’d been practicing. But at first it hurt so terribly I couldn’t focus; I was scared to death that this was labor. How could it be? How could it hurt so badly? I thought that was all bullshit! Now, of course, I believe that different women have different levels of pain while in labor, and that detailed stories of labor and this concept should replace generalizations.

By the time I got to the hospital, however, I successfully relaxed through each contraction. But relaxing didn’t make the pain any better. I remember telling the midwife that I thought the pain would subside between contractions—that I didn’t realize the pain would be constant, that I wouldn’t get breaks or breathers.

“Different women have different labors,” she said. “You’re having a hard one.”

“You’re doing great,” she said, a little later, as I sat in the rocking chair and finished a low moan through a 90-second contraction. “You’re the poster child of hypnobirthing right now. You’re doing fantastically.”

This was hours after I’d asked one of the many dozens of wonderful labor and delivery nurses at the hospital for an enema to see if that might help the pain. She gave me one, gently and professionally, and it did not help. It was then when I realized that this was labor. This was my labor. And it hurt like hell, and it was going to continue to hurt like hell.


Amniotic Fluid
My water didn’t break; it ran out of me fairly steadily over about a 2 or 3-hour period, whenever I stood. It splashed on the floor of the labor room, pinkish-clear, from hour 6 to hour 8. It shocked me but I did not express the shock because the shock was not important and the shock did not register as shock. There was fluid making a mess everywhere, but it didn’t really matter.

So far, labor had little to do with a baby. At this point and throughout my pregnancy I saw no end, no indication that a baby would be the result of all this. I’m guessing that pregnancy and labor with a second child cultivates more accurate concepts of the future.

Shaking
My legs and at times my entire body was shaking and
trembling uncontrollably, the shaking so involuntary that I was afraid something was wrong until the midwife said that shaking was a part of labor, a good sign that the contractions are strong. Contractions are strong enough to make you rumble. Contractions are extremely powerful. They could probably move trains.

Disappearance of Shame
During hour 12, I shat. But before I shat, I had not been worrying about the possibility of shitting and when I did, my embarrassment evaporated. I was consumed with my body and what was happening to it, not about what impression my shit might leave on the husband or the midwife or the nurse. I was aware of them, all there, paying such close and strange attention to my nether regions, but it was not important. What was important was finishing this experience. What was important at this point was the end of labor, whatever that meant. I still didn’t think that would happen.

Drugs
“We’re going to have to start talking about Pitocin,” said the midwife around 3pm—hour 11 or 12. “Your contractions aren’t strong enough yet, and you’ve been in labor for a long time. You’re tired. We definitely need to hook you up to an I.V.”

“For what?” I asked.

“Fluids.”

“I don’t want Pitocin,” I said—but not because I was still determined to be drug-free. I had asked for Nubain around hour 11 and had been appreciating its effect: it didn’t make the pain that much less intense, but it provided an hour-long buzz that made it easier to endure.

“I know,” said the midwife. “But we need to start talking about it. We need to get these contractions going, and you’re exhausted.”

Going? Are you fucking kidding me?

“If I need Pitocin,” I said, “then I want an epidural.” You say: Pitocin; I say: Epidural. I think I was lying on the bed at that point; the lights in the labor room were off, and the gray afternoon light made everything calm and steady and even more surreal, like something Dali would never dream of painting.

A baby at the end of all this still did not occur to me. There was no outcome; there was my body and what was happening to it. I suppose you could say I was focused, but since I wasn’t focused on anything specific, I think determined is a better word for my disposition—I was determined to end this experience. With a baby? Not necessarily. I was not thinking about a baby, about any babies at all, especially my own. I didn’t know anything about them anyway.

I did look at the husband as I gripped a counter with both hands to declare the following: “I am never, ever doing this ever again.” He said that was fine; the nurse and the midwife laughed.

“We’ve heard that before,” said the nurse.

“You can’t make those kinds of promises right now,” said the midwife.

Oh, I can, I thought. I most certainly can.

The epidural was administered around 4 or 5, and since I had known it was coming, I stopped practicing hypnobirthing and became a Body Waiting for Pain Relief. The doctor took only about half an hour or so to arrive, but I kept panting and asking where he was.

“Did you call him?”

“Where’s the doctor?”

“What’s taking the doctor so long?”

“Will you call him again?”

“Is the doctor coming?”

“Have you called the doctor?”

“Is the doctor on his way?”

I’m sure I was annoying, although not as annoying as a baby trying to get itself out of your body.

When he did administer the epidural, I laid back on the bed. I still felt the contractions but they had become mild and low—I could get through them just by breathing steadily and closing my eyes. No need to moan anymore, or bend over, or move, or anything. My entire being exhaled with relief.

“You’re finally getting a break,” said the midwife. Then came all the rest—which I had forgotten about. When you get an epidural, you have to get all kinds of other things. A catheter, a fetal monitor, a this, a that, blah blah blah. In a matter of about an hour, the natural childbirth I had wanted became quite unnatural.

But isn’t it natural to want relief for pain under any circumstance? Why is so much of the “natural childbirth” movement so insistent on no drugs at all—and what kind of pressure does this put on women who, considering what they’re about to go through—have enough to consider already? And childbirth is such a culturalized ritual—if mother and child are all right and generally unharmed (an impossible feat anyway—the baby gets harmed and the mother gets harmed—heads are squashed, arms are wrenched, vaginas are too traumatized to urinate), I wonder if anyone can really make declarations on what’s right or wrong, what’s good childbirth practice or bad childbirth practice. Maybe it’s all just a handy forum for righteousness, as so much of parenting seems to be.

At the time, however, I was quite disappointed in myself for taking the drugs. Then the disappointment subsided under all that relief.

Gender?
After writing about it so extensively during pregnancy, I thought about the gender of my baby one time during labor. Right around hour 9, when a contraction had just ended, I said this to the husband:

“I have thought it might be a boy. About a month ago I started wondering.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” He stood facing me, having just finished a hamburger his father had brought for him. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, enormous and round in my gown. The midwife sat in the rocking chair.

“I didn’t want to agree with you.”

Pushing
“Okay, Anna,” said a wonderful, wonderful nurse who I hope will not mind my lips on her feet should I bump into her downtown sometime. “I want you to push like you’re taking the biggest poop of your life!”

“Ready?”

I nodded.

“Go!”

I pushed. With a small, supportive audience in full view of my nethers, I pushed with all the force I could muster. I was aware of their presence but their presence was not important. It was time to get the thing out. I had been drugged, coached, well-steeped in childbirth literature, weathering painful labor for 15 hours, and I’d had Pitocin and the midwife said my contractions were finally strong enough and god damn was I going to push this baby out. At this point, the concept of a baby truly presented itself, but only in the context of its exit from my body. I would finish this. And I knew for certain—just like I knew that my baby was female—that I would push it out in under two hours. It was nearly 6, and this experience—this godawful experience—was going to end by 9. That would be the end of it.

I pushed. And pushed. Despite the paralysis that the epidural enduced, I was on my feet, squatting, holding onto a bar, rolling on my side. I was really out there—100 times more vulnerable than I am right now, as you are reading, but my vulnerability did not matter. I had to end this. And I would. I would push the baby out.

The Caesarian Section
About 4 hours later, after the epidural wore off (its duration was amazingly short and its strength in my opinion amazingly overrated), it was decided that I would have a Caesarian Section. It was decided by the consulting doctor, the midwife, the husband, and myself. I remember looking up at the clock, one of those standard white-faced battery powered clocks that you see in classrooms, and noting both the time (after 9 pm), and then the concern and resignation on the face of the midwife and the doctor (pretty apparent). He had come in and watched me push a few hours before. “I think she can do it,” he said proudly. We all knew by then that the baby was pretty large. I felt everyone’s relief when he said I could do it, and it gave me even more wherewithal.

But I could not do it. I found out two weeks later that the baby was not descending and therefore not rotating in such a way for the head to crown—descension and rotation apparently need to work together to get the baby through the birth canal. At the time, no one explained this. No one said, “The baby is not descending.” Everyone said, “The baby is not coming out,” or “It’s not progressing,” so I assumed I was not strong enough to do it, that I was too tired.

I however did not care: natural childbirth, gender, drugs—none of it mattered. It was not important. The incredible, shocking pain was important; the fact that none of it was moving the baby was important; the fact that this experience had to end was important. A baby? A baby, at the end of all this? Nope. No recognition. I was in tremendous pain again; it shot through me and snapped through my nethers but not out of me, and by the time they wheeled me down the hallway to the operating room (or whatever they call it), I was crazed. I was naked and writhing and hollering and kicking, saying, “Please, please,” to the midwife, who patiently did something I don’t recall, like touch my shoulder or rub my arm.

And as we neared the operating room, I was embarrassed. A janitor standing beneath a vase painting smiled at me as we passed, and I know she was laughing at me, not sympathizing with me—she looked at me with a chiding grin, as if to say, Look at her, she can’t take it. As if she had birthed many children and weathered the pain with a lot more dignity. I did feel humiliated, but I couldn’t stop writhing. Maybe I could have. I feel now like I could have controlled myself, but I if I could have, I would have. Right? And even if I hadn’t been given that knowing look from the janitor, who for all I know is tough as nails—that bitch—I think I would still feel embarrassed. It couldn’t have hurt that bad. Could it?

According to the nurse who led our childbirth class—which I was very disappointed with—Hmong women express no pain during childbirth except for a dot of sweat on their upper lips, and Latinas express pain by screaming “Oy! Oy! Oy!” I was shocked at her racism. I still am. But what I take from those generalizations, and from the childbirth anecdotes of my friends, is that the pain for some women is severe, and the pain for other women is not—for some women, the pain isn’t even pain—it’s great pressure. I think now that levels of pain during childbirth have to do with 1) the body of the woman and 2) the size and position of the baby and all kinds of things I do not understand—but the variables in these two factors alone are probably infinite. The third factor, the one that we unfortunately hear the most about, is the woman’s “pain threshold” (a term I now despise), which is determined by the body of the woman and the size and position of the baby and the way the woman’s culture exercises control over her expression of pain (because culture plays a role in everything we do) and of course her temperament and personality and genetics. But the term “pain threshold” implies that her threshold is hers and hers alone, and that it is not dependent on all these other factors. So I feel like my pain threshold is all about me and my potential and my failure to live up to it. But it is not. I am wrong. I am utterly wrong about this.

And I certainly wasn’t figuring all this out as the anesthesiologist, a nice woman with large glasses, administered the anesthetic, as I lay on the table naked with my arms Velcroed in place, straight out at my sides, exactly as if I were on a cross (I apologize—but the analogy is accurate and it was the first thing I thought of at the time). Finally! Finally! The pain subsided and I for the first time in hours and hours and hours smiled. I smiled up at the lights, through the oxygen mask over my face, and I sighed. I smiled and sighed and felt myself breathe and the muscles around my eyes relaxed completely. They could have removed my spleen. They could have amputated my legs. I was smiling and the pain was for the most part gone and I didn’t care what happened next. It occurred to me that the baby would come now, but I still didn’t know how important this was. It didn’t feel like any sort of end was on its way, and I didn’t care anyway because the pain was gone.

Then there was the husband, standing at my left shoulder. They had sent him away while they prepped me. His eyes were wide open and he looked extremely glad to see me. Then the doctors started doing whatever it was they were doing, which was fine with me. I could have given a shit. I heard them talking to each other—one on the right side of my body and one on the left—and they were laughing about something—a TV show, or the location of a flea market—and one of them told me not to worry about the scar because it would be “below the bikini line,” and their banter and that silly comment (I have never given a flying fuck about scars anywhere, and I don’t wear bikinis) did not matter at all. Nothing really did. Not that there was a baby coming, not that the husband was at my side, looking eagerly over the sheet they suspended above me that hung to my shoulders and blocked my view of my own belly, not that I was about to not be pregnant anymore. I was just there, en abyme, waiting for something that was starting to take shape.

“There’s the head,” said the husband. “They’re pulling it out now.” I smiled. A head. Coming out of my stomach.

“Look! There it is!” said the wonderful nurse who had stayed late to assist in the birth and whose feet would by now be damp with my saliva were I to run into her in a sandwich shop or somewhere.

“Tell your wife what she has,” the nurse said.

The Child
“It’s a boy,” said the husband slowly. He sounded light, airy, marvelously happy, and the joy in his voice made me happy, too. No more pain and a happy husband and the end of the experience. I was ecstatic. Elated.

“It’s a boy,” he said again, and then he walked out of my view, toward the doctors and nurses, to have a look.

I doubt very much that I said what I said next. The husband says I said it, but I think he’s wrong. For one thing, I had an oxygen mask over my face, so I couldn’t have said anything clearly. But maybe it did happen. Who’s to say? Certainly not me.

“What am I supposed to do with a boy?” I asked. And then I heard them all bustling around, happily checking out my new son while I lay there, crucified with wonder.

“Here it is,” said the husband. He brought him over and I saw a glimpse of his face and body, damp and mushy and shiny, slumped into the husband’s arms. In the pictures they took, he’s gazing right up at the husband, calm and quiet, his knees and elbows bent into his little slimy body.

“They’re putting him on the scale,” said the nurse.

“9 pounds,” called a man’s voice, “and 14.8 ounces. 9 pounds, 15 ounces! Wow!”

“Wow!”

“Wow!”

I smiled. I still didn’t feel a thing and I was glad because it seemed as though I had been feeling everything imaginable for not only the last 19 hours but also the last 10 months. I should have been shocked that it was a boy. It was not the Little Pokie, the girl I had been envisioning and worrying about and hoping to spare from that numbness and distance from her own body that characterized me so unfortunately throughout my life. I had given birth to someone else. I had had a boy. My instincts were wrong. Really, really, really wrong.

But none of this occurred to me at that moment: I was in a tired but pleasantly drugged haze, and they wheeled me to recovery and I held Ian (Eye-an; we have doomed the poor child to a life of correcting everyone, as my father keenly pointed out) for the first time, and I don’t remember feeling overjoyed or exhausted. I just remember being fucked-up and foggy and the room being very bright as the husband bathed our son and the midwife spilled the bathwater all over the floor—poor woman; what rotten luck—and Ian lay patiently in my arms. I don’t remember his looking up at me, nor do I remember what his face looked like, except that it was small. His gender didn’t matter; the state of my body didn’t matter. There he was. It was a baby, and it was here, and it wasn’t Barbara Ann, the aunt I never knew, who died when she was only a few days old in 1941 as a result of oxygen depravation because her mother, my grandmother, Dessa B., had a placenta praevia and nobody knew it ahead of time and nobody could do a thing about it. I wonder if this means that Barbara Ann was destined to die—if so, then millions of babies have been destined to die because of all kinds of complications, and millions of mothers have been bereft and despairing and tremendously sad. I think now that there is probably a force in the universe that grows larger with the unpreventable death of every baby, because if anything had kept Ian from being in my life I would be living with a sense of emptiness that would in many ways be insurmountable.

But of course we survive what we think we cannot. That is what females do. We are the most unbreakable, the most resilient creatures in the entire world. This is incontestable.

So this is what I was wrong about: everything. I’ve been wrong about everything for a long, long time. My potential for love, which is greater than I ever knew. The strength of my ability to withstand pain, which is not strong at all. The sex of my child, which I was sure enough about to elaborate on for pages and pages. The pain of labor, which I vastly underestimated. But none of that matters anymore. It doesn’t matter that I was right or wrong, or that the day Ian was born was in many ways horrible. It was the worst day of my life, in fact. It’s nothing I would ever want to go through again.

But I look now at Ian: his big round blue eyes, the splotch of red between his eyebrows, the extremes of his grin, so happy to see me or the husband or his giant plastic key chain. Three months ago I looked at Ian—pooping tar and sleeping in a clear plastic bassinet, his head a strange lopsided lump of soft bone—as I chugged water in my hospital bed and felt the pressure in my feet, bloated and swollen, like hocks of ham. I called them Godzilla feet.

Yes. That was a horrible day. But I now hold my child in my arms, sexless and innocent and shocking. I touch the baby’s skin. Yes. That was a horrible day. Much worse than I thought. I kiss tiny toes and see fingernails webbed to fingertips. A breasty mouth pumping itself into a tiny “O” without a sound. Eyes looking at a ceiling for the first time, neck craning around.

Reality
Horrible. Who cares? Fuck horrible. Lots of things are horrible. Look at a child.

Give a Pregnant Girl a Hand

Yesterday, the husband and I were in Lowe's , nesting, looking at valances (we don't know how to pronounce this word; I suppose you have to start somewhere) to hang atop the rows of beads I had strung to cover our medicine cabinet. Silly projects have become very important.

"When you due, honey, tomorrow?" asked a clerk.

"Today," I said.

"No wonder you're out walking around." She smiled. A warm, heavy woman with round cheeks and her long hair up in a ponytail. "You just keep it up. Think 6:00." She pointed to my belly. "6:00, now," she said to Pokie, who didn't move one inch in response. "6:00."

The nesting festival continued at the fabric store. The husband was looking in Home Decor and I was looking at baskets for our bathroom shelves (god, this sounds so gross).

"When's the baby due?" a clerk asked, wide-shouldered and curious.

"Today," I said.

"No wonder you're walking around," she said. "You look great! Good luck!"

Strangers who know how to talk to a pregnant woman are wonderful: no unwanted advice, no competition. Just jovial, positive support.

This would have been appropriate when I took our cat for his vaccines a few days ago. It was a vaccination clinic and the line was long--about 25 or 30 pet owners with their dogs and cats standing in front of me.

Surely, I thought, someone in the front of the line will offer to let me cut. I'm huge and everyone knows that it will be miserable for me to stand here with a 15 lb cat for the next hour.

No one said a word. No one did a thing. No one made a move. I couldn't believe it.

And--when I was teaching, no student ever offered to carry my shoulder bag thick with books up the stairs for me. Not once.

If you see a hugely pregnant woman, please offer to help her out--not necessarily if she looks as if she needs it, but if it's obvious that it might be appropriate. For god's sake. I can't help but wonder if the twisting of the Women's Movement and the twisting of feminism by the media and by some feminists who think motherhood is by its nature oppressive have something to do with the fact that so few people offered to help me out while I was so pregnant and so clearly tired. Maybe folks in that line at the vet didn't want to give up a space because they'd been waiting so long, or maybe some of them felt like pregnancy was no excuse for getting special treatment.

I freely admit that I used to feel like pregnancy was no excuse for special treatment. Two enormous problems with this world-view are 1) It assumes that women--all of them--use pregnancy as an excuse for laziness when it's perfectly reasonable to use pregnancy not as an excuse for laziness but as a reason for wanting and needing to do less; and 2) It assumes that pregnancy is not a valid cause for special treatment, when pregnancy is most definitely a valid cause for the most special treatment anyone can provide, anywhere. It is a reason for favors and gifts and lavish love and breaks and extra attention and extra money and extra everything.

This declaration doesn't seem like a stretch; it seems, after experiencing pregnancy myself, totally obvious and apparent. Despite media bias toward pregnant women, the fact that the feminist movement to the best of my knowledge has not directly stated such truth is sad indeed. So help us out if you can. Feel free. Feel obligated. Feel damn good about it.

So Many Hoaxes

I am one day past my due date, and the cervix check I received yesterday informed me that I am merely 1 cm dilated. So these cramps I've had over the last month or so have been my body's attempt to convince me that it was preparing for labor.

Ha!

"I'm sorry you're so miserable," said the midwife when I called over the weekend to see if nausea, massive constipation, cramps, fatigue, and a feeling that I might explode in a burst of baby and guts rather than go the usual route of giving birth were conducive to the onset of labor. "All that could be an indication that labor might start. Think of all it as preparing you--once labor does start, you won't care. You'll welcome it."

Labor. I now realize that it's a big hoax--that all women are just cruel, sadistic weirdos for pretending that labor and birth actually happen. How they've pulled this off and how they have their babies (because they clearly do have babies--we see them everywhere), I'm not sure--but at this point mothers everywhere are steadily losing their credibility.

The biggest hoax, though, might be the one I've tried to pull on myself. All my ranting about how whatever weight women gain is fine, and all my anger about the pressure women have to look a certain way when they're pregnant, was obviously lip service, because yesterday, when I saw that I have gained 40 pounds, I went immediately into a strange, teenager sort of trance where I felt fat and ashamed and quite simply grizzly. In my second and early third trimester, I felt cute preg--even superior, I now admit--with all my walking and my giant bulb of a belly. I enjoyed people telling me how small I was. Sure I did. And now I am one of those magazine pictures that you never see anywhere, and I feel somewhat repulsed by myself and my body.

I am supposed to be stronger than all this nonsense. I am 35 years old. I have emerged from years of bulimia, from the gloppy trenches of External Pressures That Co-Opt Your Spirit. But apparently I can bitch about our culture all I want, sometimes even intelligently, but I have clearly not yet cultivated the ability to internalize my own belief systems.

Some feminist I am. What a bummer. And my inability to walk the walk sure does detract from the greater picture, doesn't it? You know, something about a baby being born through me, something about the wonder of the female body. (Weight gain--who the fuck cares? What is wrong with me? Should I meditate?) Something about... you know, having a baby. Becoming a mother.

Oh, that. Right.

My Shelf Needs More Room

When you breastfeed (apparently, anyway--I don't want to seem as if I have some kind of experience with it), you first have to use your nipple to tease the baby's mouth open--and I mean open wide. The lactation specialist called it the Pac-Man. When you see the Pac-Man, you move the baby's mouth right over your whole nipple so that it goes way back into her mouth. From there, you let the baby suckle for as long as it pleases while checking for various signs that the baby is getting or has had a full meal--sounds from the mouth and throat, level of post-feed pleasure-stupor, weight gain.

Breast feeding, in otherwords, is a process by which mothers serve their babies. You essentially wait on and monitor the thing obsessively; what you bring it is your own body. How I feel physically about this offering is largely irrelevant to the baby's needs: Had a 36-hour labor? Feeling more exhausted and sore than you ever imagined possible? Had a C-section and so the pressure of a baby on your stomach is excruciating? No milk coming in? There are solutions to all these problems: drawing on strength and love to overcome exhaustion; lying down to feed; and pumping 24/7.

But how do I feel psychologically about all this? What if I'm damned uncomfortable relating to Pokie in what seems a kind of... um... sexual way? What if I want to have a life and not be exhausted for the next year (the length of time I plan to breast feed)? What if I'm a "liberated woman" who feels conflicted and perhaps already resentful about how much I have to be there for my child? As if I haven't done that already, since February?

First of all, my discomfort with breast feeding because it's... sexual or weird or crosses boundaries women shouldn't have to cross if they don't want to is a bunch of Puritan bullshit that fortunately is getting easier and easier for me to dismiss. My discomfort here comes largely from that paradox that permeates US pop culture: pleasure and disgust with the female body. This paradox is everywhere on TV, in literature, in behavior, in how we think about ourselves. It's not as if I didn't know it was there until I became pregnant, for god's sake--I just didn't connect it to breast-feeding, to physical elements of motherhood, until recently. And breast-feeding--how good and necessary it is for babies, the mature versions of which politicians claim are our most valuable resource--is no competition whatsoever for this paradox. Doing so in public is frowned upon:

• Want to wear sheer, tight clothing that reveal nipples and beautiful breast flesh? Fine. Sexy. If you've got it, flaunt it.
• Want to go to a titty bars? No problem. Bring your cash.
• Need to breast-feed in an airport? Well cover that shit up, would you? That's disgusting. That makes me uncomfortable. Do that in private.

Secondly, my desire to not be a mother-machine has to do with the way the women's movement trickled down to me (and I'm no feminist scholar, so there are certainly a zillion parts of the movement that never reached me at all). I grew up thinking that nurturing a baby detracts from women's independence, individuality, and self-will; that sacrificing to such an extent is not a trait of a true feminist; and that nurturing and caring for children is a form of bondage and imprisonment. I feel now that these are all misconceptions... more accurately, that they are just as grounded in cultural bias as my breast-feeding hang-ups. If I think that caring and sacrificing for a baby detracts from my individuality, then I am overlooking something rather important: my own body and, whether I like this term or not, its obvious childbearing purpose. I can choose to use my body for this purpose or not, of course--but to think that using my body and all of my mental and spiritual resources for what my body is clearly designed to do is a form of self-effacement, a reducing of my social and spiritual power, is absurd. Really, truly absurd.

So the reason I don't value mothering is because men and women in power do not; because the mainstream media does not; and because feminists, until recently, have not (or at least this has been my impression). It's really this simple: I have been duped and morphed by both mainstream and feminist ideology to believe things that are not reflective of reality.

Well god dammit.

I will indeed feel like a non-self, mother-machine for many, many days to come. But I need to place this concept of motherhood where it belongs: on my Manifestations of Cultural Bias shelf, right next to the Notions of Beauty figurine. Seems like the older I get, the more crowded the shelf becomes.

Siblings

The first time I learned about death, I was 5 years old, sitting on the wooden, chain-link swing of the swingset in our backyard, flattening the grass by pushing off lightly with my feet. My brother was the one who told me, and I can't remember how the subject came up. There was something dead that I mentioned or he mentioned--a dog we had cared for that ran away, a spider, a mouse. It was late in the day, and the sun shone just over the tin roof of our old Iowa barn that remained standing throughout my childhood, and my brother, 3 years my senior, flipping a brand new orange yo-yo, turned to me and said that the thing in question--the thing I don't remember now--was dead.

"So what?" I said. "Who cares?"

"You're going to die someday."

"I am not!" The back of our house stood behind him, white and farmy, paint chipping all along the porch railings. I could see my father making supper through glass windows in the kitchen door.

He laughed. "Yes you are, Dumb ass. Everything dies."

"Not us," I said.

"Dad will die someday."

I stood up and felt the swing knock against my back. "I don't believe you." I put my hands on my hips. "When?"

He shrugged. "I don't know."

At that moment, I felt that flat nothingness with which we are all familiar for the first time--a sort of vacant, empty chill that in my head looked like a small square of indefinable space. The chill was the concept of my own mortality and the mortality of my parent--but it was also the knowledge of a big, big question that I knew had no answer. I had figured something out by understanding that there was no figuring to be done. This and the powerlessness it implicated--my own--scared the hell out of me.

I started panicking and my brother started laughing (we never had much of an alliance), and I ran inside to discuss the matter with my father.

"Are you going to die?" I asked him. He was standing at the stove, pan frying pork chops. He pan fried everything. I never saw him grill a thing my entire life.

"No, Love," he said, looking up from the skillet and smiling.

"You never, ever will?"

His face changed and he put his spatula down to face me. He knew now that this was one of those moments where your kid learns something really important without your being there, and you have to figure out what to say.

"I will someday," he said.

"You will?"

He nodded. "Yes."

"Will I?"

He nodded again. "Yes, Love."

"But I don't want to," I said. Total despair. Fear. The knowledge that I couldn't control something--something this mammoth, something this crucial--was terrifying.

"That's not going to be for a long, long time," he said. The pork sizzled. "You don't need to worry about it right now. You won't need to worry about it for years and years and years."

"How many?"

"Seventy," he said. "Eighty."

"That long?"

He nodded. "It's not going to be for a long time. And I'll be here, too."

"Till when?"

"Until you're grown and old."

"Oh." That was a long time. That changed everything. "Okay." I went back outside. My brother was standing there in the middle of the lawn, trying to do an Around-the-World with the yo-yo. I skipped past him toward my swing, calm and happy, my feet light and my head up high, so he could see very well that he hadn't upset me after all.

The Run That Never Was

Last night, I asked the husband to run out and get me some chocolate cake from a local bakery.

"Oh, Anna, no."

"What?"

"I really, really, really don't feel like it."

"Your pregnant wife is asking you to go get her some food." I crossed my arms and muted the TV. "You have no agency here."

The husband looked at his watch. "If you eat it now, you'll be up all night anyway."

"I really want some cake."

"No," he said. "I'm not going. No, no, no."

I unmute the television. "I don't know where you think you get all these rights."

Love

A few days ago, the husband and I were driving down the freeway, headed to Home Depot so I could purchase the appropriate lightbulbs for Pokie's cute little multi-colored floor lamp. I was in the passenger seat, fiddling with the IPOD so the husband wouldn't fiddle with it. (He often does while he drives, and it makes me angry because a) it isn't safe; b) he doesn't stop fiddling when I ask him to and seems to regard my concern as unworthy of action.)

I was flipping through the huband's absurdly lengthy "artists" lists, trying to decide between two albums by John Prine, when he leaned hard on the horn and I jerked my head up to look out the windsheild. We were going about 60.

"Jesus Christ!" An old Honda hatchback in the right lane was about to veer into us. We were in his blind spot. "Mother fucker!" The husband leaned on the horn again. I was holding the IPOD in my left hand and gripping my seat with my right, watching the Honda come within inches of us as we sped further onto the shoulder, toward a huge mass of white oleander that grows high on the freeway median.

Then the Honda responded and pulled back into the right lane. "God dammit!" the husband honked again, furious, and sped up.

"Just let him go," I said. "It's okay." I was still gripping the seat.

"What an asshole."

"Um..." I cleared my throat. "I think I'm going to start crying." I put my hand over my mouth and started to wail. Unborn babies die in car accidents all the time.

"Oh, honey." He reached over and touched my knee. "It's okay. Nothing happened."

"I know," I sobbed.

"Why are you crying?"

I shrugged. "I just need a minute," I said. "Just a minute."

The husband kept rubbing my leg, being soothing (except for, as we drove across the freeway bridge, "You know, you were fiddling with the IPOD, not me." Unfortunately, I was too upset to jerk my leg away and stop speaking to him until he apologized. His timing was impressive.)

By the time we pulled into the parking lot, I had stopped crying but was sniffling in steady spurts. He turned off the ignition and pulled me over to him for a hug. "You know," he said again, "I would never let anything happen to you and the Pokie."

"Oh for god's sake," I said into his shoulder. Macho bullshit. "If something had happened, it wouldn't have been your fault."

"I would never let anything happen to you and the Pokie."

"You can't control everything," I said.

We relaxed the hug and he looked at me, serious as hell. "I would never let anything happen to you and the Pokie."

"All right," I said.

"Nothing happened, did it?"

"No," I said. Sniffle. Tear wipe.

"Well then?"

"Okay, okay," I said. "I got it."

"I love you," he said, kissing my hand.

I sighed. "I love you, too."

Questions

My first of four hospital stays was at age 16, when depression settled into my head without warning and remained there over the course of about a month. I contemplated suicide--just sort of thought loosely about it all the time, not with any particular images or plans attached to the concept. Then, one evening, after arriving home from sledding with my boyfriend, I felt desperate and just about as empty as the bottle of Bartles and James I had just helped polish off, so I slitted my left wrist with a dull paring knife that could barely even break the surface of a hard-boiled egg.

The whole incident (the label of which is "suicidal gesture") was inspired of course by genuine depression but also by after school specials and soap operas: I looked at myself in the mirror that hung over my dresser for quite awhile, sobbed at my reflection, kneeled on my carpet, pleaded with god, and the like. I was very dramatic. I wanted the drama a lot more than I wanted to die; in fact, I did not want the latter at all. I believe now and was sentient then of my desire for freedom from adolescent insecurity that I was incapable of managing--partially because for whatever reason, I could not manage adolescent insecurity; partially because I was indeed depressed; and partially because a key element of all that adolescent insecurity was a compulsive draw to drama of all kinds.

There was no gush or spurt of blood, since the blade was dull, since I didn't try very hard, and since I had slitted the knife in the wrong direction (this I learned later on). A few spots dripped onto my bedspread and as if in a trance (both real and contrived), I watched the drops soak in. Then my mother appeared in my bedroom doorway, up from bed in her flannel nightgown. (I feel no need to describe her expression, as any picture you form is probably accurate.) Any mother would have done what she did: drive her daughter immediately to the emergency room.

The ER doctor admitted me to the hospital for one week--for depression. Not to a psych ward (fortunately, I was never admitted to one of those)--just to a standard ward. I had a room to myself on the fourth floor and watched a lot of TV and walked to the nurses' station for packets of graham crackers and pint-sized milks. The psychiatrist started me on Elavil, and I started feeling better than I had in months and months. When my boyfriend broke up with me (for some reason he became distant), I handled it with wine coolers, cigarettes, and any other substances that I came across--not with suicidal thoughts or impulses. So I suppose progress had been made.

The hospital itself, that first time, was a pretty ok place to me. I was safe up there, cushioned by clean white walls and clean sheets and a thick window that overlooked the roof next door, hospital pjs, soggy grilled cheese sandwiches, and a wonderful TV that was mounted high on the wall for Ease of Viewing While You're Sick, with both cable and a remote control. I actually felt sort of pampered, and I certainly did need to be there. And I knew this. And I was glad--very, very glad--to get some help.

But until about three weeks ago, when I toured the maternity ward where I will be giving birth to the Pokie, I had not comprehended the fact that I would be having my child in a hospital--in a place that generates some rather unpleasant memories. That first stay, as I said, was ok--but my reasons for being there were not. They were not ok at all, and I don't care if they were over 15 damn years ago. Although I imagine you already know this, I am indeed unsettled and conflicted about my adolescence and my past in general--about decisions I made, thoughts I had, and feelings I watched myself act on--and as far as I am concerned, a hospital is no place for my baby to be welcomed.

I am of course working on getting over this, because who cares where I have the Pokie as long as everything goes ok, which it will? And this birth, I should probably keep in mind, is as much about me as it is not about me--this birth is about the Pokie. It's about being there for her and doing the best I can for her; it isn't about answering existential questions that I'll probably be probing in different ways for the rest of my life.

Or maybe I'm wrong about this, too. Maybe labor and birth and meeting the bodies inside our own are about all of that. Maybe they're about everything; maybe they're meant to provide answers to questions about human weakness and emotional lows and great power and the nature of euphoria and the meaning of sorrow. In an ideal situation, the husband through his tears (because he will cry--of this I am certain) will plop the Pokie on my chest, and I at that moment might have all the answers I have ever wanted. Or maybe I'll see them as unimportant. Or maybe the questions will disappear. For awhile.