Early on in this nine-month journey, I began having war dreams. Terrifying, hard to shake, Technicolor dreams that would invade my contentment, growing more intense with each visit. In the dream there was always a war; that much stayed the same. It was the enemy that varied; either the Germans, or the Japanese, or the Mongols wearing pointed helmets and riding massive black horses. I was always separated from my family—not sure who, other than Steve—and desperately trying to find them, when I’d hear the bombs beginning to fall off in the distance (though how the Mongols had bombs I cannot tell you). At first, the battles were very far away, but with each dream the enemy got closer, until finally I could actually see their faces. I’d be lost, alone and watching their approach, frantically looking for a place to hide.
One night in late October, I dreamed that the battle was on top of me, with the German soldiers so close I could see their uniforms, hear their voices speaking a foreign language. Feeling trapped, I quickly scurried under a bush and held my breath as I watched their boots step up to the shrub while they stood over me talking. And then the unthinkable happened. They caught me, pulled me out of my hiding place, shoved me along the path, then raised their rifles and shot me. I remember thinking, Oh my God, I’m going to die. As I started to fall, the action began to slow, and while moving in slow motion, I thought, Boy, oh boy, this is good. They’re really going to love this. A feeling of accomplishment bubbled up and when I smashed face-first into the dirt, everyone applauded. It was a scene. I’d been acting. It was self-imposed fear and not really happening. I woke not terrified but triumphant, and acting had somehow been a part of it. A feeling of strength, of solidly standing on my own two feet, stayed with me for days, even into the following week.
At two thirty in the morning on November 10, 1969, one week before the baby’s projected due date and four days after my twenty-third birthday, I woke with an unmistakable yank from deep inside, accompanied by a massive cramp in the small of my back. I’d learned about Braxton-Hicks contractions, had grown used to the tight knotted-up feeling of my body rehearsing for its opening night, and with this one sharp tug, I knew rehearsals were over. The show was about to begin.
But if this was opening night, I had no idea how to play my part, didn’t have a clear picture in my head of what my body was going to be doing—or how. Birth training didn’t exist at that time and the only thing I’d learned, wandering around the maternity ward for an hour with the other expectant parents, was where to park, how to sign in, and what to bring. I wanted to be prepared, so I did the only thing I knew to do: I packed and repacked all the items listed on the brochure we had been given, and that was it. It’s not that I wasn’t nervous or curious, but the only book I could find was one written by Dr. Spock, explaining what to do with the baby after he arrived. It supplied zero information about how the little creature was going to get out in the first place.
Steve and I played our parts perfectly. We parked in the right spot, we reported to the proper desk to alert the hospital staff of our arrival, and after that I became a prop in the production. First, I was examined by a young resident who confirmed I was truly in labor, then handed to an intensely friendly nurse who said with a sweet smile, “I have to give you a little enema.” She then proceeded to hang what looked like a Sparkletts water bottle over me, which—to my way of thinking—was not a little enema. After dressing me in a white gown, putting me in a white bed, and covering me with a white sheet, she exited stage left. I went through the various stages of labor alone and clueless, waiting for the periodic visits from either the nurse or—the true star of the show—the doctor. And since I had nothing to guide me but instinct, as the process became more intense, I began rolling from side to side, chanting loudly, putting myself into a hypnotic trance as if I were a Native American preparing to go into battle. I don’t remember seeing Steve after I left him signing papers at the admissions desk, though he may have come in while I was preparing for war.
Finally, my long-lost obstetrician appeared. Jesus, where’d he been? He examined me and determined that my wonderful little bundle—who turned out to weigh eight pounds, four ounces and possessed an enormous head—was facing the wrong way. Not breech, with his feet where his head should be, but with his face turned up and not down. So, without word one, my fatherly doctor reached inside me and flipped the little fellow… over! How was that even possible? And finally, after enduring my first labor experience alone with little comforting and no medication—at least none that I was aware of—I was automatically given a spinal block. Not an epidural, as they use today, but a total block, as if I were having both legs amputated. This was the standard treatment in 1969 before the widespread use of Lamaze or natural childbirth, and before the blessed women’s movement came along to break down the doors, demanding that changes be made to this demoralizing, choiceless way of doing things.
After the sensory signals from the lower half of my body had been disconnected, the pain stopped, my chanting stopped, and all feeling came to an abrupt halt. I was then rolled down a bright hallway, through swinging doors, and found myself looking up at the even brighter operating/delivery room lights. A new nurse, with a mask over her face, took one of my arms, pulled it away from my midsection—where I’d been massaging both mother and child—and strapped it to the table where I’d been transferred. She then repeated the process with the other arm. When my legs were placed into the chrome stirrups, she continued with the lockdown procedure by wrapping the two wide straps waiting there around each of my legs. “We don’t want you to move around or touch yourself,” she cooed. Surely I’d taken a wrong turn and accidentally entered a scene from A Clockwork Orange.
While I lay there, totally numb from the waist down and bolted to the lightly padded table, they casually talked amongst themselves, never to me, and when the doctor nodded to the masked nurse standing at my side, she began pushing hard on my mountain of a stomach. Every time the signal was given, this large woman started shoving with her hands, using all her weight, huffing and puffing as if she were the one giving birth. Suddenly something changed—who knew what, ’cause I couldn’t feel anything. There was a moment of bustle, of masked people changing positions, moving quickly this way and that, until miraculously… there he was. My son. Peter.
The nurse held him at my side so I could lift my head to see his beautiful face—which at that moment looked like a pissed-off Inuit, apropos of my chanting, I assume. I reflexively started to reach for him, but quickly realized I was tied down. For God’s sake, people! Let me touch my baby! “We’re going to clean him up and get him all ready for his new life.” I desperately wanted to reply, Cram it up your ass. Give me my SON!!! But no, I didn’t say any of that. I let my head flop back down on the chrome table and closed my eyes.
Two days later, my breasts had become painfully engorged, either because that’s the way my body works or because I was not allowed to nurse Peter except at four-hour intervals. If he got hungry in between, he was given a bottle containing water. Besides that, he had been kept in the nursery, away from me altogether for the first night, so maybe my body didn’t know what the hell was happening or how on earth to adjust to it. I definitely didn’t know what was happening or how to adjust to it.
I did know that to be released from the hospital, I had to be able to urinate, but the thought of that was not a happy one—although having a tube stuck into my bladder was not a cheerful image either. When I finally did pee, blissfully alone without a smiling nurse standing over me, I thought my insides were falling out until I realized that what was pushing against my episiotomy stitches was not a vital organ, but a piece of surgical sponge that had been left inside me. Oops.
Finally, with my boobs packed in ice and my ass on a pillow, I sat in the back next to the baby’s new car seat while Steve slowly drove us home. From then on and forever after, Peter and I would figure it out together. We would teach each other. What I didn’t understand, he instinctually knew. To this day, that remains the same.