*
My date is close, March 15. She will be a water baby, born under the sign of twin fishes swimming tail to head. I am ready. I want my body returned to me, and I want my baby. It’s been an easy pregnancy. I’m scared, of course. What woman close to labor thinks about what is coming and is not frightened? But I am ready. More than anything I want to avoid an emergency cesarean. I know what they look like. I don’t want to be that woman who is wheeled off after hours of pushing and propped up behind the blue screen. I don’t want layers of me cut into, organs removed, placed into a bucket by the bed, my uterus lifted up, my baby popped out like a man poking his head through the neck of a sweater. Women are not supposed to feel it, but a part of them always remembers that muscular tugging and wrenching of their deepest beings.
*
I’ve thought about getting a home birth with a midwife. I mentioned it to my doctor, and she shrugged and said, “You can do it, but if something happens to your baby you’ll never forgive yourself.” And this specter of something happening to the baby is too frightening to overcome. Daniel says, “No way. I want you in a hospital with a doctor and a medical team.”
I know what the word midwife is conjuring up for him. A greasy-haired witch with dirty fingers and bad teeth, boiling water while I scream. We burned women in the early days of this country. Women who had too much knowledge of herbs and plants and who knew how to deliver babies. Those early witches, they were midwives, setting up competition for the new science of medicine. So they were burned and their knowledge was lost, and since then there has been this drive into the hospitals. A gleaming, sterile place to have a baby. A place where any risk can be managed and altered with the knife, with the drugs.
The most experienced midwives know how to deliver babies without knives, without drugs, but I am too scared to challenge the wisdom of modernity and science. I’ll have my baby in the hospital.
*
March 15 comes and goes. My bag is packed. At every twinge, Daniel looks at me with alarmed eyes. My body is huge, the baby moving all the time. I feel like a whale holding an ocean in its abdomen.
I am awakened by a movement, like a menstrual cramp but much sharper. I lie in the dark; he’s asleep next to me. Another hard twisting inside me, and I gasp aloud.
He’s instantly awake. “What’s happened? Are you starting?”
I say, “I think so.”
There are hours of walking and waiting. Holding his arm, I pace; the pain arrives and recedes. We walk around the block. I stop, have to lean on him, gasp and shudder. We go home and I bounce on the exercise ball. I won’t go to the hospital too early just to be turned away. The magic 3-1-1. It’s on our fridge door. Pains three minutes apart lasting one minute each for an hour, this is what we are waiting for. The pain mounts. I want to walk away from my body, leave it like a shroud fallen on the floor behind me. I realize this is not possible and am terrified.
It takes twelve hours. Then the worst car ride I have ever taken in my life. It’s a ten-minute ride, but it feels like hours. At the hospital we are checked in. Contractions are coming like a knife stabbing from the inside. I lean on him. He grips my hand. When the pains come, he looks into my eyes and counts while I breathe. It calms me down a little bit.
The nurse checks me. She puts her hand inside of me and sees how many centimeters my cervix is dilated. She says, “You’re a seven. That’s great. Keep working, mama.” I have become my cervix, this number more important than any other now. She pulls her gloved hand out; it’s covered in my blood and mucus. I turn my head and sob.
I can’t do this. I don’t want to do this. I’m so scared. I’ve been ripped away from my life, my normal life. Everything is pain, a kind of pain I cannot describe. Our cozy apartment feels a million miles away. Instead I have been dropped into some nightmare. The curtain has been pulled back and I see what we really are, glorified beasts that deal in blood and sweat. I try to remember that I’m a nurse. Bodily secretions are not frightening to me, but it’s different when you are the body on the table. It’s different when you are not the one in control. I refuse the epidural, of course. I know the right way to have a baby. No matter what, it is important to say no to the epidural. And through the raging pain I think, this is the way the species is perpetuated, what the fuck?
*