Everything Happened | vol. 156
You’re a dream to me
On Christmas night, I couldn’t sleep. I was in my brother-in-law’s basement in DC. The guest bed I was sharing with my husband and son did not accommodate us: a grown man, my thrashing, restless three-year-old, my full-term pregnant belly, and me. The tendons in my abdomen and pelvis were stretched like catgut, my hips ached, and to rise from the bed to pee every ten minutes required a side-plank push-up maneuver that was less and less doable. My throat burned with the acid ghost of the Italian meal we’d had for dinner, despite the Tums I’d been chomping all day. I’d forgotten my maternity pillow at home, not that there was room for it. My book had been left at home, too, so I pulled Stephen King’s On Writing from the little bookshelf otherwise stacked with board books my nephew has outgrown. The bedside lamp was harsh, though, and I have a medical condition called “princess eyes”. I put the book down and switched off the offending lamp. My phone was dead (my phone is always near death, welcome to my bad personality) and the charging cable was not long enough to allow me to use the phone in bed as it charged. It was 1 a.m., then 1:30, then 2. I considered taking a shower but if the sound of the water woke my son it would make my annoying situation more annoying. I lied still in the dark, trying to feel present, but feeling very unpresent instead.
In other words, I was alone with the rolling boil of my thoughts, scored by the infuriating soundtrack of the people I love most in this world breathing soft, content snores. I decided I was going to schedule an induction. I mean, first, I squatted by the outlet and polled my friends on my phone asking for permission, which is a weak thing I do when I want something I don’t think I’m supposed to want. But as usual, in asking permission, the decision was mostly made. In that moment, I felt dropped into a dunk tank of relief. Bullseye. I woke Nick (why am I like this) and told him what I had decided, and he, not coherent, said, “ok, great.” When I brought it up again in the morning, he was meekly supportive and I bullied him to weigh in with more vigor. He reminded me that him having a strong opinion of what I should do with my body is a trap. I acknowledged that yes, if he were even a hair too eager or not eager enough, my eyes would blacken and the lights would flicker and it would be Game Over.
The induction idea was partially a matter of geography and season. The hospital in my tiny town stopped delivering babies several years ago, and local expectant moms now go down the shore and across the Bay Bridge to Annapolis to give birth at the hospital there, a drive of one hour without traffic. Women in rural areas increasingly must travel to give birth, which is harrowing in itself, but we also struggled with who would care for our older child when the time came. Birth is, you might have heard, famously unpredictable and not limited to polite hours. We moved to this rural college town five months ago, so we have not formed many strong social ties. The holiday season added a layer of complication: I was due January 3 and many people we knew in the area would be traveling and could not commit to being on call to take Desi in my final weeks of pregnancy. Our best plan was that we would bring Desi with us to the hospital when the time came, and then my brother-in-law and sister-in-law in DC would drive up to Annapolis and get him from the hospital as soon as they could and he would stay with them for a few days. Then, my mom would drive out from Ohio to help us and get Desi settled back at the house.
I hated this plan, even though the plan was fine. The many moving parts and family members involved felt suffocating. The thought of all the calls and text messages, even though they’d be routed through Nick, and, my god, the driving, made me nauseous. Last time I gave birth, we were less than two miles from the hospital, my parents lived an hour away, there was no older child at home who needed minding. I didn’t even have to tell anyone I was in labor! Weirdly, I didn’t want people to know! Which is probably for the best since I labored for 30 hours! People would have been texting me incessantly! Ugh! And even those two miles we drove to the hospital were an impossible trial, every pothole threatening to extinguish me forever.
Many locals fear giving birth on the bridge and everyone knows someone, or knows someone who knows someone, who had a “bridge baby.” With the extended nature of my last labor, and with this being a winter baby (bridge traffic is negligible outside of rush hour after the summer tourism season ends), my concern was not about having a bridge baby. My fear was more of this flavor: I would last the hour-long drive to Annapolis while my uterus cinched a piano-wire belt around my pelvis at increasingly sadistic intervals, Nick’s brother would collect Desi, and after all that, we wouldn’t make it past triage because of my body’s rude way of laboring. Notably: my contractions spend 2-3 minutes crucifying me without pause, offering wimpy breaks of only 30-45 seconds between them, but without the desired effect of dilating my cervix.
The correct dilation of the cervix is what gets you the golden ticket to a hospital bed, and ideally, an IV of warm, cotton candy narcotics in your arm. It doesn’t really matter to what degree your body is ending you from within, if your cervix isn’t keen to open, the baby doesn’t have an egress. Medical professionals don’t want to invest in you unless your body is showing them it’s a winner. My pain was a pointless, unproductive pain. Loser pain. I was sure I’d get bounced, and Nick and I would have to make a very sad choice: drive back over the bridge and back to our house, or get a hotel room in Annapolis by the hospital and beg my body to cooperate while episodes of “Property Brothers” fleshed out our descent into hell.
The last thing, a significant thing, was a very bleak, very American math equation. Numbers that I ran and reran in my head with each passing day. Nick was not eligible for any parental leave because he hadn’t been employed at the college for a year yet, but his semester didn’t start until after Martin Luther King weekend. If I had the baby on my due date or before it, I’d have a few weeks of him home with us. If my body and the baby conspired to be dicks and go to 42 weeks, we would have a whole one (1) weekend together. I gave birth to Desi the first week of fall semester when Nick was still a graduate student, and Nick was teaching again days after I gave birth. I’m still a little fucked up about it!
There were obvious advantages to induction. My nasty little quest for control: my mom could just drive out in advance and no one would have to move Desi anywhere, Nick and I would have time at home together during those raw first weeks of the baby’s life, and I could have my pain managed early on, rather than after one or two sleepless, soul-reaving days of Hulked-out contractions at home. I could get a civilized full night of sleep before it all went down.
It was not clearcut, though. I feared a tougher recovery, the way my uterus would be chemically tweaked to attack me from within, a cervix being made to give way with medieval balloons. There was also a loss. One of my cornier hangups is the desire I had for my baby to ~pick its own birthday~. Of all the birth interventions we are clucked at to avoid, doesn’t elective induction seem the most hubristic, the most meddlesome in cosmic forces? I was reminded by my mom that my own birth was induced yet my birth date has never felt anything but fully mine. Why would I care that a hospital scheduler had picked my birthday? The induction was a loss but it also gave me a bit of swagger. What if I tried to game things a bit? What if I was a little bit pushy about…..my life?
Two days after Christmas, I saw my OB in the office in my town for my 39 week appointment and I asked for the induction. I was proud of myself for asking. While I am not worried about impressing most people, I desperately want to impress medical professionals. (I did not realize until this moment that this is probably because I am the child of two stoic healthcare workers hmm something cool to chew on later!!) And I knew that an elective induction was not the gold-star pregnant person thing to do. But I still asked! And she said yes, probably because she is a separate person from me, spared from the morality play of my self-talk, fully not giving one shit about the narrative I’d been whipping up about what my choices said about me. Relaxing! Anyone who is not in my head with me is very relaxing.
If my cervix was doing something, she said, I could be favorable for an induction. My cervix was indeed doing a little bit of something! She gave me a membrane sweep (a.k.a. the devil’s fingerbang) and told me she’d have me put on the induction schedule for Monday, December 31. A New Year’s Eve baby! I felt like the luckiest bitch on the Eastern Shore. I called my parents and made a plan. They would arrive by Sunday afternoon. Eat shit, God. Eat shit, my impotent cervix. I’ve got this one.
Sunday night, I still didn’t have hard info about my appointment the next day but I’d been assured by the staff at my OB’s office that Labor & Delivery, like a hot but aloof boyfriend, called you whenever they felt like it on your scheduled day. More enigmatic than I preferred but Nick and I figured we’d head down to Annapolis in the morning alone, and take some time for ourselves among the population density while we waited for the Bat Phone to ring. Maybe we’d treat ourselves to some urban delicacies like, I don’t know, ~Chipotle~? Desi’s preschool had been closed for nearly two weeks at that point, and dragging Nick to a mall Sephora in Annapolis without our three-year-old sounded so soothing. Almost like a date! Or a tropical vacation. Or a very long nap.
I woke up the morning of December 31st and no part of me believed I was having a baby that day. I have never really believed, even as I felt the squirms and shudders inside me, that pregnancy would lead to a real baby. I believe it the way I believe I’m going to die someday. It may be “true” but it’s certainly not real.
I slept late; my parents were downstairs occupying my son, I knew my next decent night of sleep was a question mark. Nick brought me breakfast in bed, something he does even on unspecial days. When I came downstairs, I felt embarrassed and on edge. It was like it was my birthday or the first day of a new job: humiliating. Everyone was smiling too much. Nick and I needed to get out of the house as soon as possible, away from all this attention. Desi was already perseverating on the whole “we’re going to the hospital and you can’t come with us” thing, and there were only so many more times I could firmly but warmly explain before I lost my cool. His little world was about to shatter, and I didn’t want our last interaction before this seismic shift to be a tense one. But also, he was being really, really annoying.
I called Labor & Delivery before we packed up for the car journey, because the whole process was unorthodox and I didn’t trust it. I didn’t want to drive the hour there for no reason and wait around all day like a lovesick teenager hovering by the landline. I’m not sure what I said when I called but the nurse told me with no hesitation that all inductions were on hold. High census, they needed to deliver the babies that were already on their way out. “So maybe not until tonight?” I ventured, freefalling through space and time. “I wouldn’t count on anytime in the next few days,” she said.
“I have never seen a face so despondent,” my dad said to me as I heaved the planet of myself back onto the sofa. I disappeared upstairs to take a rage nap, and to get away from any questions about what did I want for lunch, what would make me feel better, did you want us to take Desi somewhere, do you want to go out by yourself somewhere?? There is so much approval and delegating that has to happen when you are the subject of great pity. I wanted to opt out of all of it. This was what I got for trying to game things, for trying to boss the universe around. I got my parents to drive 500 miles to watch auto-queuing episodes of Octonauts. I got a murkier timeline than if I had just accepted my body’s no-timeline timeline.
It’s hard to remember the rest of the day. I was a way sadder bitch than called for, as someone with a low-risk pregnancy, living parents ready to help, a supportive co-parent, who was poised to deliver a healthy full-term baby. It was dark all day and the rains were monsoon-like. The tree lawn in front of our house was all standing water that seemed to bubble up from below the surface.
My mom suggested I get a pedicure, which means she must have really felt sorry for me. She is not the “treat yourself” type. The strip mall nail place was closing early for the night but they could fit me in. I picked petal pink for my hands and emerald green for my toes. There were only two other customers, and we all watched, or failed to ignore, Steve Harvey’s daytime talk show. He was trying to help a guest on the show pick better men because she always picked non-committal narcissists. He had her go on dates with ten men and try to pick the good guy. She picked the narcissist. He counseled the young women in the audience to lie about their number of sexual partners because men didn’t want you to have more than two.
The other women in the salon chuckled the way you do when you are trying to signal to others that you understand something. I thought of “No Exit” and the purgatories we create for ourselves: the salon, my parents’ visit, my pregnancy. Look at me using my liberal arts education! What a rich mind I have in which to hatefully dwell forever! I thought. The nail tech took pity on my sorrowful hugeness and did not make me come down from the pedicure throne for my manicure. She brought her tools to me and did my nails from a standing position. I was so moved by this that I cried, which she did not acknowledge. Even in hell, there are angels.
My parents returned to their hotel, I had a beer from the selection of Ohio beers my dad had sent for Christmas. I tried to recall the previous New Year’s Eve. Nick reminded me that on December 31, 2017 as midnight struck, we were beside each other in bed, looking at our feeds in silence. We did a repeat of that, not really on purpose, just because what else is there to do? We kissed at midnight, and then we did other things, because what else is there to do?
Desi came into our bed during the night, as he usually does. I had a hazy awareness of his body between Nick’s and mine, breathing his ragged snores into my back. Through the veil of sleep, a thought came together slowly like a dough rising: this pain is making it hard for me to sleep. Then I’d get dropped back into the chocolate until the pain would double up and again the faraway thought: this pain is making it hard for me to sleep. The pain was a sunrise gathering brightness, and eventually it edged me into alertness. Ohh, I thought, now an awake person. It was 5:05 a.m. on New Year’s Day. Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch.
I was trebucheted into full alertness, something that typically takes me an hour and some coffee. My blood was pumping like I had an early flight and had snoozed through two alarms already. The contractions happened to me as I shifted in bed, trying not to wake Desi. I much preferred to labor in pre-dawn stillness, rather than pre-dawn making-toaster-waffles-and-catering-to-TV-demands. It occurred to me that I should time the contractions, but I didn’t have my usual pen and notebook on my nightstand. Didn’t I use an app last time? I downloaded the first thing that came up when I searched, chuckling that my phone was at 11%. Evie, you old so-and-so, just charge your phone sometimes! It’s not that hard!
I half-heartedly timed the contractions. Each time I recorded the completion of one, it felt impossible that another would follow. “False labor” probably, just something to get me all agitated and ultimately let me down. Something to report with great disappointment to Nick when he woke in a few hours. They kept rolling in right on time, though, and I felt impressed by my body and its apparent inner clockwork. I pictured my uterus as the huge gilded clock in the Musee d’Orsay, autonomous and precise. The app dispatched a pop-up modal that said, hey time to go to the hospital. Already? It was 6 a.m. I guess these things weren’t fucking around.
The call to Labor & Delivery. There might have been some theatrical panting despite being between contractions, which is not illegal. Waking Nick. The call to my parents at the hotel. They arrived quickly and I rambled on about some Desi things around the apple wedged in my jaws, hog-roast-style. Everyone was trying to get me to shut up and leave. If I’d paused and considered the moment, I might have gotten emotional. I might have gone up to kiss my sweet sleeping “baby” upstairs, knowing the next time I saw him, my heart would be different. Instead, I was really focused on that talking while not removing the apple from my face.
We drove through flat rural blackness, speeding from one life into a different one. The caved-in farmhouses, garish new-build housing developments, and flaked-off bait-and-tackle billboards were still cloaked in dark. The car radio was set to the college station that we can pick up from Baltimore. “Jane” by Barenaked Ladies played. I let it go a verse before asking Nick, “Is this song called ‘Jane’?” “Yes,” he confirmed. Jane was the name we were 90% decided on if the baby was a girl. It was awfully on-the-nose, so much so that we didn’t need to say anything else. We just let our mental “hmmmmmmmmmmm” expand to fill the car. Listen, if my baby’s sex was going to be foretold by one of the dozens of songs for people named Jane, I would not have personally picked the Barenaked Ladies one?? (Sorry, Canadians.) But you wouldn’t have believed me if I said it was “Sweet Jane” that sang out from the speakers right as we crossed the bridge. That’s not how it works.
When I think of that drive, of that whole day, of meeting my baby!, I hear “Dreams” by the Cranberries. I don’t know if this is because we actually heard this in the car, or if I played it on my phone at the hospital in an opiate haze, or if it’s just my retroactive art-directing of things. It’s one of those love songs glazed with melancholy, secular but accessing the sublime. Daylight was only a line of neon purple humming at the horizon as we crossed the Bay Bridge. The drive to Annapolis while in labor, a thing I had dreaded, turned out not to be much of a thing. I never fear the correct things.
When I got to triage, they checked my cervix and strapped a contraction monitor around my belly. My cervical dilation, as I could have predicted, was not knocking anyone’s socks off. The survivable contractions from the drive down the shore were now searing. There was no comfortable position, even between contractions. What I wanted was to recline fully but the ceiling was a solid panel of fluorescence. I guess I could have had Nick turn the lights off but instead I smothered my face in a pillow. It felt predestined that my contractions would stall out and my cervix would continue to be uncooperative and we were headed for a hotel suite with a Keurig machine and HGTV. I wailed about it into the pillow that was covering my whole head. There are few places in the world that are friendly when you have princess eyes, but hospitals are particularly punishing.
“Your contraction pattern is weird,” the nurse said, after my observation period was over. She meant that they lasted a long time, which I found vindicating. What more did I want but a scientific witness to my suffering? Well, drugs. She asked if my last labor was short or long. I admitted it was long. She asked me to rate my pain on a scale of 1-10. I decided that a 10 was someone jabbing a finger into my bullet wound (??). I said 3-4.
When I used to interview interns at my old job, I had to ask everyone the same canned questions that I didn’t write. One of the wimpier questions had the candidate rate themselves at each Microsoft Office suite program on a scale of 1-5. The men always rated themselves a 5, expert. The women always rated themselves a 3, i.e. “I know Excel!” Here I was rating my pain against some Game of Thrones luridness of which I had no firsthand experience. Being a woman is a real self-con, and I was sure I’d just conned my way into a Holiday Inn Express room.
“I’m going to have you walk.”
I was to walk the unit for an hour, to get things moving. The unit was shaped like a velodrome, as though for this purpose. When the contractions came on, I would start jogging, as though I could run away from them. I hate this I hate this I would repeat as they gripped me, as I tried and failed to outpace them.
“I need something else I can say instead of ‘I hate this.’ A mantra,” I said to Nick. “Something less negative. Something like ‘big blue sky.”
Big blue sky, big blue sky, big blue sky, I tried out as I lapped the nurse’s station again. It was okay.
“How about, ‘Blake. Lively. Arsenio. Haaaalllllll’,” Nick offered. The last syllable worked nicely as a husky, yogic exhale.
Blake Lively. Arsenio Halllllllllllll.
Blake Lively. Arsenio Hallllllllllll.
We walked the unit for an hour. I chanted the names. I never realized how often Nick idly sings to himself until I had to hiss at him to shut up every time he forgot and started singing. When it was time to be monitored again, I was exhausted. From the hour of purposeful walking, the increasingly brutal contractions, the limited sleep I’d had the night before. If I’d known I was going to go into labor the next day, I’d have tucked myself in at 8 p.m. with a book, not had impromptu ungainly sex at one in the morning!!
“Oooh, yeah,” she said, “That got you worked up. You get to stay.”
I was incredulous. All I wanted was to stay, to have the baby, but I’d been afraid to hope.
Once I got admitted, things took a blissful turn for the boring. The narcotics knocked me out so that my contractions were an irritating rumble in my pelvis rather than the beginning and end of my human consciousness. I slipped in and out of sleep. When I came to, I did crossword puzzles on my phone. I kept asking Nick to come over and sit by me, rather than on the sofa across the room. As soon as he would pull up a chair, I’d pass out again.
The midwife on duty came by sometime in the ??? time block after I’d had the epidural but while it was still light outside. She asked about my last birth and if I needed anything. I asked if we could keep the lights off.
The nurse piped up, “Oh, Maria’s a midwife. She could deliver your baby in a cave.”
The lights stayed off.
What can I say about the birth other than that Nick was there, and the nurse, and the midwife, and everyone seemed to think it was possible except for me. It’s not that I didn’t believe in myself, or felt unequipped, or concerned. It was that pushing a complete human out of my person will never feel like a real thing that can happen to me. Every push felt silly, like I was overcommitting to a role in a play.
(“She was kneading you like dough,” Nick would say later.)
“Do you want to feel the head? There’s hair!” Even feeling the gummy softness of my baby’s skull didn’t convince me that I’d grown a baby, carried a baby, that we were moments from holding the baby. It was almost six at night on New Year’s Day.
Finally, a dislodging, an inner clunk, like downshifting in an old car. Nick was crying. Maria caught the baby, whose wails found every corner of the room. It was a howl, not like Desi’s sweet braying at birth. She was a girl. She was on my chest. It was true and it was real. The nurse asked if we had a name.
“I think it’s Jane.”
When I said her name, she let out one purposeful bleat of assent.
yr mate,
Evie
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