What Lies Between Us (23 page)

I sit in the quiet of our apartment, on our old faded couch. I reach for my girl with my mind. I explain to her what will happen soon, the right way to turn so that this will be easy for both of us, so that soon I will be holding her. After an hour of sitting in the quiet and speaking to her, I feel her turn, a push and roll inside me, and my good little baby girl has listened, has turned herself upside down. I sit in wonder, my hand on the skin of my belly, which is still moving with the force of her turning. She reminds me of how little we know. How much about ourselves, the animal bodies we inhabit, is unseen and mysterious to us.

*   *   *

Later, reading, with my feet in Daniel's lap, I say, “Oh my god, listen to this. Her cells come into me through the placenta. A few of them. And if my organs are ever damaged in any way, the baby's stem cells can come in and help damage the repair. Can you imagine? Her cells will be in me all my life. They could be in any of my organs, my liver, my heart.”

He kisses my hair, nods. This makes it all worth it, the pain in my joints, the way my stretched hips make me feel like a jointed doll coming apart. All worth it because we together, he and I, are making something new, something safe, a family.

*   *   *

The question of naming rises again. Such a difficult thing to decide, the sounds she will carry with her, the name we will call her, that her lovers will call her, the one that will be spoken at her deathbed when we are long gone. What an awesome responsibility. I can't believe someone is letting us name a child. Then I remember that someone is actually letting us bring a child into existence. She will be our creation and our responsibility. Who let us do this? It's madness. I try to focus on the smaller question of her name. I look over the beautiful illustrated list he's made me, but nothing stands out. I turn to him. “What are we going to call her? She needs a name! We can't have a baby without a name.”

He looks at me over
The New Yorker
and makes a face. “Constance. It's a good old family name.”

“Constance? That's ridiculous. That's like something from the Civil War.”

“You wanted old family names. That's a good old family name from way back in the day. Great-Aunt Constance would be proud.”

“Oh, in that case, if we're doing old family names, I can go all the way back to the village. How about a nice old Sri Lankan name like Iranganihami?”

“No. I like … Petunia-May.”

“Isurusahani.”

“No one can even say whatever you just said. Prudence.”

“Chathurangani.”

“Ezekiel!”

“She's not a boy!”

It goes on like this, us laughing, us terrified. And then one morning as the last shreds of a dream are leaving me, I hear her name whispered into my ear as if someone is standing by my bed. I stretch and smile. “I know what to call her,” I tell Daniel. He gathers me closer in his sleep. I lie there, knowing who is coming to us. Her name will be Bodhi for the ancient sacred tree under which the Buddha was said to have found enlightenment. On the island the tapering leaves of these trees rustle and spin even when there is no wind; they are said to be the abode of deities and gentle spirits. It's a masculine name, and I like this—our girl will have a taproot of steel in her.

He adds to it, Anne. A quiet, settled family name. His mother sends us pictures of various Annes, a line of grandmothers, great-aunts, and cousins. Bodhi Anne then, this is who we are awaiting.

*   *   *

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?

*   *   *

I want to die. It won't matter. If I died, they could cut me up and take out the baby. She would live.

They call in the anesthesiologists for the epidural. I sit on the bed, curve my back into a C-shape, and hold a pillow to my stomach. I stare into Daniel's eyes and try not to think of what they are doing or of the needle so big that they did not show it to us in the birthing classes. I try not to think of the fact that they are going to jam it into my spine.
My spine
. I try not to think about the fact that what they're doing could paralyze me. But I'll do anything to leave my body at this moment. The shot slams through me, an electric bolt so strong my legs jerk out.

I lie back, ignoring the tube entering my spine. How wonderful to be pain free. How miraculous to have that horror lifted. The monitors show that I am contracting wildly. But I have cheated pain. I'm shuddering all over. The nurse says it's my body reacting to the trauma of pain. I fall asleep.

*   *   *

The nurse checks me. I'm finally a ten. It feels like I have to take the most giant shit of my life. The epidural is wearing off. They won't give me another because they say I have to feel the pain to push. I'm terrified of the pain coming back full force. My vagina, my ass, it's all already on fire. I'm on my back with my knees pulled up, Daniel and a nurse holding my numbed legs, another nurse with her hands in me as I'm grunting and crying and pushing as hard as I can.

The epidural makes me disconnected from my body, yet also and at the very same time, I am slammed into it in a way I have never been before. It feels like a war. I don't want to be here. I want to be anywhere else but here. Any battlefield, any war zone would be better. I fall asleep for minutes and then am jolted back to this place. The nurse looks up at me from between my legs. She locks eyes with me, says, “You're not trying hard enough. I want you to
really
try.” What the hell does she think I am doing? She says it louder, almost shouting, “Come on,
harder
, you can do this. Push your baby out.”

Delirious, I remember a friend in high school saying, “Do you want to see me feed my snake?” I remember her dropping in the mouse, the snake unhinging its jaw, the way it swung open unnaturally wide and open and then sucked up the mouse's hindquarters, then its belly, until only its mouse face poked out of the serpent's mouth, a moment before the rodent disappeared into that black abyss. And now my hips are dis-attaching like the snake's jaw, carving an opposite trajectory, from darkness into light. I picture that curve inside me, the long slide that she must travel, and I push specifically into this place. I feel a wave, some specific energy flowing through me. I feel myself opening up; I feel myself tearing open. Everything is getting big. Pressure and expansion. The nurse says, “She's crowning. Reach down and touch your baby's head!” And I do and I'm crying because there she is, her head lodged between my lips. I push and grunt inhuman noises and the nurse tugs and then I open and she slips free from me. I'm crying, high as a kite. Daniel is leaning over me. They put the baby in his hands. He stares at her, his eyes huge, streaming. They put her on me, between my breasts. We watch astounded as she snuggles, moves her head looking for my nipple, smelling for it. When her mouth latches onto it, an electric current runs through my whole body.

*   *   *

She is born with her eyes open. Her gaze is regal and composed, like a queen surveying this strange new land she has come upon. Her head is elongated from the pressure of my pelvic bones, evidence of the journey we have completed together. I stare into those eyes, the strange shimmery surface of them.

I can do anything, go anywhere. I have completed this journey that lay unknown within my body all of my life, the ability to open and bring forth life. This secret knowledge held in my cells until the right moment; it makes me feel suddenly aware of the unseen rhythms of the world. I can sense the curved migrations of whales traveling the oceans, the opening of tiny flowers to minute winged pollinators, the pinecones that open in raging flame—all these unknown events and us too a part of it all.

We sleep and eat. She nurses. Daniel holds me while I hold her and it feels like hibernation or burrowing, like we are a nest of small furry animals—squirrels, perhaps, with our tails wrapped around us for softness and warmth. She lies on my belly. Her small face opens in my hands like a flower. She is fair, almost milky white. Nothing of me in her. She is all his from birth.

Later they will say that I didn't love her, that I had no feelings for her. They are wrong. The first time I saw my daughter, I fell in love with her. I could feel the chemicals running through me. It all worked exactly as it should. I fell in love with her; oxytocin was released in the right amounts. I felt warm and fuzzy. I felt deeply connected. Here was a creature that would love me, despite everything I am. His arms around me, my arms around her. We are perfect; we are beautiful.

 

Eighteen

Motherhood. With her birth a new person is released in me. A person who has nothing to do with the person I was before. I had not known until I crossed into this new land what would be asked from me. What is asked is everything.

*   *   *

In that first devastatingly exhausting week, I fall asleep with the baby in my arms and my mother walks into the room. I think this cannot be. She lives far away. She cannot be here; it is impossible. I try to tell her this. She waves away my words, says, “That is my baby. Give her to me.” I'm crying, but I know she is right. This is not my baby, this is
her
baby. She reaches down to grasp Bodhi. I don't want to give her up. Both of us are tugging on her, so she wakes squalling.

We go to the throne of King Solomon. And he, magnificent, purple-robed, seated on his golden throne, pulls out of its sheath a curved sword. It catches the light. It is sharp enough to cleave the child in two. He will give us each a part to carry away, he says. I am happy. I hold the child out for the sword's swing, and the king stands, comes forth. But my mother cries, “No, let her have the child!”