The truth is I remember only fragments.
***
I remember the bucket Mom got for me to barf in smelled like bleach.
***
I remember crouching on the bedroom, hugging and leaning on a giant rubber ball, saying: “This is the closest thing to Pilates I ever intend to do.”
***
I remember kneeling on the floor with my head on my folded arms on the foot of the bed. Sharing the pillow, nose to nose with me: James. His feet are at the head of the bed, his eyelids and breath are fluttering. The room is dim and there is jazz on the radio: public radio overnight. The midwife’s assistant is sitting in the rocking chair behind me; the old chair creaks.
James snores.
“Hey,” I murmur to him. “Hey.”
“Hurn,” he says. “Yeah?”
“Remember,” I whisper to him, “when we were on our honeymoon? And you feel asleep during sex? How much trouble you were in?”
He smiles and breathes with me through the next contraction.
“This,” I tell him, “would be worse than that.”
He wakes up fully, laughing.
***
Michelle, the midwife, thinks it’s time to go to the hospital. Six centimetres and contractions that bleed one into the next: transition. She says maybe some narcotics? And she promises a Jacuzzi.
It’s dim, just coming on dawn. I remember the yellow and turquoise of the sky. The incredible jolt of the railway tracks. The wheelchair, refused. We load it up with my bag and pillow and blanket.
***
Jacuzzi! Warm water over my hips, which are thus saved from splitting apart.
“No drugs,” I tell James. “Don’t need ’em, don’t want ’em. Remind me I said that.”
Everyone laughs, though I’m not actually kidding.
James keeps ladling water over my belly. He’s been doing that, on and off, for 15 hours.
***
Three more hours in transition. Full dilation comes and goes. When does the pushing part come?
It’s somewhere around here that I say, for the first time, “what’s wrong?”
***
Break the waters, says Michelle. See if we can get this show on the road. So we do. But it doesn’t.
The baby is facing backward.
Another two hours in transition.
We try everything to turn her. Standing, lunging, walking around. They get me hooked up to an IV. A fetal monitor. The baby’s heartbeat drops with every contraction, comes back up. My little warrior, I say to her. My little hero. They reach in and try to turn her by hand.
***
Another hour. The contractions are starting to fall apart. Pitocin, says Michelle, to get them strong again. And an epidural.
I agree. And then I start to cry.
***
Waiting for the anaesthesiologist to show up, I lie on my side and make people lean all their weight on my hip. Exhausted, they take turns. James has to lean his nose right up to mine, to help me breathe.
I remember sobbing when one contraction started: “oh no, oh no.”
***
In agreeing to the epidural I’ve said I can’t cope; I’ve called for help.
Help doesn’t come.
Later I find out the OB hasn’t answered Michelle’s page. We wait and listen to the baby’s heartbeat drop and rise. Finally, and unbeknownst to me, my mom goes out into the hallway to raise some hell.
Two hours later the OB – a different OB, the second they called – turns up. She sweeps in, in fact: a small woman with dyed red-black hair and too much lipstick, wearing a surgical gown backwards like a cape. Oh, shit, I think. It’s Morticia.
But she’s kind. She looks over the charts, talks to Michelle. And she gets the epidural people over right quick.
***
Epidural.
When I was 14 or so, my dad recommended Queen’s Bench Seven to me as light reading for a car trip. It’s about the trial of a doctor who, among other things, gave spinal taps to people in concentration camps. I’ve had a horror of spinal stuff ever since. And a general terror of needles.
And I have never been so glad to see anyone as I was to see the anaesthetist with her huge needles rattling on a tin cart.
But I am frightened and crazy with fatigue and pain. And now I have to hold perfectly still. There’s a nurse who helps me with that, folds me in her big arms and lets me barf on her shoes while they try to get the shunt in, once, twice, five times. She smells like pink Johnson’s baby lotion. She say I’m going to be fine.
***
They promise me I’m going to be able to sleep, and I do. When I wake up it’s dark again, evening. It’s been a full day, now. I keep listening to the baby’s heartbeat, dropping through each contraction. It takes longer and longer to come up. They put me on oxygen, for her, and I try to gulp it down.
***
Hours again. Morticia comes back in. She sits at my feet and reads the charts. Then she gives me the speech I know is coming. This is the last line: “Sweetie, we have to take the baby out through your tummy,” she tells me, and pats my hand.
“Don’t patronize me, lady” I want to snap. “I was a Rhodes scholar.”
But I don’t. And I notice she hasn’t given me a choice.
***
There’s a little two-foot screen, like a ping-pong-ball net, across my neck. I can’t see anything but that, and the looming lens of the operating light. They keep testing the epidural, to see if I’m numb enough to cut me open. "Can you still feel this," they say. "Can you feel this?"
It's a prick and a tug - not painful but not bearable either: a teeth-and-tinfoil feeling. "Yes," I say. "Yes."
There's the strangest stuff running through my head, fragments of things I’ve memorized. "Angel of God my guardian dear." "Hydrogen, helium, lithium, barium." "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes." But only fragments. There are whole anthologies of poetry in my head, but not a single clear poem now.
James is here, suddenly, finally, in a gown and bonnet. There's a stool beside my head and he sits down. "Sweetheart."
"There's the strangest stuff in my head," I say, and tell him about it.
"It's funny," he says. He looks pale and tight, and he's not looking at me. "The things you think."
They are still pricking and tugging but it's distant now. "I think that's better," I tell them. "And maybe the table is tipping?" It's probably not, really. Or not very much. I'm not really going to fall on the floor. I feel seasick. "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes," I tell James.
"I remember," he says. Because once, before we had even thought of kissing, I vowed in his hearing to marry the first man who recited Sonnet 29 for me. Or at least before I had thought of kissing him, because he memorized it, and years later delivered it on one knee. He looks terrible now, charged and tight as a wire, and from this angle I can see right up his nose.
They are still pricking and tugging and it's irritating. It makes it hard to get my nerve up, hard to calm down. When are they going to start, damn it?
James stands up, suddenly - he's like a whole crowd, coming to its feet, a linedrive to left-centre.
"Sir," a medical snaps. "Sir, SIT DOWN."
He sits down. His hand comes up towards his mouth and his eyes get wide. "Oh," he says. "Oh."
And I still don’t understand what’s happening, I’m just watching him. “Oh, he says, again. “I think. It’s – it’s a girl.”
***
I don’t remember if she cried, then. I don’t think she did.
Is she alright, is she alright, I kept saying, and no one answered. “She’s alright,” says James, standing up again.
“Sir,” someone scolds him. “Sit down.”
“You get to be sir,” I say, giddy. “I had to be sweetie.” But he sits down.
The baby finally comes into view; I twist and crane to see her.
There’s a – what, a workstation? Another operating table? Behind my head and a little to one side. She is on it. There are five medicals there, two on each side and my midwife, Michelle, who I love and trust, at the foot of it, handing off instruments. I can’t catch her eye. Then I do and I she doesn’t say anything. She’s working hard, intense.
“Is she alright?” I keep asking. “Is she breathing?”
I can see the smeared swirls of the baby’s hair. One tiny arm is waving above the table. It looks like a bit of kelp in a current.
A bit of kelp. I know instantly that this is one thing I will never forget. Her arm drifting in the air.
It’s a long time before she cries. Mewls, really: tiny and weak.
They must show her to me; I don’t remember. Then they take her away.
***
At some point they move me to recovery and the baby still isn’t there. The nurse doesn’t know where she went. Adrenaline or drugs or something are shaking me from head to wherever it is my body stops. Somewhere just below the heart. The nurse gets a sheet that feels as if it’s just out of the dryer.
All I want is to call my father. But there’s no phone.
***
They wheel the whole bed into neonatal intensive care. The baby is there. She is very still and there are wires stuck to her. But her eyes are open. James gets to edge to the side of the isolet, and touch her, with one finger.
My feet get pins and needles and suddenly I can wiggle my toes.
I remember that better than the baby.
***
Some time in the middle of the night they come to tell me she stopped breathing.
Then a little while later they do that again.
I start to cry and demand that the chaplain – the nurse – Morticia -- someone, anyone, baptize her.
I didn’t think I cared about that.
***
I lay awake along time with bugs all over my skin. They say they don’t have calamine lotion but they do stick Benadryl in my IV. God knows how much. It knocks me right down into sleep.
***
And in the middle of the night again – at 3:00, because I asked – they come in again and turn on the lights. Wake up. Your baby is here.
Oh my gosh. This knocks me out. So much went on that I didn't know about. (Her stopping breathing.) It's terrifying.
BTW, I see a typo at the start. Do you want any proofreading done, or is that all taken care of?
Love, P
Someday, I'll put my memories on paper--fear mostly and an anonymous angel.