Born Again

Born Again

                The room stinks like sweaty latex gloves—my hair mattes in clumps around my face.  I can taste the sweat trickling down the creases of my lips into my mouth.  If I close my eyes, my body is ripping from limb to limb.  I can’t stand the pressure.  I want to explode.  My daughter keeps fighting to get out of me.  I hear sounds in bursts around me.  Dr. Stoopack is saying vacuum; the nurse is saying stat.  Someone is yelling—don’t suck my baby out.  My mom leans over me.  She strokes my forehead.  Her hair keeps brushing over my face.  It helps.

         Maggie is facing the wrong way.  Maybe she’s thinking about seeing the stars.  Maggie is stuck under my pelvic bone—nine centimeters for an hour equals torture.  Torture is screwing up and taking home some stranger for rebound sex; torture is living for months at grandma’s house while receiving hostile phone calls from dad number one; torture is trying to remember dad number two but failing; torture is making someone you love cry.

         He left.  He left minutes before the finale.  He thought the baby would come out black, but that’s another story.  Instead I redirect—how can I make this right?  How can I make myself right?  These questions torture me.  I will devote the next several years of my life trying to make him forgive me for sleeping with the neighbor.  He was black, the part that sent him over the edge I think, but that’s his story.  This was before the rebound sex.

         Torture is withstanding public humiliation.  Before I even know I’m pregnant, we start a rigorous cycle of on-again, off-again.  In fact, Maggie is engendered during an earth shaking session of make-up sex.  I know he’s the father.  I felt life, the warmth that travels up your belly; anchor itself inside me that night.  I could not expect him to believe me, but I planned to beat the truth out of both of us.  Mostly I let him beat me, not physically, but emotionally.  I walked around imagining I was tied to some metaphorical torture table, constantly turning around in circles, while life threw rotten eggs at me.

         The vacuum wheels in on a silver table.  There is a team of activity around me.  I hear muffled sounds expanding and contracting in my ears.  I hear: open her legs, on the count of three, and—turn.  Maggie gets turned around, her hope of seeing the stars thwarted.  Now I have to work.  I have to push, but I have no strength left.  I can’t feel anything from the waist down.  The doctors had decided forty five minutes into the nine centimeter ordeal to inject me on the spine.  This procedure made him throw up in the bathroom.  It made me dig my nails into his shoulders.

         So I push four times.  Pressure, all I know is pressure—sweat and pressure.  I think I screamed into the ceiling.  I am answered by my daughter’s crying.  At first, I really don’t want to hold her.  I am scared.  The nurses carry her over to the little plastic see-through crib and clean her up, but I can see her little head trying to turn towards me.  I am talking to her from my bed.  The doctor sees our exchange and walks over to the crib.  He picks her up by placing her butt in the palm of his hand and his other around the back of her neck.  He holds her up and in baby talk sing-songs, “Do you want to see your mommy, look there’s your mommy.”  I don’t know what kind of mommy I will be.  I am worried.  Dr. Stoopack brings Maggie to me.  I hold her and let her suckle my breast.  A pact is made between us then.  I know this.  I’ll give my life for you.

         Maggie and I cuddle in a bubble.  I can see things outside our bubble, but they are secondary now.  When I see Dr. Stoopack parading around the room with Maggie’s severed umbilical cord raised above his head, I have to tune in for a moment.  Maggie continues to suckle.  Dr. Stoopack says to the nurse, “this is the biggest cord I’ve ever seen, Betty, take a look at this.”  He turns towards me, “You are one good baby haven.”  He sends the nurse away to freeze Maggie’s cord and starts kneading my abdomen, “Let’s see what else you got in there.”

         I go back to my bubble only to be ripped out again by Dr. Stoopack’s exclamations.  “Holy, look at this, it’s beautiful!”  He is looking straight between my legs, so I have to wonder what he is referring to.  I get an urge to say thank you.  It turns out he is talking about my placenta.  I feel pressure again.  He asks, “Do you want to see your placenta?”  I decline.  He walks around the room showing the nurses, and to my horror, my mother, aunt, and brother.  Once the placenta has made its rounds, I am stitched up, and left alone in a new room to contemplate my daughter.  I gave birth to Maggie on June 4th 2001.  I gave birth to myself on June 4th 2001. My own mother did not recognize me.