Brooklyn

Birth Story Part 3

| Jade SV

This morning I made muffins for breakfast while B. slept in with the boy. This is not at all our usual arrangement, but B. was up with the babe from 5 till 6, and then I settled him into sleep, and then I was awake and hungry. Also, it is it’s own pleasure to cook alone in a quiet kitchen with the radio playing. We picnicked on the rug with an eye on the boy who was sleeping in. I allowed myself one moment to rue all that sleep I could have been getting. We ate and then, my idea, stripped down to have sex on the rug, super quick, before B.’s work departure. But the boy woke up, and we had to rush the finish, and so my O was skipped over. Again, not at all our usual arrangement. I jumped into bed to scoop the boy, still breathing hard, and even my hand still scented with me, and he immediately latched on and began nursing. Seconds before my husband gasping behind me his hands on my hips and now my son, his mouth on my breast.

My body.

My body gives pleasure and sustenance; my baby wants to be held more than he wants words. And B. and I also often need each other’s touch more than each other’s words. It’s easy to forget that; the boy can subsume all our physical energy until we shrivel and snap at the other. Now that it’s getting chillier I stand under hot showers for a long time.

My water broke in a huge, hollywood gush on a Tuesday evening.  The second B. touched a knife to the frosting of a red velvet cake it burst out of me, soaked my dress, pooled on the chair and ran down our slanted wooden floor. There was not a reason that this night was special, and yet we had both made an effort to treat each other. I had cooked dinner; he had brought cake.

We called our midwife and doula, and they said, go to bed, go to bed, go to bed.

I began to clean. B. shooed me into bed. He read me a few pages from Fellowship and then I suppose we fell asleep because the contraction woke me. It was a tectonic pain. Period cramps the tremors to this deeper than bone shifting.

I didn’t want to wake B. yet. I peed, I think, returned to bed. Could not lie down. Went onto my hands and knees, breathing and rolling forward and back and then B. was awake too.

And it began and it did come in waves and then in between there was stillness. My labor was long and slow; the contractions never gathered into one rush of sensation, not even in the very end, always they were five, six minutes apart. At the fastest it was three or four. Every push was a decision to push. In that way he was moved millimeter by millimeter through me. Finally, my midwife said, “Would you like to feel him?”.  And she guided my hand and there was his head; rock hard and covered with hair. I cried. He was so close. He was in fact going to arrive. But still, it would take hours more to move him out of me.

I threw up a few times.

I did not feel closer to God or the universe or a higher power, as I thought I would. I did not feel that the curtain between life and death had thinned and that I was in the land between. I did not feel closer to the miraculous. I did not transcend my body. It was the opposite. I was only my body. I was held in it, caught in it, could not imagine a land beyond it. I stared at my belly and tried to imagine where he was inside me. Had he left my uterus? Was he in the pelvic tunnel? Where was he? I wanted to know exactly. His heart beat steady and sure. My cervix did exactly what it was supposed to; thinned and softened and opened. He moved and he moved; fractions of millimeters at a time. My uterus squeezed and released. Squeezed and released. Cups with bendy straws were held in front of my face and I obediently sipped and then buckets were held for me to spit up into. I paced and sensed B. trailing behind me. I pressed my forehead against a wall and he pressed into my lower back. We paced some more.

I lay on my side half conscious while the contractions pulsed through me. I dozed through them somehow. A cold washcloth was pressed to my forehead. Someone massaged my foot; my hand. The day began again. I listened to the movies we played with my eyes closed; Blue Crush and The Neverending Story. I heard B. and our doula and our midwife talking; they in their own dance of care for me and care for themselves and care for each other.

“Do you want to go outside? Walk around?”

No!

I gave up on pants. And then underwear. I wore only a shirt. I crouched and bore down and pooped little dark curlicues in front of everyone. I puked and I puked. I sat backwards in a chair while B. or our midwife or our doula pressed into my back. I sat on the toilet and contracted there; peeing and pooping and spitting up. My feet were swollen and I hated the sight of my fat toes beneath the horizon line of my belly.

They put me in a hot shower and I laughed at how good it felt.

I floated in the warm birth tub.

I asked B. to put on Paul Simon’s Graceland which I hadn’t listened to in years and years but with the first notes of the album, I said, “Oh no. Turn it off.”

I tried to open my sphincters by singing.  B. and I were alone upstairs and I relaxed my throat and I don’t sing really ever and we circled the floor and these noises came from me and B. trailed me and I heard that he was crying and I knew he was deeply moved and he said something like, “So beautiful.” He told me later that as we drifted through the rooms, he was listening to these incredible sounds coming from me, nothing ever like them before, and at the same time seeing the objects in our home, most of them given or made by people we loved, and he was overcome by the love and the beauty and the depth of our life.

And the boy’s heartbeat was sure and steady. And my body kept on doing just what it was supposed to. Just very, very slowly.

They call it posterior labor, or back labor, the baby flipped so that its weight, its back doesn’t press into the front of my body but into my back. It’s slower than standard labor and more deliberate. A baby born in this position is called “sunny side up” though I think when he came out he was on his side.

I didn’t feel mythic or beautiful. I was sweat and piss and skin and hair.

I did what they told me to do, when they told me to do it. At least I tried. I believed what they told me. I gave myself completely to their care. I abandoned myself, my baby, to them, and that was the gilded net that held me. This is what kept fear or doubt at bay. I was moving my baby through me. He knew what to do. B. and our doula and our midwife; they knew what to do. My body knew what to do. I knew nothing.

The only conscious decision I made in the whole thing, my only exertion of will came at three in the morning, after what we called “the big sleep” when the midwife went home for awhile and the rest of us slept for about three hours. I went alone to the bathroom and decided that it was time to start pushing. And I squatted and began the long, slow pushing of the babe.

The last morning the game changing visit from the acupuncturist. My energy went up, my contractions came stronger and closer together, the babe in my pelvis; I felt the weight of him there; something to push into. The midwife brought my hand to his head and I cried.

I lay on my back on my bed. B. by one leg, our doula by the other, the midwife next to us on the couch. When a contraction came, I said, “Ok” and B. took one leg, and our doula the other, and then the midwife put her finger just inside me to show me where to push into, and I grabbed my thighs and lifted my head and grunted and pushed and then it was done, and we waited again for the next contraction.

I paced. I crouched. I stared at my belly.

We moved to the couch upstairs and somehow there I could really push. The midwife, “Do you want to see?”

Yes, but mistake! All that pain and just the barest oval of his damp, dark hair. It’s too small a hole, I thought. And, This is going to hurt.

Finally she said, “One more push like that and we’re going down to the tub.”

The push did more than she thought it would.

“Okay, we have to move now.”

To his great frustration, I wouldn’t let B. get in front of me on the stairs because I could not pause. I felt the baby as if his head was already out of my body. B. helped me into the tub and I draped my body over the side. I think I shouted out, “What do I do?”

And she said push, and I did and the pain was everything, mind scrambling, there was nothing to grab on to, there was no thought, it was a flash that lit my brain up and left not a single shadow to duck into. And then there was one more, and my mind skittered like a bead of water on a stove, and again, there was nowhere to go, but then it was done. And they handed him to me. And he was tremendous. Huge and solid and real.

Relief.

Wonder.

A quieter sweetness than I expected.

The rest is the simple miracle of it. The afternoon light in our room with the yellow ceiling. The water in the birth tub turned murky and I felt like I was sitting in the primordial swamp of all creation. My boy my boy my boy. B. beside us. Our boy. The women cared for the babe and for me and after some amount of time B. held him while I showered and there were clean clothes for me, and the women cleaned the rooms and I held the boy and we called my mother, but I can’t remember the words. It was dark then. The bed with fresh sheets and the babe measured and weighed and tended to, and the women left us with kisses and promises of return the next day. The cat re-emerged but she was frightened and had scratched a bare spot into her chin. We went downstairs briefly, to B.’s mother’s apartment to show her the boy. She had waited there through her worry, resisting her urge to knock on the door.

I ate a little chicken and hummus and salad because B. couldn’t handle it if I went any longer without eating but I was not hungry. The house was silent. We lay the boy between us on the bed and stared at him; the adoration that has been repeated for millenia. We eased into sleep. I woke up at dawn and my guys were asleep beside me. Finally I was hungry. I walked up to the kitchen and fried two eggs and ate them with toast and butter and watched the sky lighten outside of the window. I felt scrubbed clean and more awake than I had ever been. And everything was scrubbed clean; brighter and fresher and lighter than any day had ever been. I went back to bed and the next time we woke it was into the first morning to include the boy as, I hope more than anything, will every day for the rest of my time here.

Three months and eight days.

| Jade SV

Next to me are three squares of salted dark chocolate on a small china plate with pink roses that belonged to my great-grandmother, a glass vase of marigolds, Eclipse, the third book in the Twilight series, and my nursing pillow with a slip cover on it decorated with whales. Just a second ago, the record stopped playing Nina Simone’s “I Shall Be Released.” I’m crying. The boy is with B., my mother and my step-father. B. has swooped in to rescue me and has promised me an hour which by now only has 35 minutes left in it. I poured a bath downstairs but I have a feeling if I get into it it will be with the boy as part of his bedtime routine. I want to be eating chocolate and reading Eclipse while in the bath while listening to Nina but here I am.

When my mother called to tell me the boy was crying and I should come meet them and my previously planned hour alone disappeared it was like a gate shutting. But then when I found them and scooped up the boy it was a relief to be close to him again.

It’s been a rough few nights. He’s waking up every two hours for the first time in a while but also I’m having trouble sleeping. I’m not sleeping during his intervals and when I finally am slipping off he wakes to eat. Add to this the cat who’s enjoying some kind of summer revelry and the nights have been constantly interrupted. This leaves me with little patience for B.’s dark flashes of mood, my mother’s earnest emotional conversations, and none for myself. I feel like I’ve just spent this whole day figuring out how to get the boy his rest and now it’s evening and it’s as if I haven’t actually spent time with him, only spent time at him, trying to rock sway bounce him into naps. When I was walking up the stairs for my hour in the house he was in B.’s lap smiling and shouting in his new strange language and I was instantly jealous. Where were our smiles today? Also guilty–have I just been hounding the poor kid all day to eat and sleep and not leaving him any time to just be a baby and coo at the universe?

I carried him and he was a part of me and now he is his own person.

Last week I went to yoga for the first time, a class for both pregnant ladies and post-pregnant ladies. It was my first time back since giving birth and I was completely unprepared for how it would feel to be back in that room. The teacher told the room to put our hands on our bellies and feel our babies there but he was gone, somewhere out on the street with his father, with me watching the door to see if they would appear, needing me, or my milk.

24 minutes until they get home.

I could just move around the world then, with my baby, not alone, but still a complete unit. Now when I am alone, I am not alone, part of me is always with him. Is this endless then? Infinite? To never be whole onto myself again? Dear lord, I think of the trips I went on while dismissing my mother’s worries and I can’t imagine him being gone for those weeks and months. How I might live a daily life while he flings himself around the globe? Or forget the globe, the city. The neighborhood.

The joy and the love are beyond words. And so is the vulnerability.

This is it in terms of entries. There is only one more to come which will be my birth story. Maybe a mistake to write this on such a teary, over-stretched day. I am jagged for sure. Just too tired. As simple as that, but sleeplessness is like cocaine for my emotions. It amps them up, gets them chattering, and then crashes them hard.

I know it’s too soon to come to conclusions and in a month, let alone a year, I’m sure I will know a million things about being a mother that I don’t know yet, but for now, today, this week, it is this…that what I feared was exactly true: I am not alone anymore and it’s not possible to be fully alone ever again.

And it is both the great toll and the great joy of this new life.

Fifteen minutes. And yes, I want more time, and yes, I’m already missing them, B. and the boy. My guys. I’ll kiss B. and kiss the boy on his head and we’ll bathe him and play his music box and get him into pajamas and then I’ll nurse him and then B. will swaddle him and rock into sleep and we will spend a tired hour or so on the couch with my phone on speaker beside me transmitting the quiet buzz of his sleep. Then B. and I will climb into bed and eventually the boy will wake and when I pick him up he’ll press his legs into his bum like a frog’s, one thumb in his mouth, and his eyes won’t even open really as I settle him into me, tummy to tummy, and he will nurse with his eyes closed and one intent fist by his cheek and another hand holding my shirt, and then I will re-swaddle him and rock him back into his bassinet and this will repeat a few times until morning when I will know he is actually awake because when I look sleepily into his bassinet he will look up at me with bright eyes and a big smile. When I was pregnant i used to greet him every morning, but not out loud. I simply thought thoughts at him and that was how we communicated. But he is here now, outside of me, and every morning, every single morning of his life so far, he is happy to see me and happy it’s morning and happy to be in his body. Sure, as he should be, of being loved.

One minute more.

Three months and one day.

| Jade SV

8 AM.

The boy slept last night but I didn’t. Some summer nights this happens. I fell asleep early, while nursing him in my lap on the couch and then dozed with him on me. Eventually B. took him and got him into bed and I thought I would go too but wanted to stay in the wife space of the living room verses the mother space of our bedroom. I lay on the couch under the fan while B. meandered the internet and then he read aloud to us from The Alchemist, which we have both read. This time though the book is causing him some stress and that’s what had him up in the middle of the night. Me, it was the summer heat and the odd chill that comes from too many hours under a fan and also when I fall asleep early and don’t actually get into bed, it’s often like this, a chance for deep sleep that passes and then doesn’t return for many hours. Sleep can be like this for me; a bit jealous, a bit vindictive.

An insomnia night is much more high stakes with a babe but I repeated my old mantra, passed to me from my grandmother, “Even if you can’t sleep, just try to rest.” I tried to rest, though from some weird shifting in my vagina I always feel like I have to pee at night.  I’m trying to remember to do a set of kegels every time I nurse but for some reason I only remember to do this during the barely conscious, middle of the night, sessions.

After an interlude of smiling, wiggling wakefulness (which is his typical morning way) the boy fell back asleep on my chest this morning, while I was standing and swaying on the top of the stoop. While standing there I imagined my father walking up and looking at me from the bottom of the stairs. I smile and put a quieting finger to my lips and then invite him in with a tilt of my head. We climb all the way up because B. is still sleeping and then I ease the boy into the rocker.

“Are you hungry?” I ask my dad. “I can make you some eggs.”

I put on the coffee, and we sit down under the fan.

“Why did you name the boy Rafael?”, he asks. (It was his father’s name first and in my mind he is currently mad at me for using it. I have no idea if this is true or not. I haven’t heard from him though, since the boy, since Rafael, was born.)

“Because that was his name,” I tell him, and it’s the kind of answer my father likes and he smiles.

I got no further in the scene because a garbage truck was coming down the streets and the squeal of the air brakes tends to wake the boy up. I went back inside the house, and then to the bathroom mirror to take a peak at the cuteness of him asleep on me. He was stunning of course, but then I looked at my own face too and held my own gaze. I saw there a tired and beautiful woman.

Two months and three days.

| Jade SV

Oh wow, the house alone for a few minutes. I wish I wasn’t this type of person but I keep on getting annoyed at B. for seeming like he wants to be alone, or for not being totally “present” with me, when actually I think it’s just me who wants to be alone. And the other day with my mother, I got annoyed as soon as she showed up to help with the babe. We hadn’t even had a conversation yet. And there I am holding my baby, two months into diapering and rocking and burping and serenading, into putting my immediate needs second when he needs me to, knowing that she did all this for me and more that I don’t even know about yet and really all I should be saying is “Thank you” and instead I’m annoyed.

I’m not sure I’m a person for constant company. And especially not constant company with constant opinions. Because we all have opinions about what’s best for the boy and we’re trying to be polite about it but we’re all a hundred percent sure we’re right. Thus my delay this morning. I went back to bed with the boy because he made it clear to me he wasn’t interested in skipping our last sleep interval of the night which has been a late (“late” as in after 7:30) cuddle together in bed. He’s very wise because in fact I didn’t really want to skip it either, but I was guessing at B.’s thoughts and thinking that he’d prefer us all to laze about on the couch together. I had started baking something and abandoned it to B. and happily went back to bed with the boy, but then spent the rest of the morning mind-reading and deciding that B. was annoyed that I had gone back to bed and left him with the baking. I do think that sometimes he handles the solitude issue by simply being alone while we’re all together. But I should know by now I’m not as good at intuiting his thoughts as I think I am. Sometimes I read his mind and get pissed at him for what I’m sure is there.

B. got offered a job two days ago. And it’s a good job. But it would have him leaving the cave sooner than we expected, and I’m surprised at how sad I am at the idea of him leaving every morning and coming back nine or ten hours later. He and the boy have their own rhythms and patterns completely independent of me and it’s hard to imagine that surviving a standard work week. We’re so used to fathers not being around as the mothers are around, and I am the source yes, but isn’t it possible that the fathers are as indispensable?

The packaging on every single baby item we were given shows a woman caring for the babe. All the internet articles and advertisements and pieces of advice are geared toward mothers and women. I felt for B. during the pregnancy. Where was his baby shower? The public invasion into the life (and body) of the pregnant woman could be too much for me, but there was nothing for B. He wasn’t advised and complimented and courted. There were no rituals to guide him into fatherhood, to mark the huge transition he was about to go through.

When I was a child and imagined myself as a mother it was as a single mother. It was what I knew. And in the midst of our ten thousandth shared decision I’ve had moments when I wouldn’t mind being the sole decider, but I just can’t believe that parenting was ever meant to be a solo affair. Two adults hardly seems enough. We’re trying to fill our house on the weekends; to bring in our friends and family as often as possible; to pass the babe around. It’s good for him and it’s really good for us.

B. told me that he read this study in which people were shown photos of crying babies. Regardless of the gender of the infant, when the viewer was told that the babe was a boy they saw anger, and when they were told it was a girl, they saw fear. Fear being an emotion we want to comfort and anger being one we want to battle. One relative says to us, “He’ll be an athlete.” I say, “Or maybe a dancer.” “No,” she says, “an athlete.”

How to protect the emotional life of this boy. I know we have to work, but can’t there be some swirling pattern of schedules so that we are both here?

My father was not around. I don’t understand yet what makes it possible for some men, so many men, to miss this, but B. has brought fatherhood into my life in a new, magnificent way. Last night, after I nursed and climbed back into bed, I watched B. do the re-swaddling and rocking. Their swaying silhouette was clearly outlined, the boy in profile with his tiny, rounded nose and B.’s face as he watched, and I could tell that he was exhausted and just waiting for the boy’s eyes to close and stay closed. But he kept standing and kept rocking him. He is often more patient than I am at this. My mother told me that only my father, when he visited, was willing to push me on the swings as long as I wanted to be pushed. I watched B. bend and lower the boy into his bassinet, and saw how he was shifting a blanket over him and it made me feel secure right in the center of my chest, in the bone there that connects the ribs, an actual and literal sensation.  I feel cared for by his love of the boy. It makes me feel safe in this time when I am made piercingly vulnerable by my need to protect and love this tiny new being.

I just can’t help thinking that this too, their time, is an essential thing that needs to be protected.

And that’s it. Time to dress and to go.

Two months and two days.

| Jade SV

The massacre in Charleston has made it hard for me to write. As has the continuation of this campaign; the horror of the burning churches. I have been in the land of milk stains and breasts and this tiny baby boy and sleep and burps, but what do I say about the world that is happening…because though this began as a very private space I can’t help knowing that there are people out there reading. And that has begun to slow me down. It seems too small to write the everyday life I’ve kept on living, but that’s also the truth of it: that I have simply kept on living that life. And there, there’s that thing. That I could forget and remain tucked away from the news. That is a thing; a property of whiteness. To live essentially untouched and know that you are not the target. My sadness can be real but I am not kept up at night by fear for my new son’s survival in this country.

Race often silences me.

I realized the other day that though I know myself as multiracial, my son is not, won’t. That is a thing about the way race moves and pigments shift. Infant faces change of course and who knows what ethnic markings may emerge, but regardless, I do know he will know the unearned and very real privileges of whiteness. As, I suppose, I have.  I thought by the time I had a child I would have figured out my language of racial and ethnic belonging, but I haven’t. I wanted to, but I’m still unsure. I think mostly my whiteness embarrasses me; feels linked to old hurts, old mistakes, things I did, my estrangement from my family of color always feeling like my fault.

Even more embarrassing is that a small, but real part of myself hoped for my child to deliver me from whiteness…to exert the other family genes and give people pause when they saw us all together. This hasn’t happened.

But also, whiteness itself is kind of embarrassing. The way it’s both smugly and naively unaware of itself. The way it just takes and takes and never asks if it should. The way it does not see how it foolish it looks or how little it knows.

The news of the massacre shocked me and then my brain shied away from it. I retreated back into my cave but I’ve done this many times when I didn’t have an infant to care for.  I cried exactly once over it and could have cried longer but swallowed it up and then I went and bought a coffee and walked in the rainy park with the boy and B.

Everything is very comfortable these days. B. not working yet, and making me these glorious plates of food and we walk three blocks and are in a park, and our home is cool and comfortable and I forget to see how weird and gross the class and race dynamics of this neighborhood have become. B.’s whiteness is complicated by his parent’s immigrant views of the world and by having spent much of his childhood in non-white spaces. My whiteness is complicated by my brown father. But the boy? If we continue to live here? If we raise him here, where the only people of color are employees? Where the rich wear charity run t-shirts and listen to NPR and actually say things like, “My dear friend, who happens to be Black/Asian/Latina.”

I am raising a boy who will become a white man.

How to complicate it. I’m not sure. But at least I’m feeling it again; the ache of the murders. At least piercing the veneer of this place. That needs to happen. And now the boy howls, and I have to walk away. In two days the Fourth of July. How to complicate that? That too seems like a thing that needs to happen.