by Liz Phair
I understand that obstetricians see vagina after vagina all day long—and that, as an owner of a vagina herself, my doctor has the ability to differentiate between a person and her parts. Still, I feel like she’s peeking into my deepest, most intimate experiences, as if she can see everything and everyone I’ve ever done with my O’Keeffe iris. My vagina is secretive. It isn’t used to presenting itself on command, without coaxing. Women don’t publicly spread their legs apart in our culture. I’d love to feel sunlight on my pussy. I think it would be great to get a tan down there, lying on a chaise lounge with my knees butterflied, soaking up some vitamin D. But it’s not safe to bring out an unprotected honeypot in this Cenozoic era, given the way men accuse us women of “asking for it” every time our hemlines ride a little high. So my vagina luxuriates in darkness like a blind albino cave salamander that needs constant wetting to keep its skin sleek and pliant. You can’t just sneak up on it or you’ll startle it into retreating even deeper into its grotto.
But, drilling down (yes!), as uncomfortable as the clinical exposure makes me feel, the real cognitive dissonance sets in when she strikes up a conversation with me while expanding my vaginal canal with her speculum. I’m sure I’d talk with my patients, too, if I were in her shoes, to break the ice, forge a bond, distract from the awkwardness of the situation. What she doesn’t realize as she peers into my infinity hole is that I have the distinct sensation that my vagina is looking back at her. Those eight thousand nerve endings in my clitoris are hooked up to some primitive opportunist in my DNA who has survived famine, war, enslavement, childbirth—who has distinct tastes, tactics, and tolerances independent of mine. Normally, my vagina and I work in concert and no one’s the wiser, but when she’s got it isolated, cordoned off from the rest of me, I don’t know what it’s liable to do.
Most of the time, my elegant little piece of baby machinery sleeps between my legs unless stirred by something I read or see, or if Prince Charming comes to awaken it from its enchanted slumber. It does not wish to be inspected or measured. I worry that it has no clue what’s coming down the pipeline soon, what bulbous protuberance it will presently have to accommodate. But when the time comes, I’m confident it will rally better than I. For now, I’ve got it stuffed in a bathing suit, submerged under water, bobbing peacefully. I see the lifeguards over by the pace clock eyeing me with equanimity. Pregnant women are a reassuring sight to almost everybody.
Unbeknownst to me, the chlorine I’m breathing right now will give my child asthma in the future. He will suffer major bouts of constricted-airway disease that will see us rushing to the hospital, sometimes in an ambulance, often in the middle of the night, to treat his insufficient lung capacity. If you want to talk about fear, let’s talk about watching your son progressively lose the ability to breathe right in front of your eyes. The studies that determine a link between postnatal health problems and pool gasses haven’t come out yet, and everyone recommends swimming as one of the best activities for pregnant women to engage in, because it’s low impact and won’t stress their already loose ligaments. But every generation does something unknowingly terrible to its offspring, and this is my contribution to that fine tradition.
I do the backstroke, following the ceiling panels to make sure I’m moving in a straight line. Once I pass beneath the race flags, I take two more strokes and glide into contact with the pool’s edge. I rest with my elbows on the ledge, removing my goggles so I don’t walk out of the club with deep indentations around my eyes. Eventually, I wade over to the ladder and get my foot on the bottom rung. Climbing up out of the water is difficult now that my center of gravity has shifted forward. I stop halfway up, as soon as gravity starts to pull on my unaccustomed weight. I feel my wet fingers start to lose their grip on the aluminum poles. I will die of embarrassment if I fall back into the pool. Luckily, a passing lifeguard sees me struggling and grabs me by the wrist, hoisting me up on the pool deck as if I weigh nothing. I feel petite and feminine again for one glorious minute, until I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the locker-room mirror. Best to avoid mirrors from now on, I think.
That night as I lie in bed listening to my husband snore, feeling my baby kick me in the diaphragm, I ask myself again, How is this all worth it? I worry about what’s going to happen in the delivery room. I’m frightened.
“It’s like wind sprints,” Vivienne says, explaining what contractions feel like. “You just have to push through the pain knowing it will be over in a couple of seconds.” Viv and I were both on the track team in high school. She’s tall and has long legs: a sprinter. I ran cross-country. She has me convinced I can give birth without getting an epidural or taking any pain medication. The baby shouldn’t have a bunch of drugs coursing through its system for its first taste of life, she argues. Viv labored for five and a half hours with her first child, and I believe I can white-knuckle my way through anything that lasts only as long as it takes to fly from New York to Los Angeles.
My labor begins the next morning, after my husband goes to work. It’s the real thing this time, not one of those false alarms I’ve been having over the past several weeks. My water breaks, and I know I’m going to the big show, ready or not. I pace back and forth in the kitchen, the cats following me around. They’re yowling to be let out, but I can’t risk us going to the hospital on short notice and leaving them out in the cold. I call my parents, my doctor, and several friends to tell them I love them, as though we’re living in the nineteenth century and I might not make it home. I’ve opted to take the natural approach, so the nurses tell me to keep track of the intervals between contractions and head to the birthing ward when they’re coming five minutes apart. We live fifteen minutes away from Prentice Women’s Hospital, which is reassuring.
By the time my husband, Jim, arrives, the cramps are really starting to hurt. I didn’t realize my uterus was capable of contracting in all directions at once. My womb seems to be compacted, compressing like a body on a slow descent to the bottom of the ocean, getting crushed incrementally by the increasing water pressure. Jim is lying on the floor next to me, timing my intervals while leafing through the birthing manual for the first time. I’m annoyed, since it’s been sitting on his bedside table for months, but pretty soon I, too, am looking over his shoulder and boning up on the material, because we’re that kind of people; we’re the type who typically cram for an exam.
It’s ten o’clock at night, and I’ve had enough. I’ve been in labor for thirteen hours now, and the contractions are roughly six minutes apart. We pack up my overnight bag and cruise on over to the hospital. This is the last time for a long time that I will feel unmitigated joy. It’s late December, but I roll down the windows and let the cold air wash over me. It’s so much better to go somewhere and do something than to just sit around waiting.
We get checked in to our private room and…sit around, waiting. The nurses come in to examine me, then deliver the bad news. After all this time, I’m still only five centimeters dilated when I need to reach ten. How is that possible? I’ve been in labor for twice as long as Vivienne was, and I’m not even halfway there. What’s wrong with my cervix? Is it too narrow, too small? All my insecurities about my vagina come flooding back, and I feel like I’m twelve years old again, in that stupid doctor’s office, ashamed of being an anomaly.
My vanity would like to jump in here and say that my vagina is perfectly normal, and that this is a story about what society does to wound a woman’s psyche. Okay, no, it’s not a story about that. My vanity just wanted to jump in here. Sorry for the interruption; please go on.
The nurse asks me what I want to do. My doctor hasn’t even left for the hospital yet. She’s aware that I’m in labor, and they’re keeping her informed of my progress. They can start me on an oxytocin drip to speed things up. Or, if I still want to try for a natural birth, I can go home and continue laboring. The first word that jumps out at me is “try.” The second thing that grabs
my attention is the verb “laboring”—as if I’m a workman out in the quarry, swinging a pickaxe in the hot sun; or a prisoner in ankle cuffs and an orange jumpsuit, shuffling along the side of the highway, chained to my fellow inmates as we spike trash and stuff it in garbage bags. Neither sounds fun. This is not going to be a piece of cake, I gather.
Everybody is different, the nurses say, and every expectant mother proceeds at her own pace. Jim supports whatever decision feels right to me. Neither of us wants to admit that we didn’t read this far in the pregnancy handbook. I hesitate, unsteady.
Then I hear Viv’s disembodied voice in the back of my head, cheering me on like she always did at school, challenging me to be the best version of myself. You can do this, she shouts from an imaginary running track. You’re almost there! Don’t quit!
“I want to try to do it naturally,” I say, almost convincingly.
“Okay.” The older nurse nods, her face a practiced mixture of neutrality and pragmatism. “Just give us a call when you’re ready to come back, or if you have any questions.” In retrospect, I should have found it ominous that they were willing to let me go in the first place. They were certainly not worried that I was going to deliver anytime soon.
Back at home, the contractions intensify in strength but not in frequency. I stand in the shower eating spoonful after spoonful of bland oatmeal as the warm water sluices over me, pausing to press my face up to the cool marble every time another cramp debilitates me. This is ridiculous, I think. How is this worth it? Do I really need to be some kind of hippie hero? To forgo modern medical advances to prove a point? Is this all about competing with my friends? What is so wrong with inducing dilation or taking pain medication, anyway? It must be safe, or nobody would use it. Just then, a particularly vicious contraction brings me to my knees. I call out to my husband. “Jiiiiiiiiiiiim!”
We’re back in our birthing suite at the hospital. I’ve done an about-face and am now hopping around the room demanding that an anesthesiologist stick an eight-inch-long needle in my spine before one more contraction hits. That’s what it’s come down to—I don’t want to feel anything after this. Nothing. Nada. I want to be knocked out cold, and to wake up like the Virgin Mary with a halo, a suite of lambs at my feet, and a swaddled cherub in my arms. My husband watches all this without being able to do anything to help me. He trusts the doctors, as I do, but his tension has no avenue of release.
Once the drugs hit and I’m pacified, they decide to wait on administering the oxytocin. They want to give me a little more time to dilate on my own. They tell us to rest, to try to get some sleep. It’s going to be a long night. Jim settles into a chair, and I’m tucked up in bed, just drifting off, when the door opens and my parents sweep in. They are coming from a black-tie function at the Fortnightly, a club on Bellevue Place a couple of blocks away.
I open my heavy-lidded eyes to the vision of my father in his tuxedo and my mother in a floor-length fur coat—“the Beave,” as my brother and I jokingly refer to it when she wafts around the house in it on cold winter days. Underneath, she has on a green taffeta dress with a big black velvet bow at the waist. She talks and laughs with my husband while my father teases the nurses. He’s head of infectious diseases in another department at the hospital, and everybody knows and loves him here. The two of them present a surreal contrast to me in my thin cotton dressing gown, hair disheveled, barely able to put two words together. I feel like the Christmas goose looking out at all the colorful decorations and the happy people around the table, almost but not quite able to forget that they’re about to carve it up and serve it.
Almost as quickly as they came in, my parents are gone again in a flurry of air kisses and well-wishing, off to the Drake Hotel to spend the night. My doctor is here. She’s told them it will still be quite some time before the main event. Watching my ob-gyn roll up her sleeves and feel around in the blood and muck is not really their thing. They’re very excited, though, and a lot of people at the hospital are excited for them. “Dr. Phair’s having his baby!” “Oh, is it time? That’s wonderful!”
I wake up in the morning to see that flowers have arrived. I’m still not dilated, but at least I’m not in any pain. The fetal heart monitor says our baby is strong, and tolerating the mild but sustained contractions well. At this point, it’s just a waiting game. I’m twenty-four hours into my labor. We have breakfast. Mom and Dad visit again, this time without their superhero costumes. I hear women in other rooms screaming and swearing as they battle through to the end. Nothing much is happening over here. We’re just kind of chilling, doing the crossword. Jim calls out the clues and the rest of us chip in with guesses.
One woman lets out a particularly bloodcurdling shriek, and we all pause for a moment to let her anguish pass through and out of the ward. Is that what’s going to happen to me? Is that where this is all leading? I think about the pain I was in yesterday, and my anxiety level shoots through the roof. How is this all worth it? I envy my family. They get to sit around and watch, while I’m the one who has to go through the actual barbarity. When my doctor comes in next, I ask her if it’s too late to get a cesarian. I don’t really want one; I just need the psychological out. She’s seen it all before: the bargaining, the panic, the attempts to control the situation.
She reads the fetal heart monitor and frowns. “I don’t love the look of this. The heartbeat is getting a bit faint. I’m going to start the oxytocin. Let’s get him out of there.”
Now I’m focused like a laser beam on the ticker tape slowly emerging from the EKG. Something finally clicks, and my maternal instincts take over. Up until now I’ve been somewhat passive, letting the staff do their thing. But now I’m starting active labor, and I am not fucking around. The thought of something bad happening to my child—of this nine-month-long labor of love turning tragic so close to completion—galvanizes me. If I have to reach down there and pull him out by the umbilical cord with my bare hands, I will. I’m his mother, and nothing is going to hurt my child. Even my own body.
Even so, it takes six more hours before we reach complete effacement and dilation. People come and go. The day is a blur as they continually tweak the dosage, fine-tuning it, keeping the balance between too much drug and not enough heartbeat. My womb is holding on to this kid, almost as tightly as I will hug him before he goes off to college. At some crucial point, my doctor has had enough. This isn’t worth it, she thinks. I’m close to ready, and my child can’t wait. The sun is setting on the second day. We are thirty hours into my laboring. Surprise, surprise: The word fits.
What happens next shocks the hell out of all of us. My private room, which has been a simple bed-chairs-and-bathroom affair, suddenly transforms into a full-on operating stage. Doctors, nurses and a resident or two rush in—more people than I can keep track of, an alarming testament to the urgency of the situation. Huge lights and oxygen tanks and other industrial equipment descend from the ceiling. All manner of frightening medieval tools are laid out on cloth-covered trays. My parents are ushered out into the hallway. Only my husband remains, backed into the corner so the professionals have room to maneuver. Stirrups come up out of the footboard of my bed. This entire metamorphosis takes no more than two minutes, from start to finish.
I’m lost in the center of a storm. I am in the eye: dumbfounded, blinking, watching, as my vagina is the focus of every single person in the room. Not even narcotics have enough power to deaden the force of this blow. I am actually aware of the breezes blowing across my genitalia every time someone moves abruptly or spins around to grab another implement of torture. I, me, Elizabeth, the person I identify as, is helplessly sidelined, playing second fiddle, understudy to my own pussy. There she goes, I think, that brave and heroic objet d’amour, ready to give her life for this difficult extraction. You will never be the same, I tell my vagina telepathically, but I will love you forever if you help me right now.
A young
man comes in and parks himself on a stool to my right. He’s the person they’ve all been waiting for. He’s the anesthesiologist. This isn’t true, obviously, but in my memory I see him dialing knobs and flicking switches on a wall of audio-interface gear: preamps, compressors, DI boxes, all the filters you use in a recording studio. It must be the epidural cocktail making me hallucinate, or just the fact that I’m so scared, and I have to imagine a familiar setting to reassure myself. He’s talkative and good-looking, the rock star of this extravaganza, and he knows it. I can tell he has the run of the hospital, is in universal demand.
I’m torn between keeping up with his comments about my career and his love of music and looking down at what the rest of the team is doing between my legs. For a while, at least, the doctors and nurses need me to pay attention to them.
“Okay, now pushhhhhh.” I push. You better believe I push. But as soon as I feel that sharp twinge of pain, I back off, remembering that horrible wailing from the women in the other rooms. I’m worried about how thin the membrane is between my vagina and my anus. I’m afraid.
“Dan, can you give her a topper?” My doctor for the win, ever alert to the microfluctuations of my emotion.
The anesthesiologist twists the narco-drip dial, bumping up my buzz a smidge. It is a game changer. A flood of serotonin warms my body, and I feel all warm and fuzzy. I push when they tell me to push.
