by Bobi Conn
I should have known it was a bad sign when Jacob accused me of being selfish like his mother in the first few months of dating. He hated that they had raised him next to a golf course and had shoved a golf club into his hands. They were materialistic, especially his mom, and he was determined not to be. When we officially lived together—when I moved into the house he bought—we disagreed over money, but I lost all those arguments since his money was not mine to spend, and the little I received for school needed to go toward our family.
We visited some of Jacob’s friends in Tennessee, who ran a specialized greenhouse and nursery, and he later told me they lived on five thousand dollars a year, and he wanted to get to that point. I grew up so poor, I told him, panic rising inside me. I don’t want to be poor again—I want a better life. But Jacob said he knew what it was like to be poor, too. He had lived on fifty dollars a month and had lived under bridges with the young girlfriend.
Who bought you that truck? I asked.
He had bought it himself with money from selling his car.
Who bought you the car?
His parents.
And where did you get that fifty dollars a month?
His parents.
Where did you go when you didn’t want to live under a bridge anymore?
To his parents.
I tried to explain that being poor means there is no car to sell, no certainty in any income. And most of all, there is nowhere to go when things get too hard or you get too tired. There is no one to call, no saving grace. Just the fear of losing your children or your home, the fear of freezing or starving. Dignity is far from important, and in the throes of poverty, the need to survive outweighs all else except the need to forget your misery.
Over the next few months, doubts about motherhood crept into my mind without rest. Morning sickness had kicked in a couple of days after the pregnancy test, immediately after I drank a shot of wheatgrass juice and walked around the health-food store, dazed, for hours. I researched herbs and home birth and read everything I could find about women’s bodies, unborn babies, vitamins, and breastfeeding. In the back of my mind, though, was the thought that I did not have to have the baby, that maybe I wasn’t ready after all. I wondered how my body would change, whether I would be big forever afterward, when I was used to being small. I wondered whether my breasts would sag, whether I would suddenly look like mothers appeared to me, with their unflattering clothes and tired bodies.
One morning, Jacob sat up in bed and turned to me as I awoke. He said the spirits had told him that I had to decide whether I wanted the baby or not, that if I did not decide, the baby was not going to come.
I know, I said. I thought about it all day. I thought about it while swinging in my hammock chair, in the hot, damp air of that summer. I thought about it while reading. I thought about the alternative, and that scared me more than the thought of giving up all the control I had over my body at that time. I decided to brave the stretch marks, to brave gravity, and to brave the great breaking open I knew would happen when the baby finally came. And I said, Yes, I choose this baby, I want this baby, please let him come, though I knew I did not know what that meant.
After that, I was certain I would have a son with blond hair and blue eyes. I picked out a boy name, and as soon as I saw it, I knew the meaning was for him. His father came to agree, and although we gave a girl’s name a little thought, I did not want a daughter, and I secretly prayed I would not have one. I was not ready, I thought, to have a girl—I was not ready to love a girl, not sure what that meant. I felt like I could take care of a boy, having spent so much of my life trying to earn my father’s love and trying to protect my brother. I knew I could serve my son in a way that I could not serve a daughter.
Throughout my pregnancy, I gained seventeen pounds, though technically I probably lost some muscle weight and gained weight in fat, so the baby had more to work with than what it seemed. On a bright and cold February day, eight days after the estimated due date, I was awoken by a sharp contraction at about six in the morning. I told Jacob, and he encouraged me to go back to sleep. I woke up again around nine and had contractions steadily throughout the day. It was the first stage of labor, all very bearable and somewhat pleasant. I called my mother and told her my labor had started, and she tried to convince me one last time to go to a hospital, but I dismissed her concern. She was afraid, she said, for me to experience so much pain and not have any relief from it.
I wasn’t afraid, because I didn’t think any physical pain could rival the emotional pain I had known to that point.
Natural childbirth would mark my first memorable experience with physical pain, and it would surely establish a new reference point that I would use from then on.
My midwife showed up that evening, when the contractions were no longer somewhat pleasant. She brought an assistant with her, who was the same woman she had apprenticed under and who had attended over six hundred births. That woman had retired, but my midwife asked her for this favor, knowing we were an hour’s drive from a hospital and no ambulance could reach us.
By eleven o’clock that night, it was clear the baby was nowhere near ready to make his entrance. My midwife had me take a bath to try to relax and ease the contractions. When that didn’t work, she had me drink half of a home-brewed beer, again hoping it would slow the contractions and allow me to sleep for a little while that evening.
Everyone else went to sleep—the midwives and my friends who came to help found places to sleep downstairs near the woodstove, and the father of my child in our bed in the loft. One friend was a massage therapist, the other a student and friend of mine who majored in art and photography and would photograph the birth. I sat in a rocking chair next to an enormous window in the loft and rocked silently through my contractions all night. I labored in the dreamland of maternal solitude. I did not count contractions or minutes or anything else, and we did not have a clock to watch anyway. There were no lights on anywhere, inside or out, and no noises except the occasional creak of wood beneath me, the sound of someone moving in their sleep next to me, worlds away. In the darkness, I watched the moon travel in its arc over the sky as my child and body worked together toward a new life for us both. When the sun rose, I decided it was time to vocalize my suffering.
I let myself moan with each contraction throughout the morning. I wanted to be left alone in the ocean of pain that kept pulling me further away from the world.
My midwife checked me around noon and found I was ready, though my water had not broken. I asked her to rupture the membranes artificially—to break the caul that surrounded my unborn son and that held him in blissful suspension, in sublime safety. She did, using a tool that looked like a crochet needle, but to my surprise, it did not hurt. After that, things got interesting.
My irritation with the people around me was completely obliterated. I had felt distracted when I heard their talking downstairs, and though I wanted to be comforted, I did not want to have to speak or hear any voices. After the water poured out of me, I entered a new world, the kind of world that sets your body and your mind adrift and shows you why the Crucifixion of Christ is also called the Passion. My midwife reached inside me to push my bones apart and allow my son’s head to descend. The indentations we all have in our lower backs—the two dimples that sit several inches apart—mark the width of the ischial spines, where yet-unborn heads must first arrive before coming to the light of day. My ischial spines, it turns out, were quite narrow, and though we did not know it yet, my son’s head was relatively large.
If I had bellowed through my contractions as the sun rose, I could only scream when my bones were forced outward. The midwife was gentle, careful, respectful—but the goal was to move something farther than it wished to move, and resistance like that, of course, is a force to be reckoned with.
When my son’s head was finally visible, it was a small, wrinkled bit that my midwife encouraged me to view with a mirror. I found it alarming, though, and failed to
see the beauty in that first glimpse. After reading books about natural childbirth, unassisted childbirth, water births, and everything in between, I had thought I would give birth in a squatting position, aided by gravity and with a nod to my tribal ancestors, who understood the efficiency of such an irresistible force. I found myself instead lying on my back, my photographer friend behind me to help me arch my spine into a C. My husband held my right leg, and my massage-therapist friend held my left leg in the air. My midwife kneeled between my legs, trying to coax my son out, once and for all.
My son’s head crowned for an hour, on the verge of slipping into this world and giving him his first breath of air, his first view of his mother, his first opportunity to cry. But he stayed inside, so my midwife reached for her scissors. It had to be done.
By this point, the other midwife was kneeling beside me, her hands on the top of my still-pregnant belly, pushing downward to help force the baby out. Finally, my son’s head emerged and he cried out.
Another moment later, his body followed, and my son was born. Sometime later, Jacob would bury the placenta in a hole where he planted a tree for our son.
I got my first tattoo about a year later. One morning, while I was lying in bed with my son and enjoying the first few weeks of his life, dazed and soaked with the various essences of human life, I thought that my stretch marks looked like lightning bolts, and I considered it an apt symbol for my son’s birth, as well as for my experience of birth, though the man who did my tattoo executed an image that was markedly different from what he had sketched for me.
Pain is a place, a substance, a state of being: I am in pain. We say hurt, and we mean like that baseball that hit me in the face when I was twelve. Or we say excruciating, and we mean like giving birth and the stitches that follow. We say broken and mean my arm or my heart or something else I clearly need to be whole.
Suffer enough, and if we are lucky, you and I decide something has to change, and somehow, sooner or later, it does.
CHAPTER 28
Cyclical
I spent my first six weeks with the baby down in the holler, leaving only to have him examined by a local doctor who was sympathetic to home birth—there was a fairly large Mennonite community nearby who took their babies to him. The rest of that time, I held and nursed my baby and discovered my capacity for love in a new, sacred dreamworld. I couldn’t fathom leaving the protective hills then—I carried my son at my chest when he wasn’t eating or sleeping, and there was nothing else in the world for me that mattered. It seemed all I did was nurse him and change his cloth diapers while my body slowly healed from the tearing apart.
That holler was so much like the one where I came from, with its breathtaking beauty, its carpets of wildflowers, the furled fronds of the ferns taking invisible breaths as they revealed themselves to a waiting forest. But for all the beauty such places hide, they hide everything else as well. Those hills are hallowed, the terrain unyielding, like a church whose walls write secrets upon the hearts of the trembling.
And that holler was equally severe. We boiled the rainwater from the roof in five-gallon pots on the woodstove, fifteen minutes for each pot—one pot at a time, usually—so I could bathe in clean water. Somehow, that didn’t prove clean enough, and within a few weeks of giving birth, my postbirth blood turned rancid. For a couple of days, I wondered what was wrong and finally asked Jacob to bring me the thermometer from the bathroom.
You’re fine, you don’t have a fever.
He refused, so I walked gingerly down the loft stairs, rough-cut boards with no railing. I made my way to the bathroom, mindful of the stitches that must not come apart, and took my temperature. It was 102.5. Jacob went outside and came back with an echinacea root that he rinsed off and handed to me.
Chew this and swallow the juices.
I did what he said, and the juice was bitter and burning all at once. But I chewed the entire root, and a couple of days later, the infection cleared. When I felt well enough to walk outside, I used my cell phone on the one spot it worked in the holler—standing on the corner of the porch, facing the barn. I called my midwife, and with evident frustration, she told me I had had a uterine infection and, if it happened again, to make him take me to the doctor. I looked it up and found that a uterine infection is the same as childbed fever, the malady that has taken so many women without clean water, without proper care. I was more careful then and took no more sitting baths until I healed, though I was almost always covered in sour milk and spit-up.
Jacob worked on weekends and was gone the entire weekend, coming back on Monday afternoon with our weekly groceries. I think he stayed home with us for two weeks or so before going back to work. I slept with an ax between me and the loft stairs and kept my baby close. Winter gave way to spring, and my enchantment was punctured only by the reality of how cold the house could be. I learned to build a fire out of anything—we occasionally had a nice load of red oak, but at other times, it was wet and rotten wood that I coaxed into burning while the baby lay safely nearby. I wondered whether it was possible to freeze in that house, like our eggs and lettuce had done in the cabinet on the porch—a ramshackle, makeshift icebox that spared us from walking to the barn several times a day.
Thankfully, the chilly spring gave way to warmth and a hot summer. The failed passive-solar design ensured that the house was always hot, and we kept a box fan running when we could, moving the damp, heavy air through the living room space. There were few walls within the house, so the fan did what little it could to provide some relief. The baby and I were always covered in milk and sweat, and I did what little I could to keep him cool and dry. We often walked to the waterfalls before they dried up for the season, and I relished the cool, trickling streams.
I had taken off the spring semester from college and had the summer off as well, and would then have just my senior year to finish before I graduated. As the summer wore on, though, I worried about how I would make it to class. The trip out of the holler took time and care, and it was another thirty minutes or so to get to campus after reaching the road. With his unflagging criticism of the idea of college, I began to suspect that Jacob wouldn’t make it easy for me to leave the holler and do the work I needed to do to finish.
One afternoon, I realized I hadn’t brushed my hair in a few days, and I was suddenly frustrated with how little time I had to take care of myself. I asked Jacob to watch the baby while I went downstairs—I wanted to brush my teeth as well. He lay next to the baby on our mattress and rubbed the baby’s back as he started fussing. Standing beneath the loft, I knew what the baby’s cries meant as they intensified: Pick me up. Hold me. Let’s walk around.
I stepped out of the bathroom and looked up and said something like, Can you calm him down?
I’ve got this, we’re fine, Jacob replied.
I brushed my teeth, and the baby began to cry in earnest. I again stepped out and looked up, and this time, I did not hide my irritation. Can you take care of him?
Jacob stood up and came downstairs, leaving the baby on the mattress. I don’t remember whether he said anything, but he was clearly angry, and I went upstairs to pick up the baby and then brought him back down. Jacob kicked the baby’s walker, and it flew across the floor before hitting something else that stopped it. I grabbed my little zippered purse, the phone and charger, and the diaper bag and hurried to the old Toyota 4Runner we had bought with some of the wedding gift money Jacob’s parents had given us.
I buckled the baby into his car seat in the front passenger seat—why it wasn’t in the back seat, I can’t say. I locked the door as I always did, a measure of precaution in a time when most car doors—especially the older cars—didn’t have automatic locks. As I buckled myself into the driver’s seat, Jacob came to the passenger door, tried to open it, and then just stood looking at the baby. I thought he wanted to give the baby a kiss or say a little goodbye, because clearly I needed to leave him alone for a while, and this was no time to talk about what had just hap
pened.
But when I unlocked the door, he immediately began unbuckling the baby, and I reached out in horror—What are you doing? You can’t take him, you can’t keep him here. I held on to the baby as gently as I could, suddenly afraid in a way that I had never been before.
Please let me go, I said. Please don’t do this. I won’t take anything, you can have everything. Just let me leave.
Finally, saying nothing, he stepped back, and I shut and locked the door again, my heart racing. I started the engine and looked in the rearview mirror, ready to back up and turn around near the old shed at the corner of the dirt driveway. Jacob stood at the back of the vehicle, reaching his arms to the top of it. A couple of times, I asked him to move; he finally did, and I could see him walking into the house as I drove away.
Then I was seized by a new fear. Would he follow me? Try to stop me again? He had the white pickup that I had clutch-started during my pregnancy. Of course I would not leave him without a vehicle. There was no way to drive up the hill quickly—you had to be so careful as you negotiated the chunks of rock that jutted this way and that from the dirt of the driveway. To be careless or drive too fast meant that something would be knocked loose under the hood, as several people came to find out. Part of the way, someone could walk faster than driving up.
I reached the top of the hill, breathless with fear, but he never appeared in my rearview mirror. I made it to a friend’s house and stayed for a night or two. Jacob called me and said he wanted to talk, and I met him in a parking lot, hoping it was a safe and smart thing to do.
When we argued, Jacob would tell me I was like my father. I had told him some of the stories about my childhood, and early in our relationship, I related every story of my shame and mistakes—I thought that’s what it meant to be honest, to be vulnerable and trusting within a relationship. When the first signs of his disapproval surfaced, he compared me to his mother: selfish, materialistic. But after a while, it was my father he saw in me—at least, the version of my father I had shared with him: violent, full of anger, fucked up. I believed him, already so convinced of my flaws, so certain that any anger I ever felt was a sign I had failed to escape fate. I feared becoming like my father, and comparing me to him was a keen weapon.
