Sunlight on My Shadow

by Judy Liautaud

  How ironic that I was experiencing the same sort of prejudice my family in New Orleans did before they passed for white many years ago. It all boiled down to physical appearance: black or pregnant too young, stay away. I don’t know how this traumatic episode still lives within me today. Perhaps it causes me to be a bit more timid when meeting new people, or maybe that is why my voice wants to shake when I am speaking in front of a group.

  But my anger at the bookstore man has eased. When you know better, you do better; maybe today the man has learned compassion and understands the blows his words had on our spirits. I suppose he wanted to keep his store in good repute, or perhaps a former resident from the home had lifted something from the store, or maybe he had a young teenage child and wanted to guard her from our bad example. How could I have known?

  But I couldn’t consider his motivation back then: I was too full of anger. I can only assume he acted in ignorance. In his eyes, our appearance screamed whore, for he could not see past our shameful bellies to the sacred little spirits inside, waiting to be born. Our shame was our own. Our babies, I hoped, would be spared in their pure innocence.

  CHAPTER 33

  MY BODY GREETS D-DAY

  The way my belly expanded on a daily basis frightened me. I didn’t think there was any more “give” left. There was no place to put the chewed-up food so it sat there in my throat for hours after eating; the belly skin was tearing along the underside and itched; the baby’s little feet got stuck under my ribs and some kicks brought tears to my eyes. Maybe the little thing was getting back at me for what I had done when I was 3 months along. My body was really too fresh, young, and small to accommodate this pregnancy, but yet it kept on.

  Linda P. told me about Mother’s Friend. It was this magic liquid that could prevent stretch marks from forming if you used it faithfully. Linda said that once you got stretch marks, they never went away. Then you would be haunted with the telltale signs of your pregnancy for the rest of your life. I kept a steady supply handy and spread it on faithfully every night after I marked off my calendar and before I crawled into bed. It was the consistency of olive oil and smelled like pine and lanolin.

  When the baby dropped and settled into my pelvis, my belly became long and protruded straight out. I could have rested a dinner plate on top. I could breathe easier and swallow food better, but the stretching and burning got worse all of a sudden. Now, red marks like a rooster’s tail showed up on the underside of my belly. This freaked me out—and then I noticed them on my butt and regretted my negligence for not smoothing the lotion on my derrierre. I was sick about it. But now it was too late. A red rash covered the underside of my belly. I scratched until my skin was bloody and raw.

  My back ached. I felt heavy and out of balance. When I walked I got a knife-like jab in my groin, every now and then, that stopped me flat in my tracks. I wondered if my body would ever recover from this.

  I only had one pair of pants that still fit me. How I missed my little light and skinny body. At least my legs hadn’t ballooned out. From the back, I looked like I did two years ago, but sideways or frontward, I was a freak. I was still the same person inside, but I looked totally different. I just couldn’t wait to give birth and be light again. I thought that if this kept up, my body would burst. I took great pleasure in crossing off the days at bed-time. The horrid thing was that the calendar number was now minus three, which meant three days past my due date. With each passing day, I thought I might explode.

  I don’t think my body had matured enough to be having a baby. I perceived the changes as violent, and I watched as my skin, breasts, and belly suffered permanent changes. When you are married and have planned for a baby, these changes are taken with resolve because you know it is what you have bargained for and a small price for the glory of becoming a mother to a new baby. But when you are trying to ignore your changes and want no lasting effects because you have a secret to uphold, each passing day of increased growth is a horror.

  I knew there was no turning back, and I had no control as I stood by and watched the changes with each passing day. “If only the baby would be born,” I thought, “I would be spared more stretch marks and it would be easier for my body to spring back to normal.” I felt trapped and very frightened.

  On June 27th, 1967, I went to the bathroom and a glob fell in the toilet. It was the plug they talked about, the bloody show. What a welcome color from down there. I had been praying for this since last October; it was a pretty sight, even if it was nine months late. Somebody had told me the bloody show meant that the baby was coming soon. I gave a shudder of anticipation, knowing my time at the home had an ending in sight. I went back to my room and lay down. Nothing happened that day. Nothing happened the next day.

  Finally, on June 30th, I awoke from the night with a gripping pain in my groin. I thought this might be it. I lay there for another hour or so, until it hurt enough for me to get scared. I waddled down to the hospital floor.

  The Martha Washington Home for Unwed Mothers was an all-inclusive facility. Our second floor was fully equipped with labor and delivery rooms and a nursery for the babies. There were no resident doctors because we weren’t that busy, but a local doctor was on call when needed. The hospital floor was off-limits to us until our time came. So once you were in labor it was like you had a rare and coveted ticket. You finally got to see what it was like on the second floor, and best of all, it meant things were coming to an end. Girls who had access to the hospital floor were looked upon with envy and longing.

  I was finally in labor and not sure what was to come, but I was more than ready for whatever it took to be done with my stay here and resume my normal life. I was a full ten days past the due-date indicator on the pregnancy wheel. I thought it was ironic that it was the day I had always expected, exactly nine months to the day from when that rubber broke and Mick shot the egg to life. I’d stopped scratching off the days on the calendar once I got to minus three—what was the point? For the ten days I was past due, I thought, “This is the day!” I was wrong ten days in a row, but now today was the day and I was finally doing it.

  First they checked me to see if I was dilating. They said I was in the early stages of labor. They told me to take off my clothes and put on the white linen hospital gown. It tied behind my neck and let the cold air swirl around my backside. Next they took a razor to my tender parts. It pinched and pulled. Then I got an enema. I thought my innards would burst as I tried to hold the water in. Now that I was poked and prepped, I was ready for action. They walked me over to the labor room and told me to get in bed and lie down, that I should try to rest. The contractions were still coming, but not so hard that I couldn’t doze off.

  Soon enough the pain awakened me and I buzzed the nurse.

  “It hurts,” I said.

  “How bad on a scale of one to ten?”

  I didn’t think I knew enough to give it a rating, but I said, “Seven.”

  “OK,” she said, “we’ll give you something.” She came back about a half hour later with a hypodermic needle and told me to roll over. She shot it in my butt cheek. It was a narcotic to settle me down. It made me very sleepy.

  There was nothing on the walls. No windows. A green-and-pink paisley curtain hung in the doorway to close off the room. The bed was hard and narrow. Sometimes, when I rolled on my side, I got too close to the edge and startled myself, afraid I’d land on the floor. Then, I would quickly roll onto my back so I wouldn’t fall off. I was afraid to scoot over to the middle of the bed because any repositioning seemed to bring on the pains. They came in great waves, like whitecaps breaking on a rocky shore. As the pain crested, I involuntarily held my breath and clenched my fists. I wondered if I would make it through. Each one seemed worse than the one before, and I became engulfed in fright as the clock ticked on and the pains built to new heights.

  I had to fight the impulse to push the call button. There wasn’t anything that I needed, specifically, but mostly I
didn’t like being alone. The pain didn’t seem right. It hurt more than I thought it should, and I was sure something was terribly wrong. I wanted some reassurance. A human—any human—would do.

  The drugs put me in a state of delirium. I forgot where I was until I was jolted awake by another contraction, and then I’d look around and see the white walls, the gray steel cart by my bed cluttered with gauze pads and white puffy paper packages. Strings of reality coagulated into a vision of me in the home on the hospital floor and I would realize I was having a baby.

  My skin felt numb to the touch. The narcotic kept me in a drowsy fog and I would be half asleep until the pain came back. Just like clockwork, the pain ground into me. It felt like a red-hot poker was being squeezed between the bones in my spine and their nerve endings. With some of the pains, I’d tighten into a ball and grip the sides of the bed and somehow make it through. Other times I would feel it coming on and I would panic and press the call button again. By the time the nurse got back in, it was over and she’d say something like, “What now?”

  I would make something up, then, like “Can I have a blanket?” I wondered myself why I even called her. The pain was over and now things were tolerable. I was a pest and a baby. I didn’t think I was handling this very well. I don’t know what I thought anyone could do for me, but I wanted someone, anyone. I didn’t think the pain should be this intense if everything was okay. I thought the baby must be stuck. I felt claustrophobic and unable to get enough air.

  I guess I kept buzzing to be sure they hadn’t forgotten about me in this lonely room. I worried that I might just lie there in my own fluids and die, and no one would notice until they wandered in and were shocked that they had lost a patient.

  I reached for the call button again, but stopped myself. No, I couldn’t bother the nurse again. Last time she seemed perturbed at my beckoning. I wanted to jump out of my body and run away from this place, but I hurt so terribly that I could never walk. And where would I go?

  So I told myself that there was no way out of this but through it. I was strong. I could handle this. I reminded myself that labor meant that my time in limbo would soon be over. I comforted myself with these fleeting thoughts in between the catastrophic contractions. But most of the time I was in a puddle of panic.

  The squeeze in my belly made me want to puke. My hair was matted into a nest of snarls from tossing it back and forth. Sweat had dampened my neckline and forehead, yet I was shaking like I was cold. My mouth felt like it was lined with cotton balls. I wanted water like a kid wanted Christmas. When I rang the buzzer and asked for a drink, the nurse told me that I couldn’t have any liquids. She said it was because if there was an emergency and I had to have general anesthesia, they wanted my stomach to be empty so I didn’t throw up and choke myself to death.

  “Can I have something for this pain then?” I asked.

  “It’s not time yet for your next dose; just try to relax.”

  I thought she was nuts. Relax? I tried to think good thoughts. I thought about summertime at Bond Lake. I imagined myself lying lengthwise on the seats in the fishing boat with the cushion under my head, the waves gently rocking the boat side to side. I thought I could hear the rhythmic slapping of the water as the crests rolled under the boat. I thought about the sun shining on my face and warming my body. Then the next contraction came and I thought I would die.

  BOND LAKE

  OUR CABIN AT BOND LAKE

  CHAPTER 34

  THE BIRTH

  I was dreaming that waves were breaking on shore and then I realized it was the sloshing sound of a mop going in and out of a bucket. It came from the hallway. I heard it slurp and then slide along the floor, up and down. A caustic smell of ammonia mixed with Pine-sol wafted into my room and triggered my stomach contents into a tight ball. The bolus in my gut rose and forced itself up my throat and out my mouth and nose. It splattered onto the linoleum. Then the smell of regurgitated pizza caused another upchuck. I said out loud to no one, “Oh God, please help me.” The words gave me a hopeless feeling. I felt unheard. I wished Mom was here to tell me what was going on. I remembered her holding me when I was a little girl after I had fallen and scraped myself up. She wrapped her arms around me so my entire body was in her lap. I could hear her saying, “There, now, it’s okay. Hush, little one.” I could feel her smoothing my hair away from my face as I nuzzled up close. She made it okay.

  I laid my sweaty head back on the pillow and closed my eyes. I swiped the back of my hand across my mouth. My stomach settled. Then I dozed off again. Sometime later, the nurse came in.

  “My, what happened here?” she said as she looked at the slop on the floor. “Why didn’t you call someone?”

  “I don’t know. It just happened too fast.”

  The nurse left and the janitor came in with the smelly pail to mop up my mess. I felt like I was going to lose it again. I laid my head back on the pillow, and the ceiling spun like a carousel. I put my hand over my nose to block the stench and breathed in slowly, in and out. I wanted to get up and run away from the smell, away from the pain, away from this place. My body had betrayed me. I couldn’t get up or even move around; the hot poker in my lower back wouldn’t let me. The drugs made my head woozy and light. I hated how my belly had just taken over my body and grown to enormous proportions. I hated the sick feeling in my stomach. I hated the stab in my back. I hated it all.

  My eyes landed on a steel-rimmed clock fastened to the wall opposite the foot of my bed. I watched the second hand creep. It seemed frozen in a time warp. I closed my eyes and waited for the next inevitable rush of pain. The clock didn’t tick ahead but the pains kept coming.

  I buzzed again. “Please, I can’t stand this anymore. How long does this take?” I asked the nurse.

  “Labor can take a long time, especially for the first one.”

  It was midafternoon and the pains had started the night before. I must have been into it fourteen hours by now.

  When the nurse told me we were waiting for Dr. Wigglesworth to arrive, I thought he sounded like he busted out of a Daffy Duck cartoon. I pictured a mad scientist type with Einstein hair and thick glasses. Soon afterward, two nurses came in with a wheelie cot.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Delivery room,” she said, as she put the gurney alongside my bed.

  Even though I had been laboring all night and most of the day, I thought, “I’m ready to deliver?” I was shocked because I didn’t feel any baby coming. I just had this horrible hot and sharp pain in my back that cranked up a notch with each contraction. I was elated to be moving out of this hospital cell and that humans would be with me.

  The nurses grabbed hold of the sheet under me and slid me onto the wheelie cot. Then they rolled me down the hall and turned the corner into the delivery room. Spotlights with metal shades hung from the ceiling. I squinted as my eyes tried to adjust from the dimly lit labor room.

  They put the wheelie cot next to the delivery table and said, “Judy, we have to get you on here. Scoot over and get your body close.”

  “I can’t. It hurts too much.”

  “Sure you can. Just move your bottom over to the edge and we’ll lift you.”

  I scooted over. It felt as if a boulder was grinding on my backbone; every movement pushed harder on the raw exposed nerve. Whether I was ready or not, the two nurses grabbed my arms and hoisted me onto the table. It was stiffly padded. I thought my back would break as it settled into the hardness.

  I felt naked and exposed with the lights aimed at my body. I wanted to scramble around and find a dark hole to crawl into, but I lay there prostrate, under full view. I imagined myself as a bug under a microscope, being peered at and poked. The heat from the lights warmed my face and chest until I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath. Beads of water collected on my temples. I felt light-headed and the room began to spin.

  “Oh, I don’t feel so good,” I said.

  The
nurse was busy setting things on a steel table, but turned around and said, “Well, of course! You’re in labor. That never feels good.” I laid my head back, closed my eyes, and felt another contraction coming. I moaned with the pain. I wanted her to know how much it hurt; maybe she would do something.

  Dr. Wigglesworth came into the room, but he was not like I pictured him. He was a big man and, unlike Einstein, bald except for a few tufts on the side just above his ears. His skin was smooth and cherry colored. When he walked in, he had an air of serious concern on his face. He stretched white gloves over his large hands and reached inside me.

  “This baby is posterior,” he said as he withdrew his gloved hand. We might have to use the forceps.” I didn’t know what posterior meant. I had been in labor now for half the night and most of the day. Stuck. It must be stuck.

  “Now, Judy, I want you to roll over on your side. The doctor is going to give you a spinal.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a shot that will make you numb. You must lie perfectly still,” the nurse said.

  “Oh, I can’t roll over,” I said. “It hurts too much.”

  “Just try. You’ll feel a lot better soon. We can’t proceed unless you roll over.”

  I grabbed her arm and slowly rolled a quarter of the way. They grabbed my body and finished the rotation so I was on my side. It felt good to be off my back, but my upper leg started to cramp.