God and Jetfire

by Amy Seek

  I felt myself retreating, hiding from needles, and medicines, the intrusion that threatened to alleviate the pain and diminish my experience. Nina wanted me to deliver at home for exactly this reason, but my insurance wouldn’t allow it, so we had written a birth plan, signed weeks ago by the hospital; only under extreme circumstances would medical intervention be allowed. Nina would be there to enforce the contract. The hospital had a hundred methods to make the process more efficient and to mitigate the thousand pains of childbirth, every one of them a critical step in the transformation to motherhood.

  I was not to be confined to bed but allowed to move freely and assume different positions as I felt the need, standing, squatting, perching on a birth ball. I was to be allowed to drink water freely; please provide crushed ice. Vaginal exams during labor only when absolutely necessary. No internal fetal monitor. No enema. No stirrups. No removal of pubic hair. No amniotomy. No heparin lock. No catheter. Low light and quiet throughout labor.

  IV allowed only if absolutely necessary, and then only into the arm, allowing maximum mobility—not into the back of the hand. Do not induce labor or accelerate contractions; no Pitocin. No stripping of membranes. Thumb-sucking and nipple stimulation only to induce/regulate contractions. Do not break water. If membranes rupture early, allow maximum time (twenty-four hours) before discussing antibiotics. Heat for pain relief: allow use of shower. Narcotic pain relief only, if necessary (Nubain, Demerol). Only local anesthesia, only if necessary; please use Stadol. These to be used before epidural; no epidural unless critical. If critical, back off of epidural toward the pushing stage to allow the natural instinct to push.

  Mother allowed to push when she feels it’s necessary, but given direction for the protection of the perineum. Perineum to stay intact using compresses and support. If breech baby, still attempt vaginal delivery. No episiotomy. No forceps or vacuum extractors. Allow baby to come straight to breast after birth; no cleaning or weighing. Fundus massage for placenta delivery. Mother will hold baby through delivery of the placenta and during any tissue repairs. Please make a blanket available during repairs. If emergency C-section is required, mother to remain conscious and screen to be lowered before delivery. If no distress, son to be given to mother immediately at C-section delivery.

  Allow umbilical cord to stop pulsing before disconnecting it. Father will cut the cord. Allow baby to cough to expel its own mucus; do not suction baby’s mouth. Use cloth if necessary. All tests and procedures on baby to be done while in mother’s arms. Oral vitamin K only. Use colostrum in baby’s eyes instead of eye ointment and delay eye treatment for one hour. No PKU/glucose testing. PKU after forty-eight hours. No circumcision.

  No hepatitis B testing. Father will accompany baby for any procedures required outside of delivery room. No heat lamps.

  Private room for postpartum. Baby will “room in” with mother. Mother will breast-feed. No bottle feeding, no pacifiers; if necessary, feed supplements using a dropper, feeding syringe, or cup.

  The hospital would be a battleground, and these were the terms of engagement. I was grateful for Nina, there to fight for them so that I could concentrate on every centimeter of his shifting: every tremor would be a script I would study to understand what this was, to create a son. We were carving and crafting each other and there would be no loss of consciousness. I wouldn’t leave him, or slip away. Every feeling I felt, I was meant to feel.

  Nina shut me in the back of her minivan and we drove home to pick up the blue duffel bag, packed with my blue and white nightgown and a bandana to hold back my bangs. I wanted to stay, but I said goodbye to everything I knew, and we drove to the hospital less than one mile away. All the incubating, considering, dreaming would soon be over, and my son would confront me with the question of what I was going to do.

  Jevn must have been updating Paula and Erik, but I don’t remember overhearing it. I don’t remember saying anything about them, but I must have told Jevn I wanted to be alone, though it no longer seemed like a request I had to make. We arrived at the hospital and went directly to the third floor, the labor and delivery wing I’d toured just a week before; I’d seen nurses rushing in and out, a waiting room full of families, a vending machine. I’d seen women in various stages of labor then, but I couldn’t have imagined the faraway worlds they were inhabiting right before my eyes. Now I saw it through a fog, and I heard Nina say there were no rooms available. We’d be admitted according to medical necessity.

  “That’s what I’m telling you. Her contractions are regular, two minutes apart, a minute and a half long. It can’t be more than an hour.”

  The nurses in reception didn’t know I’d enjoyed a concert, spent a night gazing at the moon, had a day in the park, a long walk and a potato by the pond, all before making my way to the hospital. I wandered slowly in the hallway for an hour with Jevn holding me steady, his arm wrapped tightly around my shoulder, while Nina went to war. Finally a crowd of nurses surrounded me, escorting me to a room and preparing me to receive antibiotics because my water had broken almost twenty-four hours ago. Nina told them to wait.

  My Signposts read: deep labor, dilated, on the cusp of pushing, but once I was perched on sterile sheets made frigid by air-conditioning, labor ground to a halt. The birth was suddenly as far away as the city, visible only at a distance through the small window. The lights in my room were low and incandescent, but the white light of the hallway, illuminating the floor in a glossy line below the door, brightened the whole room like a slow flash every time someone came or left.

  The sun retreated, and I found myself alone again in the dusk and approaching night. Nina and Jevn were somewhere in the dim corners of the room, enlarging and appearing, then evaporating again. Then the darkness arrived at the window like a ghostly compatriot and deepened the thresholds that divided me from the world I’d known. Words from outside me crept in, distant voices speaking; the loss of sterility of the womb environment, of infection, Cesarean, antibiotics. Voices I couldn’t locate in the darkness, words that didn’t recognize how far away I was and how unreachable.

  Nina pointed the shower hose at my swollen lower back. I leaned against the tiles and closed my eyes. She had explained that pain and heat travel on the same nerve pathways, and so if you fill up the highway with heat, then pain won’t have any room to deliver messages to the brain. Relief comes by tricking the brain into thinking all it feels is hot. The water was scorching, and the room was a cloud of steam. Spit and tears and all kinds of wetness mixed; heat condensed on the tiles. The world was wet and undifferentiated. I was somehow naked. I was a monster, my body transformed, a lizard expanding its frill, parietal eye pulling me places no one else could see.

  It could have been that the pain was simply not the point, when Nina had been unable to describe it. I wouldn’t have called it pain, even after so many hours, with progress completely stalled. I was in hard labor, but the arc of his skull had nested in the curve of my sacrum, and the contractions were thrusting him hard against my tailbone, which began to protrude like the dorsal plates of a reptile. But even as I clenched through ineffective contractions, I couldn’t measure that feeling against any prior pain.

  I reached back to touch my spine, and the grotesque and bony swelling gave me a surge of vigor and certainty to push past the limits of my strength. My center moved south from my heart toward the pit of my stomach. I leaned on the head of the bed and swayed my hips like a cow loping across an uneven field, weight swinging heavily from hip to hip. But all the while we were not making progress. The emotional signposts were no longer legible. I wasn’t moving in the proper sequence. I was holding on.

  And about then a bell clanged with sudden news. At any other moment I would have recognized it. It was the ring of a phone, the kind that had spiral cords that tangled. People had heard I was in labor, and some were calling to find out how it was going. They wanted to know, specifically, do I want a milkshake? I couldn’t understand: milkshake. I couldn’t understand someone pie
rcing the darkness, offering a milkshake to help. Vanilla or strawberry? Jevn would have vanilla. His gentle voice penetrated my corridors, asking what kind I would like. And in no time whatsoever, there were milkshakes. I opened my eyes and saw flashes from the places outside my darkness where the sunset had just swept across everything, dragging everything’s shadow across the world. From where birds had cried the end of another day, and maybe someone had turned off the lawn mower and produced solid silence. I saw a world where milkshakes were made, constantly, for a million reasons, in a place with blaring lights 24/7. The milkshakes had arrived in pink and red cups.

  Jevn told me I was doing well; he told me to breathe, breathe; he told me I would be okay. He perched behind me as I balanced on the ball—lifting me from behind for each contraction. He cradled my head. He said words he had been told to say, words he had been told would reach me, words he meant. I was comforted by his presence, that he wanted to fight this fight with me, but it felt more like he was clinging to me as I fought it. Nina asked me what I wanted to do; she was beginning to falter. She was thinking I might need the antibiotics. She suggested I kneel on the bed, my forearms resting on the elevated head of it. Swaying my hips, still trying to loosen his cranium out of my tailbone. I was beginning to feel it was my fault. I kept changing positions: kneeling on the bed, sitting on the ball, pressing my face against the wall of the shower. All amid warm, dim, infinite light.

  —And then something happened; a crowd appeared. I was told to rest on my back, the head was beginning to bulge at my perineum. It wasn’t safe anymore to sit, even if Jevn lifted me for contractions. I was supposed to lie down and look in a mirror and see. I opened my eyes and surfaced for a moment. So many faces assembled around me, smiling, moving their mouths. Flashes of light. I didn’t want to see the head; I didn’t want to watch; I wanted to stay inside. I didn’t want to arrive at this moment. I reached down and touched his head. And then I felt an irresistible urge to push. My body gripped and folded me without mercy upon myself. I wasn’t dilated enough; they told me not to push. I pushed. The silence inside me broke, as though the doors were torn open, my ears breaking through the surface of the water, and I could hear everyone. Five, seven hands handing me a boy, all lips, swollen and red. Falling on me like a bodily organ, like a blind bloody seal. I kissed him; I might have eaten him. The work had been done, and I had become a mother.

  There was activity all around me, and the crowd spoke to me as if resuming a conversation from before. They looked in my eyes and couldn’t see that I didn’t recognize them. There were things outside me to tend to; I was to nurse; I was to hold him, like this, like that. The perineal massage, the afterbirth, holding still for stitching me up. I had ripped messily, the way that makes it hard to sew, and the nurse pulled at me with a hook-shaped needle. Nina making sure they didn’t suction his mouth or eyes. It was all a blur, but I joined in, with words. Jevn told me I said something about Thomas Jefferson and something else about cheese.

  It was, inconceivably, over. I would be moved to a postpartum recovery room. I would need to get cleaned up, the nurses would be there in a minute, and I would be rolled out to another room. I didn’t care when I would finally sleep. In the world, reordered, there were new imperatives. In my arms, he was smacking new lips, testing a face. He wanted to see what straight up feels like, relief to his long-curled spine, stretching feet and toes, but he found default again in a lump that approximated the bulge of my belly just twenty-seven hours ago. I felt my soul had stepped out and sat beside me. I was propped by pillows in the hospital bed, looking deeply into the eyes of my newborn son, quietly completing the arc between my chest and knees. He would break from nursing, bobbly head, to look at me, the only person who did not make me doubt myself.

  A vague memory began to return to me, that I’d been part of things before, on the planet in a certain place, with seasons, and a location that mattered to me so much. The sun had set hours ago, falling across the city whose name I couldn’t remember. I was roused in the middle of the night by sudden, jerky tests of new physical boundaries. He snapped at air in his mouth and smacked his chops for my breast. A blur: rest, darkness, love, and waking to find the best things in the world are true.

  FIFTEEN

  They’re here, Jevn whispered. Paula and Erik tapped lightly at the door, and Jevn was tiptoeing over to let them in. I lay on clean sheets in postpartum, where I fell in and out of sleep, holding Jonathan in the still deep darkness of early morning. Staff came and went quietly, and Jevn and Nina spoke to each other outside of my range of vision.

  I opened my eyes for Paula and Erik, who planted their feet at a distance and leaned in brightly to congratulate me. They took Jonathan carefully in their arms and, as they chatted to Jevn and Nina, continuously returned their gaze to him. I didn’t feel anything then, not jealousy or anger or fear or happiness. At that moment, anyone might have come in and held him. Everyone else was extra; their feeling for him incidental and minuscule. I experienced a peaceful amnesia as I blankly accepted their comings and goings, meeting and forgetting them all at once. Paula pulled him close and smiled; Erik opened his mouth in pretend surprise. They lay their hands gently on his tiny, soft chest and whispered, Hello! Hello, little boy! I didn’t mind at all. I didn’t have to say hello.

  They must have stayed for only a few minutes, because that’s all I remember before they were gone. Then I saw Jevn had Jonathan, but the distance between his joints was too great and our son too little; he couldn’t mold himself around Jonathan to cradle him tightly. He held him in a nest of tangled elbows and wrists, bending acutely. He spoke softly to Jonathan at close range, frozen in place, as if the father’s job was to hold his son completely still until the glue dried. As if his nose was securing Jonathan’s. Or maybe he thought the father’s job was to supply his son’s first breaths.

  * * *

  It wasn’t until morning that I remembered the plans we’d made. The thought didn’t come naturally to me, but because Jevn was sitting in the chair facing me when I woke.

  “What time should I tell Paula and Erik to come?” he asked, and I must have answered, but I only remember that we spent the early morning passing Jonathan back and forth, laughing at the jolts of his body as he learned to hold himself still and at his spontaneous and triumphant stretches. Still exhausted from labor, I took short naps with Jonathan pressed against me. I woke when nurses would knock at the door and push him onto my breast, and when midwives made their rounds, How’s Mama today? They examined my stitches and gave me a hemorrhoid pillow to sit on. Other nurses stopped by with lunch. I was protected within a swarm of services and constant interruptions, perpetual reminders that I was a patient, and you couldn’t ask much of me. I welcomed everyone who entered, and I was happy to look out the window when they left. I was happy to recall, with a distant fondness, that I’d once been an architecture student in a city whose name I just then remembered.

  * * *

  We had entered the state-mandated seventy-two-hour waiting period: three days and nights to adjust to motherhood before I could legally sign papers. Ohio’s official acknowledgment that birth is a transformation for both mother and child, one powerful enough to undermine any decisions made prior to it. A last opportunity to change your mind, it was still not enough time to put together a new plan if you did, but it was a painfully long time to spend with a child you felt certain about giving up. Before the birth, Molly suggested giving him right away to family or friends, to foster care, or even to Paula and Erik—my signature would just make it official, three days later.

  Our workbook had other suggestions for avoiding unnecessary pain. Do not have a natural childbirth. Do not breast-feed. Don’t “room in” at the hospital. Have your adoption plan and the reasons for it written out and handy in the hospital, for reference after the birth. I had ignored all of it, and as I lay in the hospital bed, nursing my son, those seventy-two hours no longer seemed a needless formality. They were the measure of my mothe
rhood. They were walls built in the absence of my own to protect it. I had seventy-two hours to sleep next to my son and smell him. To show him the sunset and the view over the treetops in the park across the street. To swaddle him close and watch him discover his length. Seventy-two hours to be a mother. I wanted all of them.

  * * *

  Jevn went home to take a shower, and I called my parents to give them the news. They congratulated me and said they planned to drive up in the next couple of days to meet everyone. I looked at Jonathan as I described him to them; seven pounds twelve ounces seemed such an incomplete appraisal, and I laughed, looking at him, reducing him to those things, ten fingers and ten toes, knowing he was hearing me, knowing he knew it was not a good description. When I hung up, I turned back to him. Our conversations were captivating but mostly wordless, mostly smiles and looking, reading each other’s faces. But soon I felt someone at the door, and I saw that my architecture theory professor was waiting at a distance for me to invite him in. He was a big black man, but I’d never seen him outside of school, and without its aura he seemed smaller. He took all the time in the world to look at me.

  “You look ten years older.” He smiled from the far end of my bed. I could tell he meant it in a good way.

  He sat down gently on the bed, thick reading glasses and a clean black beard streaked with gray. He had a way of watching concepts formulate, gazing up at them in the air, reaching out gently to touch them and responding to their feel. He speculated about design without authority, except the authority of his reserve and modesty. I held my son and listened to him.

  He marveled at my transformation to motherhood, pausing occasionally to examine me. He said he hadn’t become a father so easily. For months after his daughter was born, he couldn’t really believe that he had a biological connection to her. It was only after she was several months old and he was left alone to care for her for a weekend that he began to feel their bond. He was telling me not to expect Jevn to have the same experience I had. And reminding me that, even among mothers, I was on my own.