by Joanna Coles
‘How can I? It takes two to converse.’
‘All right, I’ll be baby. “Hey, dad,”’ she says reverting to the rasping New York accent she has given our unborn child,’ “ya finished decoratin’ my room, huh? I ain’t comin’ out till that place is all done, right?”’
‘I’m sorry. I just can’t do this.’
‘Oh, all right then,’ she says, handing me a book. ‘Read to him from Dr Seuss.’
I open the book and gravely address her belly-button:
‘You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
You’re on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.’
JANUARY
The fingers’ nails are beyond the finger tips and almost ready for trimming.
He or she is also blinking, swallowing, making breathing movements and passing urine.
BabySoon.com
Saturday, 9 January
Peter
Outside it is raining and New York is still sensibly asleep. We arrive at Roosevelt Hospital for day one of our Weekend Intensive Lamaze birthing course, and make the mistake of using the Sabbath elevator. It stops at every single floor on Saturdays so that observant Jews don’t have to break the Sabbath by operating machinery. After two floors I am fuming with impatience and we bale out. Soon we are on the eleventh floor in a small room with walls of swirling turquoise fingerprint patina, attending our birthing class.
Sigrid, our instructor, is a Swedish vision in a cinnamon trouser suit with a brown floral bosom, gold glasses, dyed gold hair and gold slippers. She hands out crib sheets and free maternity magazines – they come in plastic wrappings complete with some complimentary Pampers – a tiny token of things to come. In fact Pampers have a fairly high presence in today’s lessons – the anatomy and physiology chart displayed on Sigrid’s easel is also brought to us compliments of the nappy makers.
Sigrid soon reveals herself to be strict and irony free. Her instruction method is to reduce us to the status of small children with learning problems.
‘Dancing,’ she bellows, ‘dancing is an excellent way to get exercise for the pregnant women. I recommend dancing for half an hour at least – every night.’ She stoops over her boom box and presses the play button and on comes ‘Rock Around the Clock’. ‘Dance! Dance everybody!’ she cries. Soon we are all doing a desultory jive in the tiny space of the room, the men are like tugs gingerly steering the great whales of pregnancy away from each other to prevent baby-inducing collisions.
The fathers are rounded up and discharged outside to write down the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ things about having a baby. We are an uneasy group with little in common but impending fatherhood – an Israeli, a Greek, two Americans and me. There is some discussion and then under ‘best’ we write:
— everything changes
— genetic immortality
— becoming a family
— getting to watch more cartoons
Under ‘worst’ we write:
— everything changes
— scatological imprisonment
— less sex
— expense
— end of aesthetics
— less attention for dad
When we go back, Sigrid is teaching the women the finer points of peeing in late pregnancy. ‘You go to the bathroom and urinate, ja? Then you do like this, both hands on the belly and lift it up,’ she hoists her own belly, ‘and then you urinate some more – to get rid of the residual amount. OK practise!
‘The vagina can stretch naturally to take a ten-pound-baby’s head. So when people talk about men having a penis too big – it’s a joke – pah! There is no penis big enough to even bother a vagina I tell you.’ The men all look eyes downcast, as if vaguely ashamed on behalf of males everywhere who have ever claimed size mattered.
‘Everyone touch your lips. Now go like this’, Sigrid flubbers her lips with her index finger, ‘blalalalalala – that’s how the cervix feels when it’s engaged. Do it, everyone, do it! Blalalala…’
We obediently flubber our lips in imitation of ripe cervixes. And I wonder whatever happened to pacing the waiting room with a vintage cigar in your pocket, waiting for a nurse with sensible shoes and hair clipped to a starched hat, to come in and announce, ‘Congratulations, it’s a…’
Instead I am trapped here play-acting a ripe cervix and pondering if there is any way at all I can salvage a tiny bit of dignity. Sigrid is beginning to remind me of my drill sergeant-major in the army, breaking down the recruit’s personality in order to rebuild it with military instincts.
‘Think of the cervix as a turtleneck of a sweater that will stretch slowly over the baby’s head,’ she suggests, going over the early-warning signs of labour. She wants us to read the symptoms out loud and picks on Neta, the Israeli, to begin. She keeps picking on him, and as Hebrew is his mother tongue he stumbles heroically on unfamiliar English written words. Each time he hesitates, his American wife loyally murmurs prompts in his ear.
‘Mucus plug, bloody show,’ reads Neta, blanching.
‘In fact,’ says Sigrid, ‘it’s stringy mucus, not like a plug at all.’
At this point I begin to feel as if I’m going to retch up my meagre breakfast and I lower my head into my hands and try to think of something else, any other image but a stringy mucus plug. ‘That must be one of the most disgusting phrases I have ever heard,’ I whisper to Joanna, but she is jotting diligently and frowns at me for talking in class.
‘Be sure to call the doctor if blood is running down your leg,’ says Sigrid. ‘Write it down – CALL DOCTOR IF BLOOD RUNNING DOWN LEG.’
One of the women has asked if she can go swimming after she has ‘unplugged’. ‘Of course,’ says Sigrid, ‘your vagina doesn’t stand up like a tube, you know. But you shouldn’t have sex after your waters have broken.’
There are several gasps, and someone goes ‘eeooouuuww’.
‘Well, some have one for the road, you know,’ says Sigrid.
I now find that I am trying to tune out as much of the gory detail of childbirth as possible, for fear that I might be converted to celibacy, induced by Sigrid’s inadvertent sex aversion therapy. But chunks of her description penetrate my mental air defences, Scuds of disgust thudding in my consciousness: ‘… elicit your faecal ejection reflex … you feel like you’re gonna shit a watermelon … old, oxidized blood … baby’s first bowel movement … meconium, a greenish black sticky substance…’
I flip up my mental yashmak to find Sigrid picking up a plastic pelvis and a baby doll and ramming the doll’s head into the pelvis, twisting it this way and that to show the various birthing positions. Then she manipulates the plastic pelvis to show how it can open to accommodate the baby’s head. The pelvic jaws gape open like a fish’s mouth.
‘Remember, you must tap into your spiritual centre, wherever that is,’ she says. ‘You’re not just a body having a baby. You’re more than a pelvis with a passenger.’
She alights on Neta to read aloud again, and the colour rises to his cheeks as he steps reluctantly into the linguistic breach once more. I feel like screaming, ‘Give him a break!’ But in fact I remain head lowered, grateful that it is not my turn.
Sigrid is passionate about pain relief: she doesn’t believe in it. American women, she is convinced, are far too quick in their demands to be numbed. ‘They are shouting for an epidural when they’re still in the parking lot,’ she scorns.
The Birthing Center, the temple of natural birth to which Joanna appears now to be leaning under the influence of Sigrid’s zealotry, is an epidural-free zone. The only pain relief allowed there is a shot of Demarol, a mildly numbing drug that Sigrid describes as having the same effect as a quick Martini on an empty stomach.
It is now nearly five p.m. We have been hectored for nearly eight straight hours and it is more than I ca
n take. Thankfully she decides to show a short video of birthing experiences, which, she warns, we will be expected to critique afterwards.
On the screen a woman finally begins her contractions. To help her cope with the pain, her husband holds up a photo of their piebald cat. ‘OK, honey, focus on Benson,’ he says. Next he is nudging her into the shower cubicle and while she is blasted by the pellets of hot water, he sings cheerfully, ‘She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes/She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes…’
The lights go up and Sigrid’s harsh voice hauls me back to the reality of our stuffy little room. ‘Remember, if you don’t like a nurse you can always go and complain and get her swapped,’ she is saying. ‘I remember one Nurse Ratchet, who said to a husband I’d taught, “You have to leave now.” He said, “No, I wanna stay.” And she said, “But I have to do things to your wife – I have to do things to her down there.” And he said, “Look, honey, I’ve done more things to her down there than you’ll ever do.”’
Saturday, 9 January
Joanna
‘My accent is Swedish,’ announces Sigrid, our birthing instructor. ‘I studied in Sweden, I have a degree in nursing and a master’s in midwifery. I was spirited away from Sweden by a handsome American and now we’ve been married forty-one years.’
She grins round at us, her pale eyes intensified by her large, gold-framed glasses. ‘When I arrived here in 1958, I got the shock of my life. I was horrified to discover that most women were fully drugged during labour and woke up two days later to find that they had a baby!
‘So I set off to find out why women are so scared of giving birth in this country. This’, she pauses briefly, staring around at us again, ‘is a class designed for people with impossible schedules and hopefully you have no plans for tonight because there will be homework.’
Another couple shuffle in late and, as they obediently stick on their name badges, have a whispered row about where to sit. ‘I want to be at the back,’ hisses the husband labelled Bill, as his wife tugs him towards a seat next to Sigrid. But Bill wins the battle and soon embarks on the complicated process of trying to plug in his Walkman earpiece, undetected by Sigrid, so he can catch the latest football play-offs.
Barry, another husband sitting opposite him, mouths desperately, ‘What’s the score?’
At 10 a.m., the men are sent out of the room and the women ordered to sit in a circle on the floor. For one terrible moment I think Sigrid is going to make us act out the instructions on a leaflet I have spotted in our Childbirth Forum Classroom Folder. The page headed ‘How to Avoid an Episiotomy’ advises that women should spend the final months of pregnancy massaging the perineum. The instructions are accompanied by a crude pencil drawing of a woman sitting next to a bottle of vegetable oil and inserting two thumbs in her vagina. I am preparing to refuse vigorously when to my relief Sigrid tasks us with writing down a list of the best and worst aspects of having a baby.
This seems easy enough. ‘The baby’ we all chorus when asked to start with the best list. But, oddly, the worst list fills up faster:
— money worries
— being pregnant
— pain
— working pressure
— family tensions
— less freedom
— less mobility
We sit wondering what else to put under best. ‘Maternity leave,’ says a lawyer called Susan, due three days after me and still schlepping to her office every morning by 9 a.m.
‘I’ve cut my court work,’ she says grimly, ‘but I’m still not getting home before 8 p.m. Right now, I’m more excited about taking time off work than I am about the baby.’
I know what she means. It still feels so abstract. Even as we stockpile diapers – to Peter’s horror we’ve been warned we’ll go through 600 in the first month – I can’t believe we’re really going to have a baby.
At snack-time I offer our chocolate raisins to my neighbour. ‘Oooh, I don’t think so,’ she giggles, shaking her head as if I had suggested a line of cocaine. In silent reprimand, she ferrets in her bag and retrieves a chaste Tupperware box of fresh blueberries, which she savours one by one.
‘I’m not sure I can stand much more of this,’ says Peter, through a mouthful of chocolate raisins.
‘Now write this down,’ Sigrid shouts as our break ends,
‘“The good Lord deliver us from meddlesome obstetrics.”’
Only six hours left to go. And then, of course, all day tomorrow.
Sunday, 10 January
Peter
We arrive at Room 11A29, clutching our packed lunches like schoolchildren, to find a new laminated chart propped up on the easel to welcome us. It is entitled ‘Positions for Pushing’. Next to it sits a huge felt breast in a shocking shade of pink.
Sigrid bids us clear our minds and puts on a relaxation cassette of Pachelbel’s Canon, under which has been recorded the sound of distant waves breaking. ‘Everyone repeat after me: take one contraction at a time!’ roars Sigrid. ‘TAKE ONE CONTRACTION AT A TIME’, we call out in weary, unenthusiastic voices. It is going to be a long day.
Sigrid tells us how important breathing and relaxation is to a successful labour. ‘Modern women have so much going on upstairs,’ she admonishes, tapping her head. ‘They need to get into a low arousal mode.’ We all practise breathing to a medley of ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’, ‘Rock-a-bye Baby’, ‘Frère Jacques’ and ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’. ‘It’s like sex!’ says Sigrid to the men. ‘When a woman goes “Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! OH!” it’s not because she’s having an orgasm, it’s because she’s sick of it, you’ve lost her rhythm and she wants it to be over already, that’s why she’s faking it.’
Nobody comments. None of our women come to our defence. I’m beginning to feel that I’m on trial here.
‘Cheer up, everybody!’ she beseeches, noting our glum faces. ‘This is a happy event, not a scheduled hysterectomy!’ She decides that we will play-act a C-Section and gives each of us a role in the operating theatre. Ten of us huddle round the mother. I have been cast as the senior surgeon and Joanna is the anaesthetist. ‘Right, what would you do?’ Sigrid asks me as I stoop over the mother’s abdomen, imaginary scalpel in hand.
‘Um, shave the pubic hair?’ I ask doubtfully.
‘Yes?’
‘And then make the incision, a bikini incision laterally.’
Soon the repertory C-Section has got out of hand, however. ‘Stand clear!’ demands Joanna, holding up pretend defibrillator paddles and preparing to shock the patient, who is now playing dead.
‘Flat lining!’ warns a nurse authoritatively. For once Sigrid has lost control. She stands in the corner shaking her head at the gallows jollity.
‘All right,’ she claps her hands. ‘Our next paper is how to avoid an episiotomy.’ She pops in a video and on the screen, with only the briefest of warnings, a doctor is soon snipping at a woman’s vagina. The men all groan and look away. ‘Now make sure you wipe front to back,’ the onscreen doctor tells his patient, and my day reaches a new low.
She presses the pause button. ‘Kegels – they are most important to tone the vaginal muscles, right? And you guys, you can help. When you’re having sex with your wives you can say, “OK, honey, give me five.”’ I try to imagine playing the role of physical trainer during sex, but I can’t.
Finally our class gets round to the business of the newborn infant. Newborn babies are not always particularly attractive, warns Sigrid. Page 23 of our Miracle of Birth magazine lists some of the commonplace attributes of newborns. ‘Cone head’; bone bruises on the head; doughnut shape on top of head; hickey on the head if born by vacuum; blue hands and feet; puffy face from pressure; whiteheads on nose; crossed eyes; ‘stork bites’ on forehead and nape; sucking blisters on lip; peeling skin; a general rash – flea-bite dermatitis; lanugo – downy hair everywhere even on forehead and shoulders, which is especially noticeable on dark-haired babies; a little milk leakage
from the breasts of both baby boys and girls; surprisingly big balls on little boys because the testes are relaxed; oozing black meconium from the anus. And all of this is considered perfectly normal.
Sigrid is also passionate about breastfeeding. She is an apostle of the nipple. She shows us another video to help convert us all to the cult of the breast. ‘Don’t be depressed by the size of the breasts in this video,’ she warns the mums-to-be, ‘it was shot in Texas.’ On the screen a newborn baby inches its way up its mother’s stomach, unassisted, locates a nipple, opens its mouth as wide as it can, and with an heroic effort latches on. I look around at the rapt audience – all have open mouths pantomiming suckling.
‘Remember’, warns Sigrid as the film ends, ‘that lactation is not a contraceptive. It depresses fertility somewhat, but six weeks after the birth you’re ready to get pregnant again, and you could have Irish twins.’
She fetches the false breast and holds it aloft like some sacred chalice. Then she tweaks its nipple, screws up her face and utters a baby cry. She peels back the felt skin to reveal the milk sacs and muscle of the breast. And another icon of sexuality comes crashing down.
Tuesday, 12 January
Joanna
Today outside the Gourmet Garage I notice that a red dotted line in the shape of a little girl, just like a police scene-of-crime drawing, has appeared on the pavement close to the kerb at 97th Street and Broadway. Underneath it, also stencilled in red, is a message: ‘Constance, aged two, killed by automobile 23 January 1996.’ Peter takes in the scene and then says quietly, ‘January 23rd? That’s one day after our due date, isn’t it?’
Wednesday, 13 January
Peter
I feel guilty that we haven’t seen Andrew Solomon since his hospitalization. His phone has been on permanent answer service, so today I try to e-mail him and immediately receive an automatically generated reply: ‘Andrew Solomon is currently abroad and will not be checking e-mail,’ it reads. ‘He will receive your communication after 3 February. If it is urgent that you reach him now, you may print out your message and fax it according to the following schedule.’ There follows an impossibly tight itinerary. Los Angeles, Bangkok, Phnom Penh, Siem Reap, Delhi, Agra, Jaipur and finally, the Royal Tented Camp of the Maharwahl of Jaisalmer.
