by Joanna Coles
‘It’s called Adiemus, Songs of Sanctuary, by a British guy called Karl Jenkins,’ I wince, preparing for the onset of another contraction.
‘I knew I recognized it,’ she cries, ignoring me. ‘It’s the music from the Delta Airways commercial.’
Great. I’m going to give birth to an advertising jingle.
4.45 a.m.
Peter
Narcis, the splendidly named relief nurse, has come and gone, and Deborah has now taken over. She is a calming, middle-aged black woman, who, she tells me, came up to New York from the Carolinas as a child. But somehow my platitudinous small talk about how the South compares with New York has taken a potentially tricky turn into the thorny issue of American race relations.
‘At least down in the South, they don’t like us, they tell us to our face,’ she says. ‘Up here they pretend to like us, but they stab us in the back.’
‘Uh huh,’ I say, noncommittally. Though I realize that her ‘they’ probably includes me, I decline to mount a defence of the guilty white liberal over the redneck racist. This morning I have no views on anything. This morning I am in her hands. She can entertain whatever opinions she likes without fear of any contradiction from me.
5 a.m.
Joanna
My own doctor arrives and finally approves the epidural, administered by a calm Asian anaesthetist, who speaks in a low whisper and has tiny, gentle hands. In the birthing class we were warned that the epidural was complicated, didn’t always work and might even puncture the dura, leaving you with a six-week migraine. Compared to what I’m feeling now, a six-week migraine would be a relief. Again, I find myself laughing at the idea of getting through this by snorting lavender oil.
‘You should be fine now,’ the anaesthetist smiles sympathetically as liquid Heaven courses through my legs and the back pain melts away, leaving me warm and euphoric with relief.
‘Oh thank you, thank you so much,’ I hear myself saying, overwhelmed with gratitude. And suddenly Sigrid’s face with her large pale eyes flashes before me and I remember the brisk scorn she reserved for ‘American women demanding epidurals in the parking lot’.
9 a.m.
Peter
Joanna is now rigged up to an intricate web of technological tendrils – wires to the monitors, and tubes to a drip which dispenses Pitocin – a drug to induce labour – and saline, to keep up her blood pressure. One by one we are conceding to all the things we were urged to resist in our birthing class, all the gadgetry and potions of a ‘medicated’ birth.
The doctor decides to go in with an instrument that looks like a flattened crochet hook, ‘to break the waters’, she explains. Luckily Joanna cannot see it.
11.30 a.m.
Joanna
‘In half an hour you can try pushing if you like,’ says the doctor casually, before disappearing to change into scrubs. When the nurse returns I quiz her frantically about how long it is likely to take.
‘Normally between one to two hours,’ she says. ‘Though I have seen some people push for three. And’, she starts laughing, ‘we had one woman push for five. Boy, was she determined to get that baby out!’
This is the part which scares me most. I’ve a secret fear I may not be able to do it and I’m terrified I’ll fail this most basic test of womanhood.
‘Think of the letter C,’ the doctor advises, returning in a pea-green gown with worn yellow sleeves. ‘You need to think of pushing as if you’re a letter C, think of it going under the pubic bone.’
I have no idea what she is talking about. But I nod anyway.
‘In two hours’ time we’ll have a baby,’ I mumble to Peter, really to convince myself, because even now it seems so abstract. He smiles and squeezes my hand, busily chewing a banana and honey Balance Bar which I packed for him in advance.
Friday, 1.30 p.m.
Peter
Joanna has been pushing for an hour and a half, while I count out each push, feeding her crushed ice between times, murmuring soothing reassurances. But I seem to get things just slightly wrong. I grip her hand too hard. My lower back massage eludes the hot spot. I am devoid of all power to appease. I am a man in the delivery room.
I revert to the hunter-gatherer default and offer to go foraging for sustenance, but no one hears me.
‘You’re getting so close,’ the doctor encourages Joanna. ‘The baby’s crowning. Can you see its head?’ she asks me. Sure enough, there is the top of our baby’s head, covered in a fine fuzz of oily blond hair.
‘You wanna see?’ Deborah offers Joanna, and brings up a mirror in front of Joanna’s crotch.
Joanna lifts herself up onto her elbows. ‘No!’ she wails. ‘I don’t want to see…’
2 p.m.
Joanna
I have been pushing for two hours. Deborah’s offer of a mirror only reflects my lack of progress. It suddenly seems absolutely clear that there’s no way I will be able to squeeze out an 8.8 lb baby.
‘How much longer?’ I keep pleading and each time the doctor refuses to answer. ‘If I say fifteen minutes and then it’s longer, you’ll feel discouraged,’ she says, not unreasonably.
‘Yes, you’ve got time,’ she adds, as Peter enquires if he should go on a coffee run. This is definitely discouraging, it means we are not even close. I close my eyes and wonder how much longer I can keep on doing this. Maybe Sigrid was right after all and I am not sufficiently visceral for a vaginal birth. Fifteen minutes later Peter returns bearing a tray of paper cups with the green and white Starbucks logo.
‘Contraction,’ I croak and the three of them swoop down on me once again, the doctor and nurse holding a leg apiece and Peter grabbing my hand. Their faces loom towards me, distorted like portraits in a hubcap.
‘Let’s have a baby, Joanna,’ cries the doctor.
‘Come on, honey, let’s get that baby out!’ hollers the nurse.
‘One, two, three, four, five,’ chants Peter.
Scarcely hearing them, I take a huge breath and for the millionth time bear down with all my might. Above me their lips move soundlessly, mouthing words of encouragement and nearly suffocating me with coffee breath.
2.30 p.m.
Peter
‘I think it’s time for an internal baby heart monitor,’ says the doctor. And from her quiver of medieval torture tools she produces an instrument shaped like a long knitting needle and declares that she intends to screw its small metal tip into the baby’s head. We meekly agree. Her first attempt fails, however, and puzzled, she withdraws the applicator tube. ‘They’ve redesigned it,’ she complains, spreading out the instructions on the foot of the bed.
‘Pull tab a and twist b and remove,’ reads Deborah, the efficient labour nurse.
‘I think the tab goes back in after you’ve turned, like this,’ I offer, as we huddle around the applicator, as though trying to assemble Ikea furniture. Joanna groans with the onset of another contraction, and I remember that we are screwing a cranial spike into a baby – our baby.
2.45 p.m.
Joanna
As I lie here, feeling utterly drained, I remember a bizarre birthing story on ivillage.com, a women’s health website. It came from a woman who was so exhausted that when the baby’s head eventually crowned she tried to push it back in. Now her reaction doesn’t seem so strange at all.
3.15 p.m.
Peter
Joanna’s strength is beginning to wane. Between contractions she breathes now through an oxygen mask.
I lift my eyes for a moment to look out of the window. Outside it is a busy New York Friday afternoon. Below, a dotted line of yellow cabs, like slow-moving termites, are jostling for position. Over on the Hudson I can see the great grey hulk of the USS Intrepid, the aircraft carrier berthed there. The panorama unfolds across the river to the New Jersey shore, and south through a thicket of midtown high rises to the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Across Tenth Avenue, students with plastic messenger bags full of case law are lounging on the steps of the John
Jay College of Criminal Justice. Helicopters throb across the view at window height on their way to the Chelsea heliport – this is the world into which we are trying to entice our baby to make its reluctant debut.
When I turn back to our claustrophobic capsule, the atmosphere has changed. I follow the doctor’s anxious eyes to the blinking monitors and the graphs they spew. The baby’s heart rate is beginning to falter between contractions. With a magician’s flourish, the doctor whips the green cloth off the trolley at her side to reveal an array of suctioning equipment. Deborah pushes a red button on the wall and suddenly the room is full of people in smocks and shower caps. An anaesthetist, theatre nurses.
The doctor has the vacuum cap leeched onto the sandy dome of the baby’s head and on the next contraction she pulls, really heaves, like an old-fashioned dentist hauling at a deeply rooted molar. But unbelievably the head remains lodged. Everyone’s eyes swivel back up to the monitors, where the vital signs blink wildly like Wall Street stock prices on a volatile trading day.
3.28 p.m.
Joanna
The room’s alive with electronic beeping. Fast beeps, slow beeps, high beeps, low beeps and a new, urgent beeping, which has just started. People are crowding in, but I can’t see them properly because Peter keeps trying to hold an oxygen mask over my face.
‘Keep taking deep breaths, Jo, it’s for the baby,’ says Peter.
I hear the word ‘episiotomy’ and somewhere inside of me, away from the mayhem, I snort at the earnest advice I was given to ‘massage the perineum with wheatgerm oil so it will stretch naturally, making an artificial cut unnecessary’.
Every pregnancy manual I have read suggests first-time mothers should tell their doctors they would prefer ‘to tear naturally’.
But I have never been so happy to see a pair of scissors in my life.
3.30 p.m.
Peter
‘Episiotomy’ announces the doctor. It is a bald statement of fact, not a subject for discussion. From her crowded tray she snatches up a pair of scissors. The chromed blades scintillate in the beam of the lowered spotlight and I hastily look away. But above the beeping of the monitors and the roar of the air-conditioning, the shriek of sirens and the growl of buses down on the street, I hear two loud snips. I look back to see the doctor tossing the scissors onto the tray, and at the next contraction she takes up her grip on the handle of the vacuum, assuming a tug-of-war stance with her shoulders. I am silently appalled by the violence that’s being directed towards this unborn baby; terrified that its little neck will simply snap with the force of it all.
3.32 p.m.
Joanna
‘We’re nearly there,’ the doctor is shouting. ‘Come on, guys, let’s have a baby this afternoon!’
‘Come on, big breath, honey, PUSH,’ cries the nurse.
‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten,’ chants Peter, still holding the oxygen mask over my nose and mouth. Their faces loom above me again, distorted through the thick plastic of the mask. For the first time I notice they are looking tense and anxious.
‘She’s tired,’ says the doctor.
‘After three and a half hours? I don’t blame her,’ says the nurse. ‘That’s enough for anyone.’
I hear two distinct snips, but I don’t feel the scissors at all and then, with the next contraction, I do feel something, a wild, burning sensation and I hold my breath and heave whatever strength I have left against the wall of this contraction.
‘It’s coming!’ someone shouts.
‘Is it here yet?’ I ask, struggling to lift my head to see.
3.33 p.m.
Peter
I am about to plead for a C-section myself, when suddenly the doctor staggers back and the baby shoots out, and out – a head, arms, torso, legs – like a long bloody link of sausages, and immediately the room is filled with the instantly recognizable wail of the newborn.
‘It’s a boy,’ says the doctor and lifts the baby, still tethered by his umbilical cord like a tiny space walker.
3.34 p.m.
Joanna
Suddenly there’s a weight on my belly, warm and wet and delicious and a flash of tiny penis and chubby arms covered in watery blood and muddy green meconium.
‘It’s all right, it’s all right, baby,’ I say over and over again as I stroke his tiny arm and a long astonished cry blasts from his tiny, hunched chest.
3.35 p.m.
Peter
‘Here,’ says the doctor, handing me a pair of scissors. ‘Cut the cord.’ In a daze of delayed fatigue I take aim at the grape-blue plait between the clips and cut. The cord is surprisingly gristly and I have to take a second stroke to crunch through it.
‘You gotta name for the little fella?’ asks Deborah.
I look at the baby and at Joanna. ‘Thomas,’ I say and Joanna nods. ‘He looks like a Thomas,’ she says, and Deborah carries him to a little glass tray next to the bed, to run through their tests. Another nurse reaches for my hand and fixes a tag to my wrist. It reads ‘Joanna Coles No. 984787’. In the maternity ward I am a function of the mother nothing more.
3.40 p.m.
Joanna
It is only when I see the look of profound relief on the doctor’s weary face, that I realize the danger we have been in. The C-section team melts away, unneeded, thank God. Thomas looks intently at me, as though scanning me into his database, and then Deborah lifts him off me and takes him away to be cleaned up, with Peter riding shotgun, to make sure he is not inadvertently swapped.
For the first time, I hear the music from the boom box perched on the window ledge, the wonderful slow movement of Michael Torke’s Saxophone Concerto, and I see the Manhattan midtown skyline. My cloud of exhaustion lifts – and I feel strangely calm and resolved. It is over and yet it is just beginning. I have a son. I am a mother. Thomas’s mother. How very odd.
4.30 p.m.
Peter
The paediatric nurse pokes a tiny rubber tube down Thomas’s nostrils and his mouth and he copes with this indignity with remarkably good humour. She hoists him aloft, and he flings his little wrinkled arms out in alarm.
‘That’s the Moro reflex,’ the nurse explains, briskly examining his genitals and inserting a thermometer up his rectum. Thomas tolerates all this without major complaint.
‘Go with him to the nursery,’ Joanna insists, unimpressed with the security bracelets that have been fixed to the three of us. She has been riveted by a story, currently all over the papers, of two babies who were mixed up at birth. I trot along behind Thomas’s trolley and when I reach the door, I look back at the room. And I see the scene as if for the first time. It looks like an abattoir. The floor around the bed-end is slick with a mixture of blood and sticky black meconium from the baby’s first bowel movement, caused by fright during his struggle to escape from his incarceration in the birth canal.
At the nursery I must wash my hands and don a frayed yellow cotton gown. Only then I am allowed entry. There are two other newborn babies there, lying in their little transparent trays under heaters, like meals in a cafeteria. There is no chance of them being mistaken for Thomas. The other babies are half his size, nut brown with shocks of black hair. Thomas has straightened himself out after nine months of being curled up in the womb. The soles of his feet are black from having his footprints taken. A temperature monitor is stuck to his belly by a gold tinfoil heart. His stub of umbilical cord is dyed with a mulberry disinfectant and secured by a yellow clip. Now he lies there, breathing with a fast irregular shallow pant like a dreaming puppy. He has a crescent dimple where his chin should be, and a cone head from the suction, complete with a rosy skullcap where the cup was vacuumed on. He basks in the warm light like a pensioner on a Florida beach. I examine him closely. Though he has Joanna’s colouring, he doesn’t look like either of us. He looks like Sir John Gielgud, Winston Churchill, the Buddha.
A nurse approaches with a kidney dish of warm water. She wets a flannel and washes his face, and
this works him up into a tiny, livid rage. She rakes a plastic comb through his sparse blond locks and then leaves us alone. Thomas regains his composure and drifts back into sleep. He has one sole cocked up on his other bandy calf, like an old farmer leaning on a rake. There he rests in a nest of warm tufted white terry cloth, looking exhausted from the ordeal of his birth. And there I remain, dizzy with fatigue, clinging to the side of his Perspex bassinet in my frayed gown, wondering who he is going to be. And then, just briefly, the melancholy of our mortality sweeps over me as I remember the words from the Book of Job, carved into the Monument to the Amiable Child up on Claremont Hill:
‘Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.’
ALSO BY PETER GODWIN
Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa
Rhodesians Never Die: The Impact of War and Political Change on White Rhodesia (with Ian Hancock)
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Preface
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
January
Also by Peter Godwin
Copyright
