He laughed.
“How will I know if I’m giving birth today or tomorrow?”
He pretended to think for a minute. “Today, there were only boys born in the hospital. If you want a boy, then you have to give birth before midnight. Otherwise, if you give birth tomorrow, who knows what you’ll have?”
He left. I lay there in the bed, staring at the ceiling, and then the nurse arrived again to give me a CTG and listen to the heart. She attached the monitor to my womb and then turned up the volume. The room resonated with the sound of the beating heart: horses galloping near the sea, forceful and muffled at once. She left the room and the sound remained, galloping.
When she returned, she moved me to my side and then began speaking to me in Arabic.
“Where are you from?”
“I’m from America.”
“America! My son just got engaged to an American Palestinian.”
“Congratulations,” I managed. I was still not fully awake, but she clearly needed to process, and as any woman knows, this urge must be acted upon.
“I hope they get Jerusalem ID papers,” she continued. “At least then maybe they’ll stay here. My other son has already left. What are they supposed to do? There’s no life here.”
I kept listening, and trying to look past her in order to see the lines of the heart, moving regularly up and down on sheets of paper.
She unhooked me, and the beating stopped.
“Everything’s normal,” she announced. “We’ll check you again in a few hours.”
The sheet of the baby’s heartbeat was still hanging from the machine, with the lines drawn out on it, like an SOS from another world, my child trying desperately to contact me.
“Do you think you can give me the sheet?” I asked her.
She tore it off, wrote my name at the top of it, and handed it over. Then she reconsidered, took it back for a moment, examined it, and scribbled a note across the bottom.
“No contractions yet,” it said.
• • •
The sky outside had grown dark. I opened the window in my hospital room, and there was rain, a single olive tree. Silence.
I called Frédéric. “We’re having a baby tonight,” I said.
I could hear him smiling. “Should I come?”
“Not yet. We have time.”
A friend had warned me: once you have a child, you are never alone in the world again. I would take advantage of my last hours of solitude to reflect. It seemed too immense to even comprehend. Beginning in a few hours, even when I was alone at home, part of me would always be with another human being—worried, anxious, proud. I would no longer be my own.
I was too nervous to sleep. Eventually I sorted through my bag until I found the book I had, for some reason, chosen to bring with me: Into the Wild, the story of a young man named Christopher McCandless who decides to brave the Alaska wilderness alone, and ends up dying, his decomposed body discovered by a moose hunter. I knew the contractions were coming, and it did not help that I was reading the story of a young man who is facing the wild alone. I could not remember what had possessed me to bring such a book to the maternity hospital.
I continued to read. Christopher, now going by Alex, was determining that if he ran into a bear, he would climb a tree. I fell asleep to the patter of rain falling outside.
I woke up to knocking. Frédéric was standing in the doorway alongside Father Peter, a Jesuit priest who had lived in the Middle East for more than four decades. Peter possessed a kindly, wrinkled face, and a habit of giving away everything that he owned, except for his books, which he guarded with a vengeance that endeared him to me. There were kind men and there was Father Peter, who was something else, who carried himself with a simplicity belonging to those who are holy, but who do everything in their power to lead you to believe that they are ordinary. And you might even be convinced, were it not for the local people always running up to him in the street, beaming with joy upon meeting him. Peter was patient and yet sometimes cranky—especially if you tried to compliment him. He had a love of Hemingway, Faulkner, and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and had managed to read more books than anyone I’d ever met. In other words, he was my kind of saint.
He was older than Father Paolo, but a friend of his, from a generation of Jesuit priests from long ago, fluent in Arabic and living throughout the Middle East, from Baghdad to Egypt, taking both Muslims and Christians as their students. And if Paolo had been our spiritual father in the desert, then Father Peter was our spiritual father in Bethlehem. He entered the room and patted my shoulder. Frédéric leaned down to kiss me.
I was pretty sure that they had already started celebrating the baby.
“It’s not every day that a man becomes a father,” Father Peter announced.
I groaned. “How did you even get into the hospital? Visiting hours are over!”
“Peter says the Mass here every morning,” Frédéric beamed. “He can come in whenever he wants.”
I had to laugh. I sat up in my bed, and Peter handed me a small donkey made out of olive wood.
“I wanted to give you something. A present for the baby.”
“A donkey?”
“Not just any donkey. This is Telhami.” Telhami meant “Bethlehemite” in Arabic.
Father Peter leaned in to tell his story. “They say that when the time came for Mary and Joseph to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem for the census, Mary found a donkey in Nazareth to carry her on the journey. She rode him all the way to Bethlehem, and he remained with her until it was time for her to give birth. That night, on Christmas Eve, the donkey wandered off from the stables and met another beautiful donkey from Bethlehem, and they fell in love and conceived a baby donkey that night.”
He held the small wooden donkey in his hand. “After Jesus was born, Mary’s donkey had to go with the family to flee to Egypt, leaving the donkey he loved behind, still pregnant with their baby. In his absence, she gave birth to a donkey named Telhami, a reminder of the union between them.”
I had anticipated many things on the night I would give birth, but not a tragic donkey love story. “Whatever happened to Telhami?”
Father Peter smiled. “He grew up in Bethlehem and remained in the area, taking the name of the village. And then, do you remember when Jesus rode a donkey into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday? That donkey was Telhami, returning to carry him after all of those years.”
I placed Telhami next to the bed. Peter tousled my hair, Frédéric kissed me and made me promise to call him the moment I needed him, and they left. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep.
But it was time.
I slid on my slippers and crept into the hallway. The world was fast asleep. Even the nurse on duty had fallen asleep over her papers. Only Mary was awake, all aglow in the courtyard, peering down at me.
I leaned against the windows and tried to breathe through the contractions.
I returned to my room and attempted to sleep again. It was now impossible.
I walked out to the hallway, and paced back and forth beneath the statue of Mary. Every few minutes, the contractions came, and I placed my hands against the wall and breathed to keep myself from buckling under the weight. The pain was excruciating. I considered that my mother had also gone through this for all four of her children, and it occurred to me that I was a terrible and ungrateful daughter for not thanking her every single day for the pain that she had borne for me. I said a silent prayer to her in the night.
Mother, if you had to go through this for me, then I forgive you for anything you ever did wrong, and I forgive you in advance for anything you might ever do wrong to me in the future. I had no idea.
The pain was blinding. I leaned against the wall again. My mood shifted: now I raged against history, angry at the women in my life, angry at Hollywood filmmakers. There must have been some conspiracy of silence since the beginning of time that had allowed women to continue to have children, despite the impossible pain. We had all been
tricked. For surely if women knew how painful it was, we would collectively refuse to ever have children again. How do women all over the world not know about this? And how did we as a species survive?
I was, very briefly, honestly confused about this point.
I promised myself that if I survived, I would immediately set out to warn the women in the world that childbirth should be avoided at all costs, even if it meant the end of the human species.
The contractions stopped. I walked over to the nurse on duty and shook her awake.
“I want my husband,” I said.
“Haraam. What a pity!” she answered wearily. “You have a long time to go. Let him sleep.”
She took my blood pressure and steeped a cup of sage tea for me. It was named mariamiyya in Arabic, after the Virgin Mary, who according to the local Islamic tradition used sage leaves in order to soothe the pangs of her labor in the desert.
I remembered that, in the book of Genesis, birth pains were the punishment for mankind’s first sin. That in the Quran, Mary is overcome with anguish as she waits to give birth to Jesus. This all made sense now.
When I finished drinking, I looked at the nurse steadily. “Thank you,” I said. “Now get my husband.”
And this time she didn’t argue.
• • •
Love happens in hospitals, the way prayers happen in churches—the walls are filled with stories of the born and the sick and the dead, with so much fragility, and then we walk in it, in our slippered feet, trying not to do too much damage. That night, Frédéric took my hand and we paced down the hallways of the Holy Family Hospital. All night, the statue of the Virgin looked down on us, she who had been through so much, torn open, now healed, carrying the memory of her wounds. The lemon and orange trees glistened in the rain and light. We had traveled so far, the two of us, from Syria to Aleppo to France to Istanbul, to a house on Nablus Road, but there was no journey like the one we made that night in the dark, that painful passage from one kind of life to another. I was aware of being taken over by forces within me that were controlling me, and I tried to breathe and remember what I had learned in birth classes, but it was all gone now, and I was stumbling in the dark.
Is it too much to ask for a child to heal some of what has been broken? To believe that the new life coming was not only that of the child, but also that of the parents, entrusted now to travel the fragile crust of the earth with this impossible gift, this life? As I gave myself over to the pain, I kept thinking, On the other side there is beauty, there is beauty, there is beauty. Frédéric whispered to me. I had not imagined that such pain could exist. One hour, two hours, five hours, eight hours, nine hours. Breathe. Breathe. Ferry that soul to this side of the water.
Frédéric remained beside me, reminded me to do the most elemental acts that I had somehow lost hold of: to walk, to breathe, to breathe.
Time moved in two opposing directions, stretching on endlessly and condensing quickly, long silences punctuated by intense pain, contractions moving closer together. In the early morning, the nurse measured me, and I was almost fully dilated. She pushed me in a wheelchair to a delivery room upstairs. All of my natural childbirth books had made me frightened of giving birth in beds, which symbolized the horrors of traditional births, but I was much too tired to remember what I was supposed to do instead, so—scared as I was of the bed but incapable of imagining any alternative—I collapsed on the hard floor in pain. It was January fifth, the night before Christmas Eve celebrations in Bethlehem.
At five thirty in the morning, Dr. George arrived. By that time, I was no longer on the floor, but leaning into the wall.
“January fifth,” he announced, clucking. “You see? This baby knows exactly when the real Christmas is!”
I started crying. “I want an epidural. I know I said I wanted a natural birth, but I changed my mind. I didn’t understand. Please give me one. Give me anything.”
He shook his head.
“Tell him, Frédéric,” I begged. Frédéric tried to tell him.
“It’s too late for an epidural,” Dr. George announced. Then he called out to the nurse in Arabic. “Move her to the bed. She’s ready.”
And after months of reading books learning how to give birth in water, or standing up, or lying on my side, or even squatting, I was too exhausted to argue. I didn’t care anymore where I gave birth. I climbed onto the bed. The nurse hooked up the monitor to the baby’s heart, turned up the volume. Pounding.
“Push,” the doctor ordered.
I started to push. Nothing happened.
Push.
I held Frédéric’s hand and squeezed it tightly. He tried to speak to the doctor and I punched him in the stomach.
Push.
Dr. George was standing at the end of the bed, hoping for a baby to appear. Seeing that my pushes were coming to nothing, he turned to the nurse on duty. “How much did you pay for carrots yesterday?” he asked her in Arabic. “Because I paid seven shekels for a kilo. Can you believe that? Seven shekels for carrots? Who pays seven shekels for carrots?”
Push. I pushed again. All became a blur. The baby’s heartbeat. Screaming. Morning light streaming through the windows.
A boy. You. Joseph.
• • •
I looked up in a haze. There were nuns gliding into the room who blessed you, left. A dream.
I cradled you in the space between my cheek and breast. You seemed designed to fit into the space precisely. Fearfully and wonderfully made.
Dr. George approached the bedside. “Okay, enough time has passed now,” he said. “You need to push out the placenta.”
I almost burst into tears again.
I had convinced myself that I was done. I knew from my books that I would have to push out the placenta eventually. But I had secretly hoped that they had all been wrong, and that I was the unique case of a woman in labor who didn’t have a placenta left after I gave birth. In my defense, no one in the movies ever gives birth to a placenta.
I pushed. Nothing happened. I had exhausted every ounce of energy I had.
Dr. George tried to soothe me. “You did everything naturally until the birth, and that’s what’s important. But now you need to let us give you some anesthesia.”
I nodded and turned to Frédéric, scared. “Please take him,” I whispered, handing you to him. “I don’t want the first thing in the world that he feels to be my fear.”
“Shhh. It will be okay.”
They wheeled me off for surgery to remove my placenta. I turned and there was Frédéric, visible through the frame of the doorway, holding you in his arms. I had never loved a man as much as I loved him at that moment—he who was holding the world in place in my absence. They wheeled me to a freezing room, and I shivered. The anesthesia numbed me until someone covered me with a blanket. Then they were wheeling me down another hallway.
“When will it be done?” I asked the nurse.
“It’s already done,” she said.
Reality is messier than we realize until we live it. The day you were born was a disaster and a terrible, unbearable pain, before the world broke open to something else. I looked up and there was my firstborn son, now cradled in my father’s arms, my father who had rushed over from Jerusalem after Frédéric called him during my labor, without me knowing it. He peered down at me.
“Hey, Daddy,” I whispered.
“Hey, little girl,” he whispered back. “How do you feel?”
I smiled weakly and sighed. “I feel like a mammal, Daddy.”
And there were tears in his eyes, and the world was made new that day, and it was good.
• • •
You slept in the clear plastic bed next to me, dressed in giraffe pajamas and a yellow Winnie-the-Pooh hat. You had the hiccups. I held you and you hiccupped in bed. And then you fell asleep with your face against my chest.
Dr. George came in and sat on the edge of the bed.
“Is everything okay?”
“Everythin
g’s fine. Only I can’t believe that you were talking about carrots when I was giving birth.”
He laughed. “Was I? Giving birth is what I see every day.” He looked down at you, asleep. “When are you thinking about going home to Jerusalem?”
It seemed too soon to ask. “I thought I might try to go home in three days.”
“Good. That’s what I was hoping for—because tomorrow and the next day, the roads between Bethlehem and Jerusalem will be closed so that pilgrims can come for Orthodox Christmas. Then later in the week, President Bush is traveling to Bethlehem, and all of the roads between Bethlehem and Jerusalem will be closed again for his visit. You can only go home in three days.”
I considered this mess of history that we had just placed a child into.
“Then that works out well, then.”
“You probably won’t see me tomorrow,” he added. “But another doctor will come and see you.”
“That’s right,” I smiled. “Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas.”
He left. Night fell. Frédéric knocked quietly at the door and tiptoed in, barely lasting a few minutes before he nodded off in a chair to sleep.
I stayed awake to watch you, your eyes closed in the plastic bed. There is something unique in the first night of a child’s life in the world. You had been inside of me for nine months. Now, a part of me, until now invisible, was made visible. Here was part of myself, given a body, in front of me. And yet altogether other than me: mine and not mine, mysterious.
My dearest Joseph, to have a child is not only to change history, but to defy gravity. Everything shifts, not only the future but also the past, because everything in the past, every street I had walked upon, every word I had spoken, every angel who had appeared on a train, every fragment was a detail that led to you. And roads your father had walked upon in India, and men he had spoken to, and prayers he had uttered in the desert, mysteries that I would never know or even conceive of—they had led to you too. And even with this, you were entirely your own self. And I knew that my parents had felt the same way when they had given birth to me, that I, too, was built of their past lives, and yet I lived my life forward. Every child is this.
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