a birth story
(Hello! It has been, what, years since I wrote one of these? Do you even remember who I am? It's okay if you don't. I'm re-introducing myself through an 8000 word piece about my placenta. You're welcome.)
Parenting, I'm realizing, is an exercise in self-annihilation. You take the you you were before having a baby, and you murder it a little. Some part has to go to make room for the new parts. This is an ongoing process.
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When they tell you early in pregnancy that your due date is merely a window, the two weeks on either side wide with potential, you nod: Of course, babies aren't alarm clocks, you laugh, can’t expect them to be punctual! But then my due date came and went and I was supposed to have a baby, and I didn't, and I went a little crazy.
At many American hospitals they induce on your due date, despite there being little medical benefit to doing so. Our OB was described to us as “a doctor who practises like a midwife,” a compromise—I had wanted a midwife and Vic had insisted on a doctor—but it turned out not to be a compromise at all. This OB is revered in Boston, somewhat mythical. We were lucky to get her. And since she sees so many women of “advanced maternal age” (a gentler term than “geriatric pregnancy,” but still precipitously insulting), she was fine with me, a 35-year-old with a fairly uncomplicated pregnancy, waiting until what she called her “magic window” for delivery, roughly 10 days after the due date. She brought me in for ultrasounds every three days or so, and there the baby was, head-down but serene, we actually saw her yawn once, totally unbothered that she was now four, seven, 10 days past-due.
"You've made it too comfortable for her," the ultrasound techs joked.
"I'm just too good at being pregnant!" I said, while inside I was nearly incandescent with rage. It was our first fight.
My parents arrived in Boston and rented a house around the corner. My mom and I took long walks, knit tiny sweaters and hats, I drank wine every night and climbed the stairs in the rental house over and over again. I made muesli, taught myself how to darn socks, disinfected our cutting boards. I brewed mug after mug of raspberry leaf tea and choked down handfuls of dates. I started responding to texts in emojis only, the little shrugging lady, or that face with its teeth in a hard, endless grimace. I dug out and sterilized my breast pump and leeched three ounces of yolk-slick colostrum into a small bottle, willing my uterus to do something, anything. In a last ditch effort, my OB swept my cervix (they attempt to detach the membranes of the baby’s sac from the walls of the uterus—this didn’t hurt, despite a friend’s midwife describing the experience “like being fingered by a 7th-grade boy”). Throughout it all, I felt nothing: no cramps, no telltale pressure, no ghostly contractions.
Truthfully, I knew all along that she was going to be late, which is an absurd thing to say, but I did. I was late, too, and I could simply sense that my own daughter was a stubborn, willful thing, that she would come on her own terms, or not at all.
We were scheduled for an induction on a Monday, 11 days after our due date. We were told Labour & Delivery would call us that morning. I slept for 20 minutes or so, maybe, on Sunday night. Mostly I paced, stretched, looked around the guest room-turned-nursery where I’d been sleeping (or not sleeping) for most of the pregnancy, my body a litany of anxieties. When the phone rang around 8am, I was wide-eyed and jittery.
“We know you’re scheduled for an induction today,” the nurse said apologetically, “but we’re actually full right now.”
They had overbooked. They were looking for people who could give up their seats in exchange for a voucher. No stools at the bar, no room at the inn.
My phone was buzzing with messages from well-meaning friends: “Today’s the big day!” “We’re thinking of you!” “You’ll be amazing!”
I started to cry.
We had to go back to the hospital for another ultrasound: there she was, immutable. Full marks, A+ baby, all looks fine. We’ll give you a call when there’s room, no rush. I could feel her lazily spinning and stretching. I looked almost aggressively pregnant. It was embarrassing, how my body refused to yield.
“Everyone else gets a baby!” I wailed at Vic in the car, a kid who had been promised ice cream and was then told they’d have to wait. “I want MINE!”
If my purpose through this whole pregnancy had been to keep this baby safe, I had done it, and done it well. I was now just showing off.