For all the time I spent during pregnancy thinking about all the terrible things that could go wrong — and I spent a lot of time thinking about such things — I spent very little time thinking about actually giving birth. And if I spent little time thinking about the birth process, I spent even less time preparing for it. It’s not that I didn’t have time to prepare. I did. Not only had I gone through the lion’s share of pregnancy, I also had already been told a week prior that I would need to be induced. So I didn’t just have a gist of when the baby might come. I had a date certain. it’s just that I spent that time mostly marveling that there would be a baby. Also I was still working, a decision that in retrospect seems a bit silly but, at the time, seemed eminently reasonable. Why shouldn’t I work? It wasn’t like I had a baby.
Most of my birthing knowledge came from TV and movies, and if there is one thing popular culture taught me, it’s that I would need a pregnancy bag for the hospital, ideally one that when labor started my partner would forget and then comically run back in to grab, flailing and spinning in cartoon-like motions. So I knew that part — pregnancy bag, check! However, the movies are *shockingly* non-specific about its contents. So mostly I brought snacks. Snacks, and two black dresses.
The dresses were identical, both standard issue GAP maternity wear. One I had purchased a few weeks prior for a job interview and the other had been gifted to me in a bag of hand-me-downs. I like them. I felt safe in them, with their long sleeves that I could slip my hands into and their stretchy, forgiving fabric encasing my bulbous middle. Plus, I may not have spent a lot of time preparing for birth but I knew enough to know that pants seemed impractical given the anatomy involved. So, black dresses it was.
On the day of the induction, I found myself haphazardly throwing a few things in a duffle bag, as though I was going to crash at a friend’s house for the evening rather than give birth to a human being. I packed the two identical black maternity dresses, the basket of snacks that friends had given me at the baby shower, and a book. I cannot remember packing a single additional item. I know that can’t be true, there must have been other things in the bag. But I really only remember the dresses.
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Inductions are weird because, in my entirely non-medically informed experience, it is like the doctors are trying to trick your body into thinking it wants to give birth, but not like *too* much or else you will just end up having really terrible contractions and nothing else will happen.* This was explained to me at the hospital, where I sat in a room on the top floor, a mere two blocks from my house. They told us that they couldn’t tell us how long things would take, but that we should just settle in and get comfortable. And then they proceeded to do a million things to make that humanly impossible, because zero things about bringing life into the world are actually comfortable, it turns out. Monitors were strapped across my giant pregnant belly, I was given some “let’s get stuff rolling” medication, and instructed not to move around too much lest I disturb the various monitors.
Now would be a good time to confess something: I was a little bit excited about the idea of the hospital. Like, not “WOOHOO CAN’T WAIT TO BE IN A HOSPITAL” excited or anything. And let’s be clear: the idea of being in a hospital because I am sick terrified and continues to terrify me to my very core. But being in a hospital when I was not sick but rather having a baby didn’t seem that scary. Like, my brain processed as a weird hotel, albeit one where I would frequently be pantless with people peering into my nether regions but hey, room service! I honestly thought I would get to like just hang out, relax, eat snacks, and watch a bunch of TV for a while before things really got going — a little pre-birth vacation, if you will. I brought dress, snacks and a book, which is pretty much my beach packing list. (In case you are curious, I *still* do not know where Bernadette went.)
There was no mini-pre-child-birth vacation.
Obviously.
With monitors strapped across me, frequent nighttime visitors to check on me, and a 9lb baby lollygagging around in my mid-section, I got little more than the idea of sleep and, disappointingly, by the next morning, not much had changed in the whole “getting the baby out” department. He was still in there, good and tight, and there didn’t seem to be any indication that my body was preparing for an eviction. The doctors decided to turn things up a notch and I decided that the hospital was the worst and also that I missed the good old days, when I was not strapped to monitors.
The next few hours are honestly something of a blur. There was an exam that went badly. I remember the nurse who came in afterwards and said, “I need to tell you that what just happened was not okay. I am here as your advocate.” In naming what happened as problematic, she also gave me permission to also say that it wasn’t okay and to ask for someone else. I will forever be grateful to her and for the midwife who took over my care. I also remember that some time after that, while laying in bed, my water broke.
I was being induced because I had polyhydramnios — too much amniotic fluid — and part of the fear was that when my water broke, the baby’s umbilical cord could prolapse, which, I had been told, was A Very Bad And Scary Thing. But my water broke and it was a mess and disgusting and the cord stayed where it was supposed to and one of the two black dresses bit the dust. I waddled to the bathroom and got cleaned up, donned the second dress — THIS WAS MY PLAN GUYS, I JUST HAD DRESSES? — and climbed back into bed, somewhat relieved to have that particular hurdle behind me.
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When, at first, the nurses came in to adjust the monitors and tell me that the baby’s heart rate was dropping slightly, they didn’t seem very concerned. Normal, they said, not a big deal. But then, after a while, it was not normal. Something was wrong and I didn’t know what or why and all I could do was look to the faces around me for clues — how worried should I be? Is this an emergency? Is the baby in danger? No, no, they reassured. We are just going to put in an internal monitor and get a better look. No need to worry. They were jovial, quietly joking amongst themselves and it annoyed me. I was tired and cranky. I resented the laughter of the midwife and nurse as they set about removing the foley catheter and putting in whatever it was that they were putting in. While I knew they were not laughing at me, I wanted them to be serious. This felt serious to me.
But then they got serious. There was a brief, deliberate pause and then I heard it: The Calm Voice. The voice that says, “I need you to not panic.” The voice that says, “Something is very wrong.”
“Patricia, you know the thing we talked about that could happen with the cord? Well, it has happened. You need to have a C-section and it needs to happen right now.”
I didn’t open my eyes once while they wheeled me to the operating room. They put the mask on me — the “count backwards from 10” mask — and told me to breathe and I did, big deep breaths, desperate to be asleep and for the baby — my baby — to be out, to be safe, to have air. I tried to breathe as deeply and as quickly as could, convinced that the quicker I went out, the quicker they would get the baby.
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I woke up screaming, and I believe this is an exact quote, said “I AM IN PAIN WHERE IS MY BABY IS HE OKAY IS IT A BOY OR A GIRL.” When Phil laid him on my chest — Nyland, his name was always Nyland — I felt whole again. I had, I knew, been afraid to imagine that moment, the moment when he arrived. I was afraid to imagine it because I was afraid it might not come, and then it would be even worse. But here is was, here he was, and I found myself whispering, “You are here. You are finally here” over and over again while I cradled him, him so calm and me crying like, well, a baby. It seemed — still seems — so impossible how perfect he was, seems impossible that my body grew his body, that this is just a thing that happens, all the time, every day, all over the world. People growing people. He was — he is — so perfect.
I was, by the way, still wearing the second black dress.
*Don’t come for me about this, I have no idea if it is really correct, it is just what I remember
The Belly Fish 