When did i get like this.., p.4
When Did I Get Like This?, page 4
I maintained this resolution all the way up until my third pregnancy actually occurred. Then I clawed my fingernails into the ground as I was dragged back to Dr. Merman’s office in the Mimi Maternity Full Support Panel Jeans I never wanted to look at again. I looked hugely pregnant immediately. I had to watch Dr. Merman’s scale make its inexorable slide to the right. How could I not? After the Liz Lange boot-cuts split across the backside in week ten, I had to be sure I wasn’t gaining more than a pound a week this time. I worked out furiously, taking spinning classes three times a week. Then, like Penelope at her loom, I would undo any progress I had made by going directly to the bakery across the street for a cow patty–sized scone. To my shock and dismay, the scones won.
People often told me, when I was pregnant, that I was “all baby,” meaning that I carried predominantly in front of me rather than an all-over increase in girth. This is a very nice thing to say to a pregnant woman, whether or not it is actually the case, and I took great comfort in it the first time around. If I had gained forty pounds, at least I didn’t look it. But by the third pregnancy, my stomach got so big so fast it looked like the baby was lying perpendicular to me, head at my spine, feet pushing my belly button improbably outward like the center pole of a circus tent. Months before I was due with Maggie, people would stare wide-eyed at me on the street, hoping my water wouldn’t break right then while we were standing there waiting for the light to change. I would attempt to ignore their gaze, thinking, Please don’t say anything. PLEASE. Please allow my girth to go unacknowledged. And then:
STRANGER: What, do you have twins in there?
I’d come home frothing at the mouth. David would try to remind me that these people were only attempting to be nice. And so I tried to take everything said to me in the generous spirit in which it was being offered, like when our Albanian neighbor said:
LINDITA: I think is girl? Because your face?…Is like-a thees.
and then puffed out her cheeks as large as they would go, or when Uncle Daniel asked David, in my presence:
UNCLE DANIEL: Did she get this big with all of them?
Wasn’t that so nice of him? It was so nice I wanted to kick him with my cankles. The only thing worse than being as big as I was that summer was having all those nice people remind me of it.
Even though I looked ready to pop at twenty-two weeks, Maggie delayed her debut for a full forty, plus another eleven days for good measure. Since Dr. Merman had assured me that she, as a third child, would probably be two weeks or so early, I expected to be done being pregnant about a month before I was. The only person more disappointed than me about that was every single other person I encountered. Each morning, I’d duck-walk the boys into school to vociferous reactions of disbelief. It was like being Norm on Cheers, except that my arrival was incredibly disappointing. “Ammmyy! You’re still waiting?!” one parent would say. “Oh my goodness,” another would chime in, shaking her head with a frisson of schadenfreude. Since these were my children’s friends’ parents, I managed to smile and shrug. But when I passed the same group of construction workers I did every day on my walk home, and one of them called out, “Holy crap, Mama, you’re enormous!” I stopped dead in my flip-flops, turned, marched back to him, and stood my ground. “That is not something pregnant women want to hear,” I said, “you motherfucker.” I stomped away to the hoots of his coworkers, throwing them all the parting gift of my middle finger. I was doing a public service. Maybe they’d leave the next pregnant woman alone.
It’s been two years since I was last pregnant, and the nausea, sciatica, and insomnia have already become distant memories, not to mention the three childbirths. But I will never forget my dread as I exceeded each time, by four whole pounds, the twenty-five-to-thirty-five-pound recommended weight gain, how I was reminded of that at each and every doctor’s visit, and all the people who let me know just how ridiculous I looked every time I thought I was actually looking reasonable for once.
Before I ever had children, if I encountered a heavily pregnant woman on an airplane, in a checkout line, on an elevator, I thought it incumbent on me to acknowledge her impending joyfulness. I would smile indulgently at the stranger’s adorable stomach and say: “Congratulations! When are you due?” Now when I see a pregnant woman, the bigger she is, the more assiduous I am in leaving her the hell alone. I give her thirty seconds off from talking about her preposterous size. The mommy jumpy castle is not there for my amusement.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Mother Who Prepares
In third grade, whenever I finished my assignments before the rest of the class, my teacher, Mrs. Boyle, would send me to a desk in the back of the room set at a right angle to the others, an area called the “Independent Work Corner.” There was a pack of reading comprehension cards on that desk, stacked like recipes in a box, increasing in difficulty the farther back you went. The front of each card would have a brief story, on Aborigines or what have you, offering a few paragraphs of edification. The back of the card had a list of questions on what one had just read. I loved these cards, and would plow through my times-table worksheets and Jesus-themed word searches so I could return to the Independent Work Corner and my labor of love. These cards were the real reason I came to third grade each morning, and I yearned for the day when I would have completed every one of the hundred-plus cards, in their dozen colored sections, up to and including Aqua.
On the early spring day I finished the last card in the box, I went up to Mrs. Boyle’s desk. She sat writing with red pen in her mysterious curriculum planner while the rest of the class pored over that morning’s spelling test. “Mrs. Boyle, I did it!” I whispered. “I got all the way to Aqua!” Mrs. Boyle regarded me over her glasses. “Goodness,” she said. She was probably thinking, Now what the hell am I going to do with this kid? It’s only March. I saw then that there would be no grand prize for having gotten to Aqua, no certificate, no proclamation of my name over the loudspeaker after the principal’s morning announcements. It was clear to me that even Mrs. Boyle didn’t give a shit. The point of getting to Aqua was simply to have gotten there. But that was more than enough for me.
The Knowledge of Having Done My Best is something deeply ingrained in me, and if there is an opportunity to set the bar for myself just a teeny bit higher than other people’s, I am doubly pleased. As the birth of my first child approached, preparing and planning for this life-changing event offered just such an opportunity. I attended prenatal yoga three times weekly, practicing my squats and hip openers. Our instructor, a twentysomething woman named Willow, always rewarded us with fifteen delicious minutes at the end to recline on bolsters beneath Native American blankets and, quite possibly, fall asleep. Just in case any of us were awake, Willow would read aloud to us from the books she had been studying in her training. Though she had never gone through childbirth herself, Willow loved working with pregnant women so much she was studying to become a doula. A doula guides a woman through childbirth, though she is not a midwife: a doula is not trained to deliver babies. A mother-to-be hires a doula because, while her obstetrician may be outside smoking until the baby’s head crowns, a doula remains constantly at the mother’s side, offering encouragement and suggestions, helping her cope with the pain, enabling the birth that mother wants. For Willow’s clients, such a birth would be, it went without saying, “natural,” meaning it would occur without the numerous interventions and pain relief that accompany most modern parturitions. A doula like Willow could remind the laboring mother, even in a traditional hospital setting, that a drug-free birth was something well within her capabilities.
As we mothers-to-be lay in shivasana, Willow read us that day’s words of encouragement:
Birthing without drugs allows one to be fully present, fully alive. Epidurals are for women who don’t know the other methods of managing their discomfort. Picture a flower blossoming, and you will find joy amidst the unpleasant sensation! Birthing can even be pleasant, for the mother who prepares.
“But I don’t want some other stranger in the room,” David said that night when I brought up the idea of hiring Willow. “I’m going to be your labor coach. What do we need her for?”
“You have never helped anyone give birth before,” I reminded him. “A doula has.”
“Look, I got it,” David said. “Just tell me what I’ll need to do, and I’ll be ready.” Well, I intended on doing just that. If David was going to be my only birth attendant besides those provided by the hospital, it was clear that we would need, at minimum, an exceedingly well-thought-out birth plan.
A birth plan is a document created by discerning parents-to-be listing all of their preferences for the impending event, everything from what drugs (if any) should be offered to who gets to cut the umbilical cord. If you trust the details of your birth to the hospital’s preferences, the thinking goes, your birth experience will inevitably reflect what was most convenient and expedient for the staff, rather than what was best or most meaningful for mother and child. The extreme importance of having a birth plan was discussed extensively in the books I read, books Willow recommended in yoga class, books like Better Birth, The Thinking Woman’s Guide to a Better Birth, and Your Best Birth. Many mothers probably never considered that something as quotidian as giving birth, something that one’s body would, at forty weeks’ gestation or so, set to doing with or without one’s consent, was something one could even be “better” or “best” at. But I was a thinking woman. Now that I knew there was a higher possible level of achievement, a summit of childbirth performance, I was going to scale it. Why, my very possession of a birth plan would set me quite apart. I imagined the kind labor and delivery nurses nodding with approval as I handed round collated copies:
Dear Hospital Caregivers and Staff,
Thank you for helping our dreams come true by assisting with the birth of our first child!
I would like to express the following preferences for my labor, birth, and recovery:
—the option to return home and labor there, if I am less than four centimeters dilated upon arrival at the hospital
—access to any and all natural ways of speeding labor: hot showers, birth ball, walking hallways
—avoidance of Pitocin and other artificial means of speeding labor
I had planned to include that I wanted David (rather than my obstetrician) to announce whether the baby was a boy or a girl, and also that the lights should be dimmed for the birth, in consideration of the newborn babe’s sensitive eyes. Some of these details had to be tossed in the end, since The Best Birth Ever said that a multiple-page birth plan might be considered a tad excessive, and even in a nine-point font, I couldn’t fit it all on one page. Some things I listed I wasn’t sure I actually had a preference about, although the books told me I should. “Delay the eyedrops,” I was told to write, and so I did, unsure who was getting eyedrops and why I would want them postponed, only certain that my birth experience would suffer if they were not.
—avoidance of episiotomy, except in case of fetal distress
—avoidance of an epidural. Please do not offer me one. If I am in need of pain relief, I will ask for it.
According to what I was hearing in prenatal yoga, epidurals were the default choice of the uninformed. If I entered the birthing room armed with my breathing techniques, a big exercise ball to bounce on, and a partner willing to massage my pressure points, I would have all the coping skills that I needed—even if I didn’t have a doula. I fervently hoped this was the case. But as my belly grew, I began getting unsolicited comments from other women, sometimes even strangers on the street. “Get the drugs,” they’d say under their breath, and then laugh, chortling darkly, almost barking with the memory.
A few weeks before I was due, my OB, Dr. Merman, recommended a particular teacher for our childbirth preparation classes. This instructor, a tiny and spunky woman named Alice, was a labor and delivery nurse who had attended the births of hundreds of babies, though she had never given birth herself. At our first class, Alice began by asking us to go around the circle and tell the group what kind of birth we were imagining. I was first. “Well, I’m pretty sure I don’t want an epidural,” I began, certain this was what Alice wanted to hear. Alice offered no reaction, but the woman next to me, sporting hair extensions and a mountainous belly, snorted in disbelief. “Why?” her husband said, looking around his wife’s stomach at me with some disdain. “Why wouldn’t you just get the drugs?”
“Well,” I hedged, looking to Alice for support, “once you have an epidural, you have to stay lying down in bed. Which is guaranteed to slow down your labor. Which will lead to other interventions. If you can stay up and moving, labor will go faster.”
“That’s right,” Alice said. “Amy is thinking of this the right way.” My colleagues, however, seemed unimpressed. They were willfully uninformed, an option I had never considered. “I’m gettin’ the drugs as soon as I walk in,” the hair-extensions woman said, flipping her locks to a smattering of applause. I decided it was probably a good idea to leave the birth plan in my purse.
I was also too shy to show my birth plan to Dr. Merman, and had brought it across town for several of what were by now weekly appointments without bringing it up. This was somewhat undermining to the birth plan itself, since its whole reason for existence was so my preferences could be clearly understood by the professional delivering my child. Finally, at thirty-eight weeks, I spoke up.
DR. MERMAN: Okay! Well, I’ll see you next week, and of course call me before then if—
ME: Actually, Dr. Merman. There is one other thing. I’ve been working on a birth plan.
I could see something in Dr. Merman’s face, an urge to smile, quickly quashed.
DR. MERMAN: Ah, then. Let’s have a look.
I pulled the plan out of my purse and handed it to him. He scrutinized it.
DR. MERMAN: Mm-hmmm…Okay…I do have one question.
ME: Yes?
DR. MERMAN: I recommend constant fetal monitoring for all my patients. Why are you requesting that it be limited?
ME: Well, having intermittent fetal monitoring, I have read, would allow me to remain mobile during labor.
DR. MERMAN: It would.
He paused for a moment.
DR. MERMAN: You may find, though, as many of my patients do, that once you are admitted to the hospital, you will be happy to lie down.
If I had been truly committed to natural childbirth, I would have taken this conversation as proof I needed a new doctor, one who would honor my wishes rather than pooh-pooh them. But Dr. Merman did not seem dismissive when he said this, neither rigid nor patriarchal. He seemed, merely, kind.
My contractions began the afternoon before my due date. They were mild and irregular, maybe seven minutes apart, but after just a few I understood that something was beginning. I rode the subway home holding on to the pole very carefully, since no one saw fit to give up his or her seat. This was, sadly, standard treatment for a pregnant woman on the subway, but I was surprised no one around me sensed the transformative, electric experience happening inches from their opened newspapers. Whatever. I didn’t want to sit down anyway! I was in labor! I was going to perambulate the whole city, pausing only to let out primal yells of hip-opening power, and when David and I got to the hospital, it would be nearly time to push.
As soon as I got home, I pulled out pen and paper so David could time the contractions and confirm their veracity. Dr. Merman had given me the 4-1-1 Rule: once my contractions were four minutes apart, lasted a minute, and continued this way for one hour, active labor would have begun. “It’s starting! No, wait! Now!…No, wait. That wasn’t one, but—go! Now! Start from three seconds ago!” I’d pant, David scribbling out what he had just written and starting over. It seemed terribly important to have an exact record to show the admitting nurse; that, and the early December temperature, meant I did laps around our apartment rather than the neighborhood.
When I met the 4-1-1 standard an hour or two later, David alerted Dr. Merman on his cell phone. He was out to dinner with his wife. He asked to speak to me so he could gauge my status from the sound of my voice (and, probably, know whether it was safe to order dessert). “You sound like you’re doing very well,” Dr. Merman said. “You go to the hospital when you feel it’s time.”
By 11:00 P.M., I felt it was. The contractions had moved beyond moderately uncomfortable to painfully arresting. Once one began, I would stop pacing and stand rooted to the spot, trembling involuntarily. It was, I told David, what being electrocuted must feel like. “We said in the birth plan we were going to wait as long as possible,” David reminded me; he had just settled in on the couch to watch SportsCenter while maintaining the contractions’ paper trail. “I—have—waited as long as possible,” I hissed, holding on to the dining room table for support. “I have been having contractions for six hours!” Going by the rough benchmarks Alice had given us in Lamaze class, six hours of labor meant six centimeters of dilation. Really, staying home any longer would have bordered on the irresponsible.
We struggled downstairs in the elevator and out to the cab, David, me, and our three overflowing bags of supplies, which had been packed and waiting by the front door for weeks: comfy pillows (for both of us), robe and slippers, pajamas (for both of us), heating pad, massagers, Gatorade (no hospital-issued ice chips for me), a wide range of CD and snack selections, a “My Brest Friend” breastfeeding pillow, a homecoming outfit for the baby in gender-neutral pale yellow, and several copies of my birth plan. David had committed our plan fully to memory, under my rather extreme exhortations to do so, but I wanted it all in writing in case we were challenged on some point. I was going to have other matters on which to focus.
