It was touch and go there for a few hours. Tricky, I can say, now that it’s 14 years later. Back then, tricky wouldn’t have been the first adjective to cross my mind. In fact, I’m pretty sure I was only thinking in expletives at that point. Childbirth hurts like crazy, especially after 19 1/2 hours of labor, 4 hours of pushing and an emergency trip on a gurney down the hall for a last-minute forceps delivery in the O.R.
I was 40 and my blood was everywhere. You were brand new, blue for the first few seconds, blue like a low sky on a perfect June day, and you had sepsis. So the nurse who helped the doctor drag you out of me warned that it could only be for about half a minute when she gently placed you, all peachy and clean, across my still-heaving chest. You weren’t even crying. But you did look me in the eye.
“There you are,” I thought, before the nurse could whisk you away to the NICU for an antibiotic drip. “I’ve known you all my life.” I know you felt it too.
Resting comfortably, after I knew you were okay and your other mom had followed you down to the NICU, the next thought that occurred to me was, “Yay! I’m not pregnant anymore!” I was cleaned up and stitched to within an inch of my life, since you weighed 8 pounds, 1 1/2 ounces and insisted on emerging with your right fist tucked neatly against your right temple and could not be persuaded to arrange yourself otherwise. So basically your appearance into the realm of the living ripped your mother to shreds. Your large size and my small size were working in concert to make it nearly impossible for you to return to the world (since we both know you’ve been here many times before) in the natural way. There are friends who tease me to no end whenever I tell them this story, blaming my “small size” on the notion that a vagina gets bigger, more accommodating, through repeated use. Not only am I a woman who has not repeatedly had sexual intercourse with a man, or men, but I am a woman who has never had sexual intercourse with a man. Not once. One of my favorite sentences to say out loud to people as I relate the story of the miracle of you is, “I got pregnant the first time sperm entered my body.” The sperm that fertilized the egg that became the miraculous you was, yes, ejaculated by a man…. Into a cup and then a syringe and then injected into me by your other mom as I lay ovulating on our Brownstone Brooklyn bed. I was 39 and you were a rapidly expanding cellular blob at T-minus 9 months and counting. The angel Gabriel did not need to inform me; I just knew. And three seasons later, there you were, my virgin birth.
As I rested, having just gone through the most difficult yet most rewarding 20 hours of my life, in a small white room just off the O.R. where we both came close to not making it to the other side of the ordeal as members of the living but sliding instead down together to that other realm where you had just been so sweetly floating, I heard the the cleaning crew wheel their equipment into our emergency operating room. My senses were functioning at maximum levels and I distinctly heard one of them say to the other, “What the fuck happened in here?” Thankfully, it was my blood and not yours that was splattered on all the tools and instruments and soaking the sheets. My quiet laughter was borne of relief and joy, not from any disrespect for the two poor souls who were given the task of cleaning up our near-disastrous mess. I rested quietly, alone with my desire to see and hold you once more and with my doubts about ever being able to feel truly clean again. Having a monthly period was bad enough for a grown-up tomboy like me. Now I was torn to shreds and bleeding real blood, the blood of wounds not womanhood. It was disgusting for a few weeks. Painful, too. But I had you now. And that made it all worth it.
How To Overthink Almost Everything 