I talked with strangers about pregnancy and discovered that I had physical and emotional experiences in common with other women. I exploited the fact that one need only say one is pregnant to get a seat on a tube, or access to a loo. A now queenly vessel, in my own opinion, I was affronted when people didn’t shift themselves in order to accommodate me. My comfort was suddenly of universal importance: my womb gave me rights on this earth.
I loved going to the Breathing Classes, were birth was seen as emotionally stupendous, and everyday – simultaneously. I could’nt get enough of it. In fact I enrolled for an extra and rather inferior private class in Pregnancy, in which we did little exercises and were ordered never to stand with our legs straight and knees locked – they should always be a little bent, as if one is about to pounce.
Baby-care was of course never mentioned. No one had the audacity to suggest the practicalities surrounding pregnancy’s product (not because it would all be easy after that, but where would the advice end – toilet-training, adolescence, UCCA forms?). Everything but our breathing was left to us, or to chance. I never even mastered the breathing. It was pregnancy alone that was the issue, and we were all excited about it (mothers of previous children perhaps less so). It was a pleasure only appropriate to share with other pregnant people,; and yet I wanted Jeremy to come to the classes to learn how to be a Labor Partner (he didn’t). I wanted to have a Natural Birth (I didn’t). I wanted the baby to come (she did).
The woman we’d all cheerfully encircled, each holding a plastic cup of free tea, had told us, ‘We don’t call them “pains” any more, we call them “contractions”.’
The pain was unbearable. I wanted my Mommy. I was all alone in a strange cruel country with an alien being tearing around inside me (what was I doing having a baby in England anyway?). No one seemed to consider my predicament disturbing or unfortunate. No one even believed I was in labor. Jeremy was sent home – ‘false alarm’ – while I clenched my teeth in a prenatal ward, wrecking the goodnight’s-sleep of six-months’ pregnant women fearing miscarriages or still-births or feet-first deliveries.
The nurse who gave me an internal examination during a contraction said, ‘Don’t cry – it’ll just tire you our’. I cried. Another nurse suggested a bath, another told me to walk around. Extremely clean, I toured the fourth floor of the dark hospital in agony, clinging to walls and window-sills. I returned to the nurses who, having agreed that I was in labor, arranged for me to go down to the Labor Ward for an epidural. The lift wasn’t working. The lift-man said, ‘Lucky it’s not an emergency.’ I informed him that it was. Two floors down, I writhed on a bed for ten minutes, and then froze effortfully while an anaesthetist inserted a needle into my spine. I no longer feared paralysis, only pain. When the epidural took effect, I was plunged into an ecstacy of non-pain. At this point Jeremy turned up. It was clear to all present that he was not needed, so he went off to have a sleep in the wainting-room while I delitated.
My only sense of communion with the outside world during labor came from Hieronymus Bosch, for having imagined obstetrical hell before me. When the baby’s head lodged in my vagina, I assumed rather pessimistically that we would remain like that forever. The midwife urged me to be slow and gentle, but I secretly (?) pushed. Jeremy watched. A huge object – a tiny human body – slowly emerged from mine, and was placed on the belly that had kept it safe. She looked at me with dark hair like my mother’s. I loved this person, for such she suddenly seemed to be. I held her to me, I fondled the new little legs and arms, and the back that I already knew. At last I could touch her – at last I could love someone. A ferocious summer storm raged outside the already darkened room, as if the gods (or goddesses) acknowledged the significance of this birth. I said ‘Hello’.
uit: Sweet desserts - Lucy Ellmann
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