Baby Love (17 page)

Insomnia. My new bedtime is five a.m. I watch TV, read, scour the Internet for information about what the hell I am supposed to be doing and feeling this week. I worry. Can I really do this? What will become of me? Will I be trapped and miserable? I organize. I throw papers away, I order what I call “organizational principles” from the Container Store and make pretty, chronologically ordered file folders full of contracts, notes, articles, bills. I shred documents that I wouldn’t want anyone else to see: medical records, first drafts, copies of tax returns.

I am up so much at night that it is starting to feel like day to me. Like I have collapsed the artificial line between day and night and I am living one long, seamless stream of life.

Another gift from Tenzin.

We nixed the postpartum-doula idea. We just don’t want to have to deal with another person. I wish I could judge how incapacitated I will be. Some women I’ve talked to can’t function for weeks and others get up after two days and do the grocery shopping. Where will I be on the spectrum? I have no idea. It all depends on the kind of birth I have.

In lieu of a doula, I figure I can get services lined up now so I won’t worry about certain things. Like bottles of water. Fresh produce. Housecleaning.

Mr. T is moving around a lot today, kicking and elbowing me, his knees and tush sticking out from my belly. I started rubbing the parts that I can feel, massaging them and talking to him while I rubbed. He loved it.

We went to meet Sonam’s backup doctor today, as required. When we arrived at her office in the Women’s Center of the hospital, the small waiting room was packed with pregnant women about to pop. The doctors were running forty-five minutes to an hour late. There were no windows in the office, and the room was hot and stuffy.

To my left was a young woman ten days past her due date who kept shrieking, to no one in particular, It won’t come out, it won’t come out. She was accompanied by her mother, who looked stonily at the ground as her daughter screamed. At one point, this young woman asked another woman if her placenta was going to get stuck, and what she should do to make sure it comes out. The other woman very nicely told her not to worry, it would come out right after the baby.

There was a woman with a huge attitude talking on her cell phone to the father of her child. She told him that he needed to buy the baby some clothes or some formula since he hadn’t done anything else for her the whole time she was pregnant. He said something and she said she didn’t care about all that, all she knew was that he better buy something for this baby. Then she clicked her phone shut and went back to reading her magazine.

A young couple sat down next to us. They could have been in high school. The guy kept his arm around the girl the whole time we waited. She flipped through a magazine and they read it together, laughing sometimes, reading parts out loud to each other. Besides Glen, the guy was the only other man in a room full of hugely pregnant women.

About fifteen minutes before we were called in, a woman came in with her baby in a portable car seat. Turned out she was one of Sonam’s patients. She said her birth went great, “You’re gonna have a blast,” which was the first time I had heard it put exactly like that. She also told me that it was all about the traveling car seat and that no, it wasn’t too heavy.

I asked her how she was doing, and she said good. She tore a little bit, but it was all healed, and her energy was starting to come back. She said she was sweating all the time because her hormones were all over the place, and that nursing was harder than she thought it would be, but other than that she was loving being with her baby and it was all so much more normal and natural than she thought it would be.

Which was a relief.

Then the “It won’t come out” woman asked her whether her placenta had come out on its own, or if she had to do something special to get it to come out, and the car-seat woman very patiently explained that no, you don’t have to do anything special, it just comes out on its own after the baby. And the “It won’t come out” woman nodded her head.

We were finally called in to meet with the doctor, who looked me over and said that for the most part everything looks fine and perfect and right on track, including the fact that I weigh 184 pounds. She said the low iron is still a problem. She’s going to look into iron shots as a possibility but in the meantime told me to keep eating the beef, which I assured her I am, in copious amounts, thanks to Glen.

When she left the room, I started crying. It was just so intense in there. All those women. That young girl, probably developmentally disabled, not knowing what’s going on. The tiny, airless office. Glen reminded me that we could be having the baby in the very nice, very airy hospital near our house. Which made me cry even harder.

I’ve started reading children’s books. The Berenstain Bears, Richard Scarry,
Goodnight Moon.
The books take me back to purity, simplicity, ease. I remember why these books were my best friends when I was a little girl. Everything gets worked out, people love each other, the world is good.

I am reading these to counterbalance the e-mails that have been flying back and forth between me and my mother. I ask her to apologize for the dreaded afternoon and the statement she threatened to send to
Salon,
and to acknowledge the ways she has hurt me over the years with neglect, withholding, and the ambivalence she seems to have about my race, relative privilege, and birth itself.

She writes back that she has apologized enough and that children should forgive their parents and move on. She tells me that she and all of her friends think that because I have asked for this apology, I have lost my mind. I write her that asking people, even one’s parents, to be accountable for their actions is the epitome of sanity, and that I am sorry that her friends, all of whom I know and love, don’t have the courage to stand up to her.

When I write that if she can’t apologize, I don’t want contact because I feel she is too emotionally dangerous to me and my unborn son, she writes that she won’t miss what we don’t have and that to her our relationship has been inconsequential for years. She writes that she has been my mother for thirty years and is no longer interested in the job. Instead of signing “your mother” at the end of the letter, she signs her first name.

After that e-mail, I lie in bed trying to imagine some circumstance that could cause me to tell my child that I no longer want the job of being his mother. I think about Michael Jackson’s mother, standing by his side in court as he responds to charges that he sexually molested children. I think about Scott Peterson’s mother, who maintains that her son is a good boy even after he’s been convicted of murdering his wife and child. Am I that awful, that I should no longer have a mother? Does telling my story the way I remember it make me a devil?

I try to imagine a circumstance that would lead me to tell my mother that I no longer want to be her daughter, that the job is just too draining, and I’ve found someone more suitable to take her place. When Glen walks in, I ask him to help me think, because, frankly, I am at a loss. I haven’t even seen my baby and I feel I would die for him, kill for him if I had to. If I hurt him in some way, I imagine I would apologize to him over and over again until he could hear me, because that’s what parents must do.

Glen sighs. It’s not rational, honey, he says gently. An irrational person can find an endless number of reasons to justify ending a parent-child relationship, but a rational person knows that nothing can break that bond and it’s madness to even try.

I am starting to think that giving the baby a Tibetan name isn’t a betrayal of family as much as it is a sign of maturity.

Glen and I were flipping through a magazine, talking about how many people are stunted in their development, hovering in an adolescent state well into their fifties and sixties, even until death. He defined adolescence as being overly concerned with the acceptance of peers, and fearful of rejection or confrontation with the adult world.

Which made me think of how few people break away from the expectations of their parents to live their own, authentic lives. Guilt and fear keep so many of us ensnared. Who can stand the emotional blowback that comes from choosing a different path?

If guilt and fear keep us from acting on our own beliefs and aspirations, and not acting on our own beliefs and aspirations keeps us in a state of arrested development, there are bound to be some serious problems. If we aren’t diligent in our efforts to mature, at some point cutting the cord of familial expectation, we become infantilized by it.

Sobering, but inescapable.

For research and recreation, I’ve been watching births on the Discovery Channel. It’s amazing how many of these programs there are.

So far they fall into two categories:

The first is the normal birth. The mom lies calmly with her feet in the stirrups. She’s completely epiduraled and everyone is just waiting, waiting, waiting until she’s dilated. She looks content, and people come in and kiss her head and whisper in her ear. When it’s showtime, the doctor comes in and peels back the sheet. He tells her to push. And push some more. Then we cut to commercial. Then we come back, and she’s almost done. One more push, one more, there it is, yes! Congratulations, Samantha, you have a boy, a girl, a healthy baby. And everyone starts crying. If it’s the home makeover show, this is when we cut to the almost-finished nursery, complete with gender-appropriate theme.

The second version is the complicated birth. In this segment, the mom does not look relaxed. She is on a gurney instead of a hospital bed. She looks panicked, in pain. She’s practically crawling out of her skin. Doctors surround her and shout orders to nurses. Friends and family are remote. Then the decision to cut, to deliver by C-section. Mom is rushed to the OR, where a sheet is thrown over her legs so she can’t see what’s about to happen. Seconds later a bloody infant is held up, followed by applause, relief, exhaustion. Mom gets to rest her cheek on the baby for a few seconds and then, before we can wonder about the gash in her belly, we go to commercial.

Glen says I shouldn’t watch, that it’s like watching movies about plane crashes before taking a trip. But I am compelled.

He doesn’t understand that I am measuring myself against the women I’m watching, trying to convince myself that giving birth is something I can actually do. When I watch the normal births, I say things to myself like, If she can do it, I can do it. I am tougher than she is. Oh, for God’s sake, that’s a piece of cake. When I watch the births with complications, I think:
Oh my God, I am never going to make it.

I want to see a home birth, a natural birth. I want to see what it looks like with no anesthesia and no emergency C-section. What channel is that on?

It finally hit me that all of this nesting, this obsession with the right bed, the right stroller, the right house, the right amount of money, is about trying to control an absolutely uncontrollable situation.

It’s about fear.

It is all in lieu of the actual work, which is to prepare to give birth the way I must prepare to die: alone. This morning at four forty-nine I realized that I alone am having this baby. Glen and the midwife will be in the room, but no one can come and do this for me, no one can make it not be hard, no one can make it not hurt. No one can bear the pain so that I don’t have to.

The notion of waiting for someone else to bear your burdens, to save you—pregnancy is a lesson in the futility of all of that.

I feel relief, as if a huge burden has been lifted and I can let go of the superficial aspects of this pregnancy.

I feel like an adult.

Woke up this morning after the long, detailed meeting with Sonam, Glen, and Natasha, the masseuse and birth assistant I chose to be my doula, full of energy. I made a big breakfast, cleaned the kitchen, worked on the textbook piece, drove Glen to a doctor’s appointment, went out to lunch, and kept going until five. I didn’t realize I was in an altered state until later, when it dawned on me that the odd tightening across my big belly was my first set of contractions.

At six, I had a primal urge to be as close to Glen as possible, preferably with my face buried in his armpit, but not before eating an entire chicken, a loaf of bread, and two bottles of mineral water. I know it seems like I am exaggerating, and when I read this in a year I’ll be like, Yeah right. I am not exaggerating. I really did eat that much. Tenzin, you have always been a healthy, strong, strapping boy.

Then at about two a.m., I had another very strong urge to complete all of my outstanding work. So I finished the textbook pieces and e-mailed them to the editor, and made a detailed list of the rest of the work to wrap up. I taped it on the wall next to all the other lists I’ve been compiling, and finally, after I read all of them over, tumbled into bed.

I dreamed that I went to the bathroom and looked down and there was my “bloody show.” When I thought,
Oh my God, it’s happening,
the baby slid out of me, right into the toilet.

Tonight I lay in bed thinking about the scarcity model versus the abundance model. For my whole life, I have operated as though there isn’t enough love to go around, that love is something that must be stockpiled, hoarded, guarded for fear of losing a few precious drops. But lately, maybe because I’ve been contemplating what life would be like if I had, gasp, two or even three children, I have been thinking about how, while there may never be enough time or money, there will always be enough love.

What if everyone could let go of the fear and territoriality that comes from trying to control the love supply? What if everyone realized that love is about giving, not getting? What if everyone realized all of these things before it was too late?