Live Through This (33 page)

From the moment she found out she was pregnant, Amanda had taken on the mission of growing a healthy baby with a fervor I hadn't known was in her. She didn't just quit smoking and drinking, she weighed and considered everything that went into and onto her body—the organic fruit and the steamed vegetables; the herbal teas that she mixed up in quart jars and sipped all day;
the creams made of cocoa butter and hemp oil that she rubbed on her belly. Now, in the candlelight, I looked around the room: Stacks of cotton diapers she'd washed and folded, topped with new, sharp safety pins. Baskets of soft blankets she'd made herself and tiny baby clothes she'd found at used-clothing stores. She had cleaned every inch of the space, washed the sheets, vacuumed the rug, scrubbed the walls. Amanda had made this bedroom ready for her baby. And maybe all I could do now was assure myself that she knew what she was doing.

The candles on the table above me cast both light and shadow on her skin—in the tiny bathroom, she rocked back and forth, squatted, rose straight and still, then squatted again, while I knelt on the other side of the bathroom door, silent. Her skin was a color described in fairy tales: alabaster. I hadn't known such a shade until I saw it on my daughter. Marble white and smooth. Every inch of her was taut. Her breasts, her belly. Face, thighs. I was in such awe of this transformation from girl to mother that for a second I could almost release myself from the wild worries about my child giving birth when no one in the house had the experience to make sure it went well. But then a contraction took hold, the rocking started up again, and she groaned as deep as an old tree hit by a freezing wind. I closed my eyes, wishing this could just be over.

And soon enough, it was. Amanda's midwife, Elena, arrived a few minutes after eleven and found the baby's head had crowned. She coaxed Amanda out of the bathroom and onto the bed, while Stephanie and I stood next to the bedroom's French doors, open wide to the patio, holding hands, whispering to each other, trying not to be in the way. Trying not to panic.

Despite the midwife's prediction of a quick birth, the baby refused to come out. Not by eleven thirty, not by a quarter to twelve. The midwife pulled an oxygen tank and mask from her Mary Poppins bag of endless stuff, and she told Gabriel that the infant had been too long in the birth canal and that the heart rate had dropped too low. Elena leaned over the bed and put her hands on each side of Amanda's face, which was streaked bright pink from
effort and exhaustion. "Your baby has to come out now," she said.

"I'm too tired," Amanda whispered, her eyes closed, heavy and wet. "I have to rest."

"Too bad," Elena said. "You're the only one who can do this."

So Amanda pushed. Elena examined again, then shook her head. The baby hadn't budged: a brown patch of hair no larger than a half-dollar was still all that showed.

I looked at the phone on its cradle across the room and felt my hands itching for it. What kind of mother wouldn't get herself on it to call for help? Yet I didn't move. This was a decision that wasn't up to me, and though I didn't want to accept that, some stern part of me knew I had to.

Seconds before midnight, Elena—worried now, trembling herself, I noticed, and curt in answering the questions we threw at her—pulled Amanda to her feet to let "gravity do the work."

"This is it, Amanda," she said. "This has to be it. One last try."

She called the rest of us over. Stephanie, Elena explained, was to kneel on the bed and wrap her arms around Amanda's chest to hold her upright. Gabriel was to squat to the floor to catch the baby when he came. I hung back as Elena delivered staccato directions, thinking that all the jobs were taken and I could at least have the phone in my hands if things got even a tiny bit worse. If the baby hadn't come in two more minutes, I promised myself, I was going to make the call whether I was deemed meddler or not. But then Elena reached for my arm and pointed to the floor. She told me to sit still between my daughter's legs and hold the beam of a flashlight on the emerging baby.

Before I could think about the position this would put me in, I did what I'd been instructed. I sat at Amanda's bare feet with the metal shaft of the flashlight in my hand, the wet-earth smell of childbirth enveloping me, the pot of recently boiled water—full of clean washcloths—steaming the back of my shirt, and I tried not to think about how deep I was into my daughter's privacy. In a back corner of my mind was the fear that she'd someday consider my position at this moment an invasion, a lit firecracker to lob in my direction next time she was fed up with something I'd
said, something I'd done. I pushed that concern away and flipped on the light.

"One more, Amanda," Elena said as she turned toward the tight mound of belly, pressing the cup of the stethoscope into its steepest slope. Amanda groaned, bearing down. "No noise!" Elena shouted. "Put it all in the push. Everything you've got."

I trained the beam on the purple bulge between my daughter's legs. Instead of thinking about Amanda's own birth, instead of thinking about how much her body had changed since that day she was born or the change it was going through on this day, instead of thinking of all we had gone through as a mother and daughter to get here, I thought of the dozens of times I'd held the flashlight for my father while he fixed a broken pipe under the sink or a radiator hose in the car. "Give me my light!" he'd say if my arm drooped. I gave Elena her light, careful not to let my arm fall, while she pulled at the tissue around the baby's head, trying to release him from the grip of his mother's body.

There was a soft murmur of noise in the room, and from my spot on the floor I added to it, saying to Amanda what I thought needed to be said. That she could do this. That her baby needed her now. That I believed in her. "Amanda, Amanda," I said. She whimpered, a rabbit sound that hadn't come out of her since she was tiny. I held the flashlight steady with my right hand, and I laid my left hand over my daughter's cool, bare foot. Did she feel me there? I didn't know until, in one quick move, she raised her toes and lowered them again.

I heard a pop a second later, and a squished white-masked and tiny face appeared in front of me. From behind the flare of the light, I was the first one to see a forehead, eyes, a nose, a crop of hair. Elena reached around and wiped the baby with a soft swab, clearing mucus. His eyes squeezed tight against her touch, then opened to tiny slits. Even before his shoulders, before his arms and body, were born, Amanda's baby boy opened his eyes.

The next morning, Barry and I went to Amanda and Gabe's house early, after we thought they'd all be awake. We brought juice and
rolls and flowers. When I walked into the bedroom, I found Stephanie stretched on the bed with her sister, the sleeping newborn boy between them. Stephanie beamed up at me from the other side of the baby, both sisters delirious in their happiness, and they silently welcomed me into the first hours of this boy's life. Gabe was in the kitchen, making coffee and, now, chatting with Barry, and Amanda was recalling her labor, going over every detail of the long night we'd all just been through.

"When Elena got me on my feet," she said as I moved to the edge of the bed, "I couldn't go on anymore. I've never wanted to quit so bad in my life." She reached over to pick a fleck of dust off her baby's cheek, and his forehead wrinkled for a second before he sighed and settled back to deep sleep. Amanda rolled herself flat on her back and looked up at me standing next to her. The smell of her rose up to my face, startling me a little with the memory of my own first hours with newborn babies—the scent was of the first clean, sweet milk of motherhood and the last musky hint of childbirth. "At the end, I just made myself concentrate on Mom's voice," she said. "I kept telling myself to listen to what you were saying, Mom."

"What did I say?" I asked her, sitting down now. I couldn't remember anything but the most ordinary statements of encouragement—the same words everyone in the room was saying, Gabe and Stephanie and Elena.

Amanda reached over to put her hand around my wrist, wrapping her fingers and tugging at me a little. I leaned closer to my family on the bed. I breathed them in, children, grandchild, and then Stephanie reached over to hold me too, her hand just above Amanda's on my arm.

"Don't you remember?" Amanda asked me there in the soft hum of morning and in the glow of this first day, a day of change and possibility for every one of us. "You said, 'Amanda, do it for your baby.'"

This book has been a long time coming, so it's impossible to acknowledge here the many people who have helped along the way—

I am thankful for the support of my mother, Barbara Strickfaden, and her husband, Ed, and my father, Mike Gwartney, and his wife, Tore. Thanks, too, to siblings Cindy, Ron, Rebecca, and John. Dear friends Alice Tallmadge, Cheryl Crumbley, and Kathleen Kochan have kept me upright during difficult times—I'm indebted to them and others who befriended my family: Kathleen Holt and Alex Dupey, Abigail Gripman Capalby, Molly Hollister and Jerry Andrus, Mary and Brian Doyle, Megan Breen Leigh, Tom Gerald and Frances Scott, and "Richard and Jane," as they're called in the book (to protect their privacy), all loving adult friends to my daughters.

Thanks to Sandy Tolan, who produced our
This American Life
radio show and whose love and humor have often sustained us—the same for Alan Weisman and Beckie Kravetz.

My old writers' group allowed me to get first stories on paper, and other friends have offered support, particularly Magdalene Smith, Dan Raeburn, Anna Mills, Tracy Miller, and Barbara Ras. Elisabeth Ceppi and Sandra Morgen read early drafts and offered keen insight. Phillip Lopate and Sven Birkerts pushed me to dig in, do better. I am privileged to know them. Much gratitude to Bob Shacochis and Catfish, who offered just the right advice and who've many times buoyed me with their faith in the book.

Jon Garlinghouse provided years of good counsel, and I'm grateful that we could turn to the Catherine Freer Wilderness Therapy Program, Northwest Youth Corps, and especially to Robert Burkhardt and everyone else at Eagle Rock School. Thanks to Michael Collier and the Breadloaf Writers' Conference; the Hedgebrook Writing Colony; the Wurlitzer Foundation of Taos, New Mexico; Literary Arts of Portland. And to the students and faculty at Portland State University.

It's been my great fortune to work with Gail Hochman and Deanne Urmy.

Thanks to Gabriel, Otis, Erik, and Nick—young men who've become members of our family. And I am deeply grateful for the joy my grandchildren bring every time they walk in the door.

Not one word of this book would have been written if I hadn't felt my daughters' support behind me—behind this effort to get a complicated family story on paper. Amanda, Stephanie, Mary, and Mollie asked only that I be honest in the telling, and I have tried my best to do that. I hope all four girls consider this book a tribute to their strength and character, and a recognition of the friendship we've formed, dearest to me in the world.

Most of all, thanks to my husband, Barry Lopez, who has believed in me and in this book for eight years of writing and revising. He watches over me, and over the children and grandchildren, reminding me daily what it means to be protected and truly cherished.