The Source of All Things (30 page)

There was a huge barrier to his plans for fatherhood, however. I knew that if I had kids, I would just screw them up. Not only did I have plenty of parent disqualifiers—I drank beer while driving,
dabbled in hallucinogens, and could live for weeks out of a truck—I was also the product of abuse. According to the National Criminal Justice Reference Service, this made me five times more likely than the average person to inflict the same horrors on my own kids. Thanks to Dad, I was statistically doomed not only to hug my babies when they were crying, but to console them by putting my hands down their underpants.

Having babies and caring for them was for someone loving and stable, with a stomach for carnal intimacy that included breast feeding, diaper changing, and, in some cases, placenta eating. That someone was not me.

Apparently, though, none of this mattered to Scout.

That night, high above the Continental Divide, he was already winging through the autumn sky, crossing the Pleiades and the other constellations, his star form dead or currently dying. When he saw me lying in a field of columbine husks, he thought I looked like the perfect place to stop his trajectory and settle in. Burning hot and full of energy, he dropped into my belly, ready to become a boy.

Nine and a
half months later, the day after Mother's Day 2001, Shawn and I drove to Steamboat Springs, Colorado. At thirty-eight weeks pregnant, I felt bigger than a helium balloon. Brimming with water, blood, and adrenaline, I knew that I was carrying a baby boy.

We cruised past the cattle ranches in Kremmling and the bald eagles perched on tree branches along the Colorado River. Tank and my sled dog Merlin rode in the back of the truck. Today's plan
was to hike, for hours maybe, after we met with our baby doctor, whom we already knew would be flippant and terse. A small-town obstetrician with time to kill, Dr. Schaller didn't seem to care that I'd gained thirty-five pounds despite obsessive overexercising and undereating.

At the clinic, a nurse came into the exam room, all smiles and questioning.

“How are you feeling?”

“Good, good.”

“How are the contractions?”

“Good, I think. I'm not sure I'm having them yet.”

“Are you nervous?”

This one I had to think about. Nervous wasn't the right word. Mortified, yes. Uncomfortable, certainly. A tankard moving through a sea of molasses, farting and burping and suffering fat ankles, esophagus burns, and hemorrhoids, hell yeah. Oh, and did I happen to mention that pregnancy had brought with it the added benefit of making me profoundly emotional? “I guess we're nervous.” I said. “Who wouldn't be, right?”

Shawn slipped his fingers through mine and smiled weakly. We were both scared out of our minds, because of the unknown, because we were small and young and unsure of ourselves, and because we'd decided—weeks earlier, after the first Lamaze class—that we'd rather wing the birthing process than hang out with a bunch of fat, boring pregnant people who would give up everything they love to become parents.

We are not like them,
we told ourselves.
We are strong, free, and independent! We are so connected to the rhythms of the earth that we don't need Lamaze! Let's go skiing instead!
(What we really meant—what
I meant, and Shawn went along with it—was that I was so sickened by the thought of focusing on my “area” in front of other people that I would rather have blundered my way through childbirth than sit in the living room of the local sheriff and listen to his wife say things like, “cervix,” “perineum,” and “vagina.”)

It states in my personal rule book that I never, ever discuss anything having to do with my period, ovulation, or contraception, and I remember wishing that everyone associated with my pregnancy had been given a copy so that they could do the same.

I had made a decision years ago to put a clamp over my sexual organs and seal the edges with a blowtorch. While my dad ground his hipbones into me, I built plutonium-enriched shields over my breasts, vagina, and uterus. Psychologically, this had the effect of making me feel as fortified as an army bunker and toxic to the touch. Physically, it made me alternately numb and torturously sensitive.

But on that day in May, none of that mattered. What mattered was that I was thirty-eight weeks into one of the least-prepared-for pregnancies in history. And sooner than I could imagine, I was going to have to coax a baby through an area so foreign to me it might as well have been the moon. Back in the doctor's office, the nurse wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around my fat upper arm, pumped the rubber ball, and counted my pulse with two fingers while my forearm turned purple. I practiced slowing my heart rate by holding my breath, smiling, and thinking of cherry Popsicles. When the red needle on the monitor stopped, the nurse frowned and made a note. She removed the cuff, rewrapped it, and pumped the ball again.

This time her fingers rested on the exam table, tapping the
crinkly white paper, tat-tat-tat. Her eyebrows strained toward each other as she waited for the result. When the needle paused, once on the systolic number and once on the diastolic, she wrote on her clipboard again. The third time she frowned, unwrapped, rewrapped, and pumped, I asked, “Am I dead?”

“Nooo, but did you bring your overnight bag?”

Oh, no
. “What?”

“I'm just wondering if you came prepared to stay. It's a long drive back to Granby, and you might be here awhile.”

Shawn and I looked at each other with hard, dilated eyes. We had no idea what this cryptic nurse meant, but we felt instantly like we needed to laugh, throw up, and cry, as it dawned on us that in a matter of hours, we would no longer be just Shawn and Tracy. We would be Shawn and Tracy and the baby we jokingly called Number Three until we saw him on the sonogram pictures and felt our hearts momentarily short-circuit, at which point we named him Scout. The nurse put the cuff next to me on the exam table and said, “Have a seat, both of you. You're not going anywhere.”

Two hours later we checked into Yampa Valley Medical Center. Tank and Merlin were still sitting in the back of the truck. At some point, Merlin would manage to jump out the window and run wild through the streets of Steamboat. An excellent tracker taking advantage of our distraction, she would find a fresh pile of steaming horse manure and roll in it before being picked up by the Steamboat dog catcher and landing in doggie jail. Meanwhile, Dr. Schaller would have come to the hospital to recheck my blood pressure, which now read 140 over 88. This is a great blood pressure if you are a 250-pound sixty-year-old who dines regularly on
cheese, butter, and beef. On an extremely active thirty-year-old it meant hypertension, which, left unchecked, could have been bad for Scout. We were staying in Steamboat until I pushed him out.

By the time Shawn called the dog catcher and realized Merlin had been locked up, I'd had my blood pressure taken for the fifth of possibly 120 times. I'd changed into a hospital gown that wouldn't close in the back because my stomach was too enormous. I'd called my parents, who were not invited to the birth, and Shawn's mother, Linda, who immediately began packing for a two-day stay. And Dr. Schaller had decided that induction was a good idea.

He asked me to lie back and spread my legs, good and wide, so he could see all the way up to my throat. He poked my cervix, which made me want to vomit, and then told me that I was days, if not weeks, from dilation. “You're not even softening,” he said, and I thought,
No shit, I'm not softening. I will never soften. I am a lead shell of fear
.

Fortunately, there are drugs to take care of that. Dr. Schaller spread some magical softening cream on my cervix, placed a gel tab of labor-inducing Pitocin inside, and left the room. I was relieved he left but then worried about the contractions he promised would come. I switched on the television and waited for a python to squeeze my belly. I continued waiting but nothing happened. The nurse watched my blood pressure rise and fall, creeping into the danger zone and back out again without explanation.

Several hours later, Linda arrived from Denver. She planted herself on a wooden chair directly across from my bed; I could see her smiling over the tips of my feet. The next time Dr. Schaller came in (twelve hours later, with more Pitocin), Linda had a pervert's-eye
view of my labia. Respectfully, she turned away, while the nurse checked me for softening. Hours of bad sitcoms passed. Linda smiled encouragingly, asked if I needed anything. I did: a temporary lobotomy. I began to retain water, taking it on like a capsizing boat. In photos I look like my brother, who weighed 220 pounds at the time. Sometime after midnight, I fell asleep to the muffled rhythm of Scout hiccupping in my belly.

The following morning arrived, and with it more devices, encouragement, and hope. Linda said, “This is the day, I know it!” And Dr. Schaller returned, carrying a long, plastic poker with a hook on the end. He explained that he would use the hook to break my water, which would kick labor into high gear. It took significant poking, but he persisted. With a sharp sting, my water bag broke, sending a burst of warm fluid down my inner thighs. Now the contractions would come, and with them, Dr. Schaller promised, a new boy.

He didn't lie. Within minutes of the manipulated water-breaking, the contractions arrived, violently and without warning, making me buckle in pain. Because of the induction, I was confined to bed, hooked up to a series of monitors that tracked my vital signs along with Scout's. All along, Scout had been a trooper, sleeping and gently swimming, moving a shoulder across my belly, jamming a knee into my spleen. I couldn't believe I would meet him in a couple of hours. I hoped he would like me as much as I already liked him.

Then—all of a sudden—there was trouble, as Scout's heart rate began to skip and flutter, weakening with each contraction. Summoned to my room, Dr. Schaller shoved an electrode into my uterus, fished around for Scout's head, and stuck a white pad
sprouting red wires to his temple. The snake-squeeze contractions continued, but furtively. When the nurse checked my cervix for the umpteenth time, she frowned and said, “You have to relax.” I wanted to relax, but I started to cry. Twelve hours after my water had been broken, I was dilated one centimeter. The nurse said, “Don't worry, one way or another, we'll get this baby out of you.”

But I did worry.

I worried that I had made the shield too strong. I worried that even now, because of something my dad did twenty years ago, I was too damaged to experience this joy. How could I tell the nurse and Linda and Shawn that there was no way a baby could get past the clamp? How could I tell them that it is a medical impossibility for something so bright and beautiful to move through a place that is so black and blue?

In the end, I couldn't—tell them, or deliver Scout vaginally, even though for a few electrifying minutes, it seemed like I might. At 2:30 a.m., on the morning of May 18, 2001, I was overcome with the urge to push. At first I whispered it: “I need to push.” And Shawn, unknowing, said, “Yes!” But something told me I needed Dr. Schaller's permission. I held off until I was overcome again and then shouted, “When can I push?! When is it okay to push?”

All at once, it was as if an alarm went off in my room. The nurse rushed out and ushered Dr. Schaller in. “Your cervix is hard as a rock,” he said, stating the obvious. “If you push, you could rupture it, which could kill you and your son. What you have to do is wait and resist the urge to push, and maybe something will start happening.

“Then again, maybe it won't. There's no guarantee that you won't have contractions for several more hours and still never fully
dilate. The baby is fine, we're monitoring him, but you've been going at this for days. You're exhausted. Your uterus is worn out. If you want to, we can take him by Cesarean. If you're rea—”

“I'm ready,” I said, cutting him off and looking around for Shawn. He was standing right next to me, holding my forearm. “Is it okay if I'm ready?”

Shawn's eyes filled with tears. He squeezed my hand and nodded.

At three a.m.,
the sun has not yet poured over the horizon, and it's still dark enough to count a million stars. This was when I told Dr. Schaller to cut Scout out of my body. Shawn put scrubs on over his rumpled clothes and walked alongside the stretcher as they wheeled me to surgery. A curtain dropped in front of my face, so I couldn't see them making the incision, which is in the shape of a half-smile a few inches below my belly button.

On the operating table I felt the doctors digging into my uterus, rooting around for Scout. He was lodged deep in my pelvis, his shoulders in a tight, determined hunch. It took serious tugging, but they lifted him out of the blood and entrails and put him up to the light. He was the most perfect baby you've ever seen, except for one thing: when they held him in front of me, I noticed that the top of his head was pointed in the shape of missile.

He had only been trying to move out of my body and into the world.

He had been interrupted by damage already done.