What I Thought I Knew: A Memoir (11 page)

It was heaven having my wonderful women friends all together. From grad school, college, friends from Julia’s elementary and pre-schools, theater and writing friends, my sisters. It was fun to sit upright all afternoon, and not have to lie down on my left side and drink Gatorade. It was fun to open presents. The three children, Julia and Sophie and Ben, were in charge of organizing the presents, which included lots of giggling and oceans of tissue paper. My friends were happy for me. I was out of the closet, I was accepting gifts for the baby, I was welcoming my friends’ congratulations.

It was the most natural thing in the world.

It was the happiest I’d been in nine months.

It was magnificently ordinary.

It was a baby shower.

It was a great party.

I was so happy.

Terror in the pit of my stomach. I’d thrown away the key to the escape hatch.

There are only two more classes in the semester. Remarkably I haven’t missed a single class. Tonight is the rehearsal for the final performance next Monday. It will be an informal performance in a small studio theater at The New School. Each student will perform ten minutes of his or her original solo work-in-progress, for an invited audience of friends.

After the rehearsal is over, I ask my students, “Why do people make theater? Why do you want to perform, and for whom?”

Dani: “My performance is a gift for the class.”

Miriam: “I’m going to invite my extended family over for dinner and make them watch my solo show about my two grand-mothers arguing over tea in heaven. After I perform, I won’t let them out till everybody puts this dumb feud to rest.”

Kayla: “I want to perform my piece for inner city black teens and for rich suburban white teens at the same time—Yeah, right. In my dreams.”

Jeremiah: “I’ll perform this everywhere, for everyone who will listen to me.”

 

 

At Dr. Rosenbloom’s insistence, I switch to a new doctor she recommended, at New York Hospital’s obstetrics clinic. “If the baby has medical problems, your insurance won’t cover it unless your doctor is in-network. You could incur costs you would never be able to pay off in your entire life.”

I like my new, in-network doctor, Barbara. I don’t have to tell her the whole story. She treats me like a regular pregnant woman, with no extra drama. She’s warm, confident. She speaks about my baby with great affection. I feel safe with her.

“It’s getting close to your due date, and you haven’t begun to dilate. We should be seeing some action down there. I want you to get out of bed and walk. Have sex if you want. Get things moving. This is it, the final stretch.”

I cup my left hand underneath my huge belly to support it, so it will hurt less. Walking a block feels like running a marathon. I get winded after a few steps and have to stop and rest. It’s thrilling and scary to be out of the apartment, making small talk with strangers and acquaintances, parents from Julia’s school, store owners who haven’t seen me all fall. I accept congratulations and pats on my belly.

 

 

Later, when Julia is asleep, I tell Michael, “My doctor says we can have sex . . . if you’re interested.”

“I’m very interested!”

We haven’t made love for three months. We’re out of practice and my belly keeps getting in the way, creating comic logistical challenges, until we assume the classic spoon position. It’s breathtaking and kind of scary when he enters me, and I’m soon transported into pregnancy-hormone-enhanced ecstasy. I lie in Michael’s arms in post-coital bliss.

“I kept thinking, ‘I’m going to push the baby out with my orgasms.’ ”

“And I kept thinking, ‘What if I’m poking the baby in the eye with my penis?’ ”

“No, you didn’t think that.”

“Yes, I did. I was worried my penis was poking her in the eye.”

The next moment we’re laughing our heads off, and I can’t decide which I love more, laughing with Michael or making love with him, and I’m so glad I don’t have to choose. I hope our baby will share our goofball sense of humor. Our laughter wakes Julia, and we cover ourselves with a blanket just in time, as she staggers into our room bleary-eyed to find out what’s so funny.

Scene 10

Sunday morning, after two days off bed rest, I woke up at 6:30 a.m. with contractions every five minutes.

This was going to be okay. I didn’t know what would happen the day after the birth, but this was today, I knew exactly what was going to happen and what I was going to do. I wasn’t waffling or ambivalent, thinking of alternatives and ways of backing out. I was absolutely clear that I was going to have this baby. It was December 11, not December 31. I wouldn’t have to face the Y2K global meltdown.

We hadn’t chosen a name yet, because we couldn’t agree on one. We had agreed to choose a name after the baby was born.

Tomorrow was my solo theater students’ end-of-semester performance. I asked my substitute to cover.

I called Barbara. Alas, today and tomorrow were her days off. I was assigned Dr. Tara Carson—a gorgeous young doctor whom Michael and I had met at the clinic’s open house. Tara had chatted with us at the open house, and made us both nervous when she bragged that she was dating a New York Mets pitcher, and had stayed out partying all night before working a two-day shift. All the doctors at the New York Hospital obstetrics department looked like glamorous TV actors—understudies for the cast of
ER.
Tara would be appearing tonight in the role of my ob-gyn.

Per Tara’s instructions, I called her with updates on the contractions throughout the day. She told me to spend Sunday night at home and come in Monday, or when the contractions were really hurting, whichever came first. Michael brought Julia over to Sophie’s, where Susan and Mark would take care of her.

I had a sleepless night—every contraction woke me. Monday at sunrise the contractions were quite painful. Michael and I cabbed to New York Hospital on York Avenue and Sixty-seventh Street.

“Your cervix hasn’t even begun to dilate,” Tara scolded, as if I hadn’t turned in my homework on time. Without warning, she dilated me by hand, using her fingers to stretch open the os, the hole in the cervix.

“OW! OW! THAT HURTS,” I screamed, as I felt my cervix ripping.

“You ain’t seen nothing yet. Now you guys walk back to the West Side, and keep walking. You got to get this thing moving. You’re nowhere near ready to deliver. Don’t come back until the contractions hurt so much you can’t stand it anymore.”

We walked the width of Manhattan, from the hospital by the East River, to Riverside Park on the Hudson River. Every few minutes, as a contraction rolled through, I groaned and doubled over, using Michael’s shoulder for support. We walked in Riverside Park, with a halting rhythm—walk, contraction, groan, double over, walk, contraction, groan, double over—punctuated by conversations with curious and congratulatory passersby, my spontaneous nosebleed, and a sunset over New Jersey.

We went to a coffee shop on Broadway for dinner, an absurd place to be in labor but Michael was very hungry, and in the ever-shorter moments between contractions, so was I. Squeezed into our booth at Café 83, with barely room for my stomach, I tried to silence my groans during contractions, between bites of a cheeseburger.

“When are you due?” asked the young blond sitting with her boyfriend at the table next to us.

“RIGHT NOW!” I roared through gritted teeth, gripping the table at an especially intense contraction. The couple quickly paid their check and left.

“You just ended their relationship,” Michael teased. “They were probably talking about how much they both want children, but you put the kibosh on that, didn’t you?”

Now I was laughing while having a contraction, a bizarre sensation. Michael enjoyed the spectacle, so he kept up a comic monologue while I alternated between laughing and roaring in pain. The biological imperative of going into labor, the adrenalin, the hormones, the cheeseburger, Michael’s sense of humor, the absurdity of the situation released me from my obsessive fears.

At six in the evening, when I couldn’t stand the pain, we went back to the hospital. I clung to the reception desk, doubled over, as my next contraction reached a new level of intensity.

“That’s more like it,” said Tara cheerily.

The nurse helped me into a cotton gown and into a high-tech bed, surrounded by machines and monitors. The young Indian anesthesiologist came in to give me an epidural. “I am going to insert a catheter into the space at the bottom of your spine. For one-out-of-a-hundred women, it will feel as though you have been shot in the back with a gun. If that is the case, your left leg will kick involuntarily.”

It felt like I was shot in the back with a gun, and my left leg kicked involuntarily. I’m the queen of the one-in-a-hundred chance. I guess dying in childbirth is next. The pain quickly subsided, but the violence of the sensation made my body pessimistic. I distracted myself from this newest trauma by wondering if the baby would have a penis or something penislike. What would it look like? Would it be an entirely new genital shape? Would it be nameable? Would the baby be nameable?

Michael stayed close to me. He charmed the nurses. He held water to my lips when I was thirsty. He stroked my shoulders and held my hand. He talked to me, and stopped talking when I wanted him to stop talking. He was fantastic. I felt entirely distant from him.

“I want to ask you a favor,” I said to the nurse. “When the baby is born, please don’t say ‘It’s a boy!’ or ‘It’s a girl.’ Dr. Christopoulos, from endocrinology, is going to look at the baby’s genitals when it’s born. I’d like her to tell me the baby’s gender.”

The nurse noted this on my chart, in case the next day’s nurse switched with her at midnight before the baby was born. I told her I hoped she didn’t have to show it to the nurse on the next shift. My contractions had started thirty-six hours ago. I was running out of steam, and I wanted to get it over with.

 

 

Things weren’t moving as quickly as my doctor wanted. She gave me a drug to induce labor. The epidural started wearing off. They dripped more into me. I hadn’t slept for two days. I hadn’t moved for three months—until today when I walked for miles. I watched my contractions on the monitor. Hours passed. The epidural wore off, and it hurt like hell. They dripped more painkiller and I had no awareness of my lower body. It wore off again, so that all I was conscious of was the pain in my lower body. Numb. Pain. Numb. Pain. Numb. Pain. . . . This cycle repeated, part of a polyrhythmic symphony of lights and beeps and contractions, my heartbeat, the baby’s heartbeat, my blood pressure tests, the crescendo and decrescendo of pain. Ten hours had passed since the epidural. At four in the morning I asked for a C-section. Tara said no.

 

 

The nurse told me to push. Michael told me to push. I couldn’t push. I was numb from the waist down. The idea of pushing had no physical meaning for me. I didn’t know how or where to push. Tara told the nurse to stop the painkillers. I felt the pain and the baby and the contractions, but I had no strength, and the pain was frightening. I didn’t know what I was pushing. My useless attempts to push bore no resemblance to the Lamaze-approved labor of the three women with different-colored hair in the movie.

“I’m going to give you an episiotomy.” I heard the snip through flesh. I was sad for my vagina. Two nurses and a doctor and Michael screamed at me to push. “I don’t know what to push, I don’t know where to push,” I cried.

“Push like you’re having an enormous bowel movement!” ordered Tara.

I could work with that. I had forty-five-years experience shit-ting, and my body remembered how to do it, even paralyzed from the waist down. “C’mon, c’mon, harder, like you’re having an enormous shit!” No painkiller. “Keep pushing! Just Push Push Push Push Push Push.”

At 5:30 a.m., on December 13, 1999, forty-seven hours after the contractions started, I gave birth.

“Umbilical cord’s around her neck. . . . She’s okay. She’s breathing.”

ACT III

Scene 1

—From
Little Finger of the Watermelon Patch,
a Vietnamese tale

 

 

There was no cry, no sound.

“APGAR score, four.”

“Alice, it’s a girl. Her genitals are fine,” the nurse said quietly.

That was good to hear.

Michael mopped the sweat from my forehead and hair.

The nurse called out the second APGAR score. Six.

They cleaned the baby, raised the back of my bed, and put her on my chest. Michael perched on the edge of the hospital bed with me, his large hand cradling our baby. I wished we’d chosen a name for her.

She was tiny. Her legs were folded tightly into her belly, making her look smaller still. Her skin was pale. Her red lips formed a miniature rosebud. Her one wisp of hair, wet and matted to her head, was nearly blond. Blue eyes. She had a large forehead and a small, sweet, funny-looking, lopsided face, as if her features had all slid down from her forehead into a puddle near her chin. She was a girl, with tiny, perfectly formed labia. She weighed exactly five pounds.

I was prepared for a penis, but somehow I wasn’t prepared for blond. I expected her to look Mediterranean, like me, with darker skin and hair.