1. It is infinite and regenerative.
I wonder if we are made to love. Or maybe we are and there is just so much that cuts us down and tears us apart in this world that our instinct to love and be loved gets the shit beat out of it on a daily basis. And if we don’t take care of it, nurse it back to health, it just dies a long, awful death (like Cato in The Hunger Games. Have you read that shit yet? Speaking of destroying ones ability to love…). Let’s assume that we are made to love, since as innately social creatures we are made to form alliances, then that would mean that some pretty intensely hurtful shit would have had to happen to us for our nature to do a 180. I know it’s wack and frowned upon within anthropological intellectual circles to make generalizations about entire groups of people (although I’ll be the first one to admit that we Puerto Ricans have a propensity to steal bikes so keep your fixies on lock) but I do think humans are made to love. Why else would babies stay babies for so long? Horses are like born walking (right? or something like that) yet Odessa is going to be a year old in a week and still hasn’t taken more than two steps on her own. She needs more guidance. And one cannot guide without love. This is at the heart of what bell hooks had to say Teaching to Transgress. Teaching and guiding are acts of love because they encourage our intellectual and spritual growth. How can I want Odessa to learn and run and talk and sing and read without loving her. These are gifts. We do not give gifts to those we don’t love. So yes, human beings are meant to love.
So why then have we seen more violent deaths on this island in 2012 than in any other previous year? Why have I just read another article about another woman being murdered by her ex-husband in front of her child? (fuck) Why did I mark hatred into my own skin? Baby Odessa, mi amor, these are not questions; these are conversations that last as long as lifetimes. We are only just starting to have them now.
And here is what I have to say so far. I remember one time when watching you sleep, I whispered to your father, I just love her so much that I can’t even fathom having enough love for another child. Not that I wouldn’t love that next baby, that little sibling of yours whom you too will love like crazy, but that christ my love for you is so fucking big I can’t imagine it getting any bigger. Like imagining what’s outside of the universe. But then it hit me hard and warm, love is just like the universe in that it is infinite. That’s why we can’t imagine it but you know it and you know that there will never ever be a day we you crash into its limits. And just like the universe, it is so easy to forget that we are a part of it, that it is always there but once you look up at Venus slowly (but really it’s so fucking quick!) doing her best to eclipse that big fat sun, you remember the universe and you feel every particle of it on your lucky skin. You remember love, see it everywhere, feel it pressing against your body as it grows ever bigger.
2. It is transformative.
Yesterday I was a healer. Baby had a fever and cried and cried and cried. It’s those teeth. Two more growing in and they look like the first crocuses peeking out of the cold snow. Her fever reached 103.2 scary degrees y se puso bien monguita. No tight grip around your shoulder as you carry her on your hip. No standing up tonight just collapsing into a hot and sad little heap of child. Josue and I took her temperature like mom and dad used to, one of us holding baby on the lap, the other putting the thermometer in the fundillo and then squeezing the fundillo shut so baby can’t wriggle her way out of this awful procedure. I stroke her fine baby hair as she fusses.
Yesterday, she wouldn’t really eat but she knew her body needed mine. And I swear I got no more than twenty minutes of sleep at a time because she woke up so many often to roll over and nurse. When she rolled off my arm and back into sleep, I could still feel the hot emptiness where her head just lay.
Yesterday I healed my baby with my touch, with my presence, with my body. That healing power, the desire to heal, the fear and worry that I couldn’t heal, and the empowerment after seeing that I can never existed before Odessa. Before my love for Odessa. I am a healer now when before I was only looking to be healed. And fuck was I looking for it in the wrong places. I think of so many times I disrespected my body or allowed other people to and now here is this child, my child, who needs my body to grow stronger. This love has changed me.
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Monday, June 4, 2012
Birth and Rebirth
Prologue: Morning Prayers (May 2011)
Mostly the mornings are slow. We wake up without hurry. We feel the heat of the rising sun on our eyelids and blindly reach out to fold ourselves into each other's arms. If it’s a particularly wonderful morning, I’ll wake up already there and he will be kissing my shoulders. Lately, he likes to be spooned so he can feel the baby’s kicks and punches on his lower back. I like this too. I run my fingers through his greying chest hair and get to practice at being a protector. Sometimes, when I am the one being held, I look down at this heap of child growing within me. Are her eyes open or closed? Does she also like waking up to the sun?
On these unhurried mornings, I wonder how many scars he can count. I wonder how many scars are in fact there. And I love this man with his arms around me for never asking. For just knowing and never pressing me to explain the highways of hurt that criss-cross the map of my skin.
And I am grateful. For holding the one I love in my arms and catching his jugular vein pulsing up and down on the side of his miraculous neck, for watching feet and hands make their way across my belly as they make more space of my skin. I wake up and watch life and everything life is about: a baby moving its divinely created limbs, a vein pumping blood from heart to head.
Birth Story (June 2011)
The water breaking at 7:20am was a warmth leaking from in-between my legs onto the golden yellow sheet with the hole in it where Josue stabbed the bed with the knife I last used to cut myself (why do you do this to yourself, he screamed?). I instantly opened my eyes. It was the only unfamiliar thing. These fuchsia walls and the white ones next to them I’ve seen before. The buzz of the mosquitoes. The whir of the fan and the balls of dust holding on to its grill by a single stubborn strand. The heat one feels on her skin as soon as she is aware that she is conscious. All familiar things. But not this. The water breaking came alone, without being introduced by the contractions. The water breaking didn’t even bring the contractions along.
The baby’s name had always been Odessa.
The unannounced and unaccompanied leaking was just one of my problems. The other was the fact that Josue didn’t know about it because he was sleeping downstairs without me. A fight on Sunday afternoon that took Sunday night and Monday morning captive too. Screaming in the car. A frustrated boyfriend and a crying girlfriend. Silence. The kind that threatens to shatter relationships. A baby unborn who made a decision to help her parents: break that silence/break out of this womb.
She always wished money didn’t exist so her parents wouldn’t fight about it.
The night before, I thought I had decided to give birth without Josue, right here in this attic with the circle window like an old wooden ship and the lizards that hop in and out, leaving their white-tipped turds behind them. In the hours before the fight, I knew something was coming. I woke up, more in love with Josue than ever. He was glowing. And as he got up to prepare himself for a long bike ride with a friend, I watched him, feeling his glowing light inside of me. I stood in bed the entire day, touching my pregnant body, being grateful for the skin that graciously stretched to make room for another and knowing that Josue’s light was a sign that I was about to give light too.
But now that it was happening, I wanted to be in Josue’s gentle spoon. I wanted his hands to be the ones to pull her into this world. I wanted to hear him call me mamisonga, to tell me that he loved me. So I went downstairs to our bedroom and told him about the waters breaking. And he didn’t know what to do. And I told him I needed him to apologize to me. But he wouldn’t because he didn’t think he did anything wrong.
“Why is this so hard for you?” Water everywhere.
“Why can’t you just say it so I can give birth without distractions or negativity? I just want our baby to be born in peace.”
Josue stood his ground until the floor beneath him collapsed with the realization that very soon he would be a father. That is when he pulled me toward him and kissed me. He told me that he loved me and that he was sorry. I laid in his arms with my cheek to his chest, feeling the hair underneath it and loving him too, not caring about the sincerity of his apology.
The contractions never came. Eventually, the midwife’s assistant left. Josue’s family left, too without another member to add to it. And then the midwife came and prepared us for a hospital birth just in case she was not able to deliver the baby at home like we wanted.
I half-listened. Hospitals are no place to start a life, I thought (I knew). Hospitals separate you from the people you love. The people you love always think they are loving you by sending you to a hospital. But you cannot feel love through latex gloves. Or taste it as you swallow the pills placed onto your quivering tongue. Love does not drip into your veins from an IV. You do not sleep alone and cold on over-starched sheets on a reclining bed if you are loved. God damn it. My baby would not be born in a hospital.
Yet the midwife continued to urge us. We said no and eventually she left us too. And then Josue and I were alone. There were no contractions but there was the baby’s heartbeat, steady and fast and beautiful. We measured it every half hour to make sure she was okay. Between 140 bpm and 160 bpm: good. Anything higher or lower than that: get your asses to the hospital. In Puerto Rico, they give your baby just twelve hours to start to come out if your water has broken without any contractions. In other places they wait a day maybe two or three. Why do we rush things? It had taken nine months for her to grow enough inside of me to be able to leave. It had taken me years to decide to live for something other than myself.
Give her some space. Let her feel her intuition for the first time.
In the morning we wake up and wait for contractions. We make the ginger tea a lot stronger now, drink it and get dressed slowly. We kiss. Josue rubs my belly. We do not pack a bag with our toothbrushes, shampoo, contact lens solution and a gender neutral baby outfit because even though we decide to go to the hospital for an ultrasound so we can know just how much amniotic fluid I have lost, we also decide to run right out of there if those doctors try to make me stay. It would be an heroic escape. I’d jump off the gurney, karate chop the nurse in her hairy neck, kick the blue-masked doctor in the stomach, set the babies in the nursery free, light fire to the nurse’s station, grab Josue by the hand and kiss him long and hard as the oxygen tanks blow up in the background and doctors run around screaming as their precious information charts turn into useless piles of ash.
I was not going to give birth in a hospital. We had it all figured out.
Then we ran out of options. The midwife refused to deliver our baby. There are protocols she must follow, blame she must avoid. I had given up on my image of the midwife as some kind of feminist warrior. She proved herself to be just another person with a job, another person with an ass to cover. The doctors and nurses wanted us to stay, didn’t understand why we wouldn’t. How did it get to this? I know my body. My baby is fine. I am fine. Why is no one listening? My mouth is moving, my lips are forming words but there is no sound. This must be the case because no one is hearing me. I am an informed woman who knows her body but my opinion doesn’t matter, what I am feeling doesn’t matter. No I won’t take off my clothes. I won’t take out my nose-ring. Get your fucking IV away from me and I will not sit in your wheelchair. I am not sick, stupid, or paralyzed.
I am a strong woman. I am a beautiful woman. My body is sacred. My body knows what to do.
I want to see Josue. They won’t let me because I haven’t been checked in. I haven’t been checked in because I am not giving birth here. No one understands me and I have one of those moments where I wonder if it’s my Spanish. I know it gets bad when emotions get involved. It’s hard to be angry in Spanish. It’s hard to be a smart, capable woman, who can defend herself, who has read about her options and knows what the fuck pre-labor rupture of membranes is in Spanish. But there is no language barrier. They don’t understand me because they can’t understand why a woman would think she knows her body better than a man who has read about her body in pre-highlighted, used medical textbooks. Where is Josue? There are four colors in this room: chrome, white, beige, and light blue. The fluorescent light makes them all too bright and harsh. These are not the colors of my womb. I don’t want to welcome my baby into this world. Where is Josue?
The doctor comes in, disheveled and uninterested and in a hurry. The first thing he says to me is that I need a cesarean section because I have lost too much amniotic fluid and too much time has passed since my water broke. What he didn’t know was that my water had broken way before he thought it did. We lied to him so I wouldn’t be forced to do anything I didn’t want to, like undergo a cesarean section.
When I fight back he raises his voice and calls me “una problematica.” He tells me my baby won’t be able to be born vaginally because she is too high up in my womb. He tells me that if I give birth vaginally, the baby will die and it will be my fault and that even if she is born alive she will be born with a horrible infection and will need to stay in the hospital on antibiotics for ten days. Finally Josue is allowed to come in and when he does the doctor says, “talk to her; she’s being difficult” and tries to reason with him. When I interject, the doctor ignores me. Suddenly the self-empowering birth I had envisioned for the past few months had turned into another battle against machismo.
I am a strong woman. I am a beautiful woman. My body is sacred. My body knows what to do.
I tell everyone to leave the room so Josue and I can be alone. And there we are. I am crying and he is holding me and baby’s heart keeps beating just as it should.
But then I remember to breathe. And so I do and I remember that this is not the first decision I have made for my child. I have been making decisions, good decisions, about her and with her since she first began to grow in my womb. I have been a mother concerned for her baby and the world her baby will come into for thirty-seven weeks now. And I want the birth of this baby to mimic the way I want the world to be. In this birth there will be no bullying, no fear-mongering, no intimidation.
This baby will be born freely and into freedom.
Throughout my whole pregnancy, I listened to cues from my baby and my body. Her brain secretly sent signals to mine, like best friends passing notes in class. We communicated through chemical reactions for months and now I knew she was saying that she could do this, that we could do this. Why was I doubting my daughter’s first attempt at self-realization? She was going to come out of me on her terms. She would not be cut out and pulled out of me. The doctor would have to save his scalpel for some weak-willed sucker of a baby. This one is a fighter and has stood up for herself since the very first time someone tried to fuck with her.
In between each moment of indescribable pain was a moment of perfect peace. And in those seconds of silence when the walls of my body were not collapsing in on themselves, I tried not to think about and be afraid of the contraction that would soon come to paralyze me again. It was an exercise in being in the now. Yet it was urgent. I had no time to find the now, like with the few times in my life I’ve meditated in the wilderness or in yoga class. If I missed the opportunity to enjoy this miraculously painfree moment, I would have to wait through another round of contractions to get a second chance. Never before in my life had the desire to feel the pleasure in a moment of peace been so important. So I drank it all in like water.
Although I knew I must have been getting some progress done, I also felt like this was never going to end. And then, using all my energy to open my mouth and push out words, I did what I said I never would, I asked for an epidural. The Wonderful Doula asked me if I was sure. She told me that I may not be able to feel the contractions and wouldn’t know when to push. I said I was sure. I knew I was supposed to be able to do this without it. I knew that thousands and thousands of women around the world do this without it. But I didn’t care. I tried not to feel like less of a woman, like a disappointment, like I had failed the natural childbirth movement in Puerto Rico. And the nurse with the face that said she hated that I was making her do her damn job came in with a needle and gave me the shot.
I didn’t have time to feel it. Within five minutes, the baby made it clear that it was time to push. In our birth preparation classes, I always wondered how I would know when the baby was ready to come out. How would I know when to push? But once I felt a big baby head pushing down against my vagina, I knew it was time to place that head into the hands of the man who put it there in the first place. Josue. Josue, thank God you are here with me and looking into my eyes.
The Wonderful Doula told the stank nurse I was ready to push and the doctor came in to see if I knew what I was talking about. When he saw for himself that I knew a baby was about to burst out of me, he and the nurse began to prepare the room for another person to join it. In that moment, I wished there were two of me: the me on the bed pushing and another one sitting on the metal stool where the doctor was, watching the arrival of the person that had been living inside of me for the past nine months or so. I wished that second me could see the baby’s head peaking out and then shrinking back in. The second me would tell the nurse to shut up because her saying “largo largo largo largo largo” was annoying, unromantic, and not what the first me on the bed wanted her baby to hear as she made her way into the world. The second me would squeal in happiness when after three long hard pushes, the baby’s head would be completely out of my body (two eyes! one mouth! one nose! oh the nose just like Josue’s! two ears and lots of hair!). The second me would hold that head in her trembling hands and Josue would be waiting for the warm and slippery body to fill his up. Then when it did, the second me would marvel at the skinny little arms and legs that sprang to life as soon as they were given a little room and the tiny voice that cried out as soon as it breathed in the cold air, and finally the puffy vagina that let her know that the person dancing around inside of her, hiccuping inside of her for the past few months had always been Odessa Liliana.
Epilogue: Of Mothers and Scars (September 2011)
She is ten weeks old now and has the most beautiful smile in the world. I know the inside of her mouth and the bottoms of her feet. She falls asleep on my chest and mimics my breathing. Nothing is better than her warm new skin on mine. In these moments before we both go straight off the cliff of sleep, I measure how much she has grown. When she first fell asleep on my chest, that first day we brought her home, she barely reached my belly button. I almost couldn’t feel her six pound body on mine. What is six pounds? The biggest sack of sugar at the store is five. The pernil my parents get for Christmas is always about ten. The bag of onions imported from Norway on sale at the supermarket is three. This is a miracle and it is six pounds one ounce. This is the weight of my life changed.
She doesn’t mind the scars on my arms when she nuzzles into them to nurse. Nor does she care about the ones on my thighs when she leans her back against them as we play with our hands. It’s s funny thing to “be strong for” someone else. If that means promising to not be depressed anymore, I can’t do it. I don’t want to mask my fear, sadness, or anger in front of her. I want her to know that I am a full human being with a wide range of emotions. I want her to know that I struggle with depression, that every minute of every day I have to choose not to let that depression consume me. So if “being strong for” Odessa means making that decision more often, I suppose I can do that. She deserves a mother who knows she deserves to live and be happy.
I don’t know how I will answer her on that day she asks me where these marks on my body came from. Will I tell her everything right then and there? Will she be too young to understand? What does too young to understand even mean? I feel as if everything can be explained to kids as long as you explain it to them in their terms, right? The dismally non-confrontational coward in me wishes that somehow all these scars will disappear before we get to the point where Odessa has developed enough cognitive ability to turn the words in her head into coherent questions. And what about her friends? What if they ask her and she explains and they don’t get it? Do I care if her friends think I’m a freak? I do if that means they make fun of her for it.
She is asleep now. And I take a break from writing to watch her chest grow and shrink with every breath she takes, the air from the fan blow through her fuzzy hair, and her lips curve into secret smiles that only make sense in her dreams. I take a break to imagine us both at the beach, the place where I am most uncomfortable about the visible hurt on my body. I imagine us both sitting at the shore, our legs outstretched, she sitting in between mine and a pile of sand, rocks, and shells in between hers.
We mostly go to the beach at night. I hold her in my arms and Josue and I watch the lightening storm over the Atlantic just a few miles out or we watch the massive cruise ships, now just dots of yellow light, wasting gasoline as they drag themselves lazily from one Caribbean paradise to another. We walk down the shoreline. I feel her in my arms. I feel my feet forcing the sand underneathe them to give a little, the cool nighttime ocean on my ankles, her breath on my neck. I hold her and feel her weight. I feel like a mother. And I imagine all the mothers that have walked on this shoreline, babies on their hips, wishing to the same stars dangling above me now that every moment that comes after this one will be just as perfect. Taino women who protected their children from the monsters that came to these shores, African women who protected their children from the monsters that forced them to these shores. Women on hard-earned vacations, women from the projects down the street. I feel like a mother. And that feeling is heavier than the weight of any scar on my skin.
Mostly the mornings are slow. We wake up without hurry. We feel the heat of the rising sun on our eyelids and blindly reach out to fold ourselves into each other's arms. If it’s a particularly wonderful morning, I’ll wake up already there and he will be kissing my shoulders. Lately, he likes to be spooned so he can feel the baby’s kicks and punches on his lower back. I like this too. I run my fingers through his greying chest hair and get to practice at being a protector. Sometimes, when I am the one being held, I look down at this heap of child growing within me. Are her eyes open or closed? Does she also like waking up to the sun?
On these unhurried mornings, I wonder how many scars he can count. I wonder how many scars are in fact there. And I love this man with his arms around me for never asking. For just knowing and never pressing me to explain the highways of hurt that criss-cross the map of my skin.
And I am grateful. For holding the one I love in my arms and catching his jugular vein pulsing up and down on the side of his miraculous neck, for watching feet and hands make their way across my belly as they make more space of my skin. I wake up and watch life and everything life is about: a baby moving its divinely created limbs, a vein pumping blood from heart to head.
Birth Story (June 2011)
The water breaking at 7:20am was a warmth leaking from in-between my legs onto the golden yellow sheet with the hole in it where Josue stabbed the bed with the knife I last used to cut myself (why do you do this to yourself, he screamed?). I instantly opened my eyes. It was the only unfamiliar thing. These fuchsia walls and the white ones next to them I’ve seen before. The buzz of the mosquitoes. The whir of the fan and the balls of dust holding on to its grill by a single stubborn strand. The heat one feels on her skin as soon as she is aware that she is conscious. All familiar things. But not this. The water breaking came alone, without being introduced by the contractions. The water breaking didn’t even bring the contractions along.
The baby’s name had always been Odessa.
The unannounced and unaccompanied leaking was just one of my problems. The other was the fact that Josue didn’t know about it because he was sleeping downstairs without me. A fight on Sunday afternoon that took Sunday night and Monday morning captive too. Screaming in the car. A frustrated boyfriend and a crying girlfriend. Silence. The kind that threatens to shatter relationships. A baby unborn who made a decision to help her parents: break that silence/break out of this womb.
She always wished money didn’t exist so her parents wouldn’t fight about it.
The night before, I thought I had decided to give birth without Josue, right here in this attic with the circle window like an old wooden ship and the lizards that hop in and out, leaving their white-tipped turds behind them. In the hours before the fight, I knew something was coming. I woke up, more in love with Josue than ever. He was glowing. And as he got up to prepare himself for a long bike ride with a friend, I watched him, feeling his glowing light inside of me. I stood in bed the entire day, touching my pregnant body, being grateful for the skin that graciously stretched to make room for another and knowing that Josue’s light was a sign that I was about to give light too.
But now that it was happening, I wanted to be in Josue’s gentle spoon. I wanted his hands to be the ones to pull her into this world. I wanted to hear him call me mamisonga, to tell me that he loved me. So I went downstairs to our bedroom and told him about the waters breaking. And he didn’t know what to do. And I told him I needed him to apologize to me. But he wouldn’t because he didn’t think he did anything wrong.
“Why is this so hard for you?” Water everywhere.
“Why can’t you just say it so I can give birth without distractions or negativity? I just want our baby to be born in peace.”
Josue stood his ground until the floor beneath him collapsed with the realization that very soon he would be a father. That is when he pulled me toward him and kissed me. He told me that he loved me and that he was sorry. I laid in his arms with my cheek to his chest, feeling the hair underneath it and loving him too, not caring about the sincerity of his apology.
*
We waited for the contractions. We called the midwife and she sent her assistant to help massage them out of me, accompany me as I walked them out of me. Josue made me ginger tea and called his mother. She came over with Josue’s sister and his niece, the one who had talked to my belly just the night before, coaxing the baby out of the comfort of my womb. She told me she wanted to be there for the birth to help me because, as she said, “eso duele. Un poquito en el totito.” The contractions never came. Eventually, the midwife’s assistant left. Josue’s family left, too without another member to add to it. And then the midwife came and prepared us for a hospital birth just in case she was not able to deliver the baby at home like we wanted.
I half-listened. Hospitals are no place to start a life, I thought (I knew). Hospitals separate you from the people you love. The people you love always think they are loving you by sending you to a hospital. But you cannot feel love through latex gloves. Or taste it as you swallow the pills placed onto your quivering tongue. Love does not drip into your veins from an IV. You do not sleep alone and cold on over-starched sheets on a reclining bed if you are loved. God damn it. My baby would not be born in a hospital.
Yet the midwife continued to urge us. We said no and eventually she left us too. And then Josue and I were alone. There were no contractions but there was the baby’s heartbeat, steady and fast and beautiful. We measured it every half hour to make sure she was okay. Between 140 bpm and 160 bpm: good. Anything higher or lower than that: get your asses to the hospital. In Puerto Rico, they give your baby just twelve hours to start to come out if your water has broken without any contractions. In other places they wait a day maybe two or three. Why do we rush things? It had taken nine months for her to grow enough inside of me to be able to leave. It had taken me years to decide to live for something other than myself.
Give her some space. Let her feel her intuition for the first time.
In the morning we wake up and wait for contractions. We make the ginger tea a lot stronger now, drink it and get dressed slowly. We kiss. Josue rubs my belly. We do not pack a bag with our toothbrushes, shampoo, contact lens solution and a gender neutral baby outfit because even though we decide to go to the hospital for an ultrasound so we can know just how much amniotic fluid I have lost, we also decide to run right out of there if those doctors try to make me stay. It would be an heroic escape. I’d jump off the gurney, karate chop the nurse in her hairy neck, kick the blue-masked doctor in the stomach, set the babies in the nursery free, light fire to the nurse’s station, grab Josue by the hand and kiss him long and hard as the oxygen tanks blow up in the background and doctors run around screaming as their precious information charts turn into useless piles of ash.
I was not going to give birth in a hospital. We had it all figured out.
Then we ran out of options. The midwife refused to deliver our baby. There are protocols she must follow, blame she must avoid. I had given up on my image of the midwife as some kind of feminist warrior. She proved herself to be just another person with a job, another person with an ass to cover. The doctors and nurses wanted us to stay, didn’t understand why we wouldn’t. How did it get to this? I know my body. My baby is fine. I am fine. Why is no one listening? My mouth is moving, my lips are forming words but there is no sound. This must be the case because no one is hearing me. I am an informed woman who knows her body but my opinion doesn’t matter, what I am feeling doesn’t matter. No I won’t take off my clothes. I won’t take out my nose-ring. Get your fucking IV away from me and I will not sit in your wheelchair. I am not sick, stupid, or paralyzed.
I am a strong woman. I am a beautiful woman. My body is sacred. My body knows what to do.
I want to see Josue. They won’t let me because I haven’t been checked in. I haven’t been checked in because I am not giving birth here. No one understands me and I have one of those moments where I wonder if it’s my Spanish. I know it gets bad when emotions get involved. It’s hard to be angry in Spanish. It’s hard to be a smart, capable woman, who can defend herself, who has read about her options and knows what the fuck pre-labor rupture of membranes is in Spanish. But there is no language barrier. They don’t understand me because they can’t understand why a woman would think she knows her body better than a man who has read about her body in pre-highlighted, used medical textbooks. Where is Josue? There are four colors in this room: chrome, white, beige, and light blue. The fluorescent light makes them all too bright and harsh. These are not the colors of my womb. I don’t want to welcome my baby into this world. Where is Josue?
*
For some reason I decide to change out of my clothes and into the blue paper gown. Now I match the room. The nurses play nice, passive-aggressively asking me if I want to do what they need me to do. “Me dejas ponerte el suero?” “Puedes quitarte la pantalla en la nariz?” It makes me feel like an oppositional child or like a bear that escaped from her cage in the zoo.The doctor comes in, disheveled and uninterested and in a hurry. The first thing he says to me is that I need a cesarean section because I have lost too much amniotic fluid and too much time has passed since my water broke. What he didn’t know was that my water had broken way before he thought it did. We lied to him so I wouldn’t be forced to do anything I didn’t want to, like undergo a cesarean section.
When I fight back he raises his voice and calls me “una problematica.” He tells me my baby won’t be able to be born vaginally because she is too high up in my womb. He tells me that if I give birth vaginally, the baby will die and it will be my fault and that even if she is born alive she will be born with a horrible infection and will need to stay in the hospital on antibiotics for ten days. Finally Josue is allowed to come in and when he does the doctor says, “talk to her; she’s being difficult” and tries to reason with him. When I interject, the doctor ignores me. Suddenly the self-empowering birth I had envisioned for the past few months had turned into another battle against machismo.
I am a strong woman. I am a beautiful woman. My body is sacred. My body knows what to do.
I tell everyone to leave the room so Josue and I can be alone. And there we are. I am crying and he is holding me and baby’s heart keeps beating just as it should.
*
Doubt is an all-encompassing and paralyzing thing. I doubt the doctor has the best interests of my baby and me in mind. This doctor who almost never looked me in the eyes during prenatal visits. This doctor who threatened to send me to an institution when I told him I was feeling depressed. This doctor who’s seen enough blood, and shit, and babies and heard enough screaming for today. I doubt the medical establishment of Puerto Rico that has allowed the rate of cesarean births to climb to fifty percent. It can’t be that half of us are unfit to give birth the way women have been doing for thousands of years. I doubt myself and my ability to do just about anything. To give birth, to know my body, to make the right decision. After all, these are doctors. This doctor has delivered hundreds of babies and I have only ever been pregnant with one, this one who might be in distress right now and here I am crying instead of acting. What if the first decision I make for my child is the wrong one and everything goes horribly wrong and it will be all my fault, just like the doctor said?
But then I remember to breathe. And so I do and I remember that this is not the first decision I have made for my child. I have been making decisions, good decisions, about her and with her since she first began to grow in my womb. I have been a mother concerned for her baby and the world her baby will come into for thirty-seven weeks now. And I want the birth of this baby to mimic the way I want the world to be. In this birth there will be no bullying, no fear-mongering, no intimidation.
This baby will be born freely and into freedom.
Throughout my whole pregnancy, I listened to cues from my baby and my body. Her brain secretly sent signals to mine, like best friends passing notes in class. We communicated through chemical reactions for months and now I knew she was saying that she could do this, that we could do this. Why was I doubting my daughter’s first attempt at self-realization? She was going to come out of me on her terms. She would not be cut out and pulled out of me. The doctor would have to save his scalpel for some weak-willed sucker of a baby. This one is a fighter and has stood up for herself since the very first time someone tried to fuck with her.
*
We convinced the doctor to induce my labor first even though he said that my baby was positioned sideways and that she would probably break her neck with the contractions (lie). We said that if the induction didn’t work then we would agree to a cesarean. And so at around 8pm on Tuesday June 28th, the nurse with the look on her face that says she hates her life, her job, and me hooked a big bag of Pitucin to my IV and the artificial oxytocin began to drip into my veins. And Odessa began her epic decent down my uterus. And as the contractions came on stronger and stronger The Wonderful Doula took the monitors off my belly and I positioned myself on all fours and started to make sounds I had never before made in my life. They weren’t human sounds because in those moments I wasn’t human. I was a lion. I closed my eyes and pictured myself as a golden-haired lioness giving birth under the shade of a tree during sunset somewhere in the African grasslands. Maybe this visualization technique was trite but I guarantee you that no woman in any part of this world ever worries about being cliche as a baby is tearing its way out of her body. The imagery worked to focus me throughout the pain until the pain turned into my insides feeling as if they were being ripped out.In between each moment of indescribable pain was a moment of perfect peace. And in those seconds of silence when the walls of my body were not collapsing in on themselves, I tried not to think about and be afraid of the contraction that would soon come to paralyze me again. It was an exercise in being in the now. Yet it was urgent. I had no time to find the now, like with the few times in my life I’ve meditated in the wilderness or in yoga class. If I missed the opportunity to enjoy this miraculously painfree moment, I would have to wait through another round of contractions to get a second chance. Never before in my life had the desire to feel the pleasure in a moment of peace been so important. So I drank it all in like water.
*
It was a chainsaw ripping my insides apart every minute or so. It was the freezing cold air. It was the nausea and not knowing if I was going to throw up all over everything or shit myself. It was feeling like although it helped to look Josue straight into the beautiful brown-green eyes I hoped our baby would be born with, I still felt like every contraction was going to kill me. My legs shook violently with each wave of pain. Josue and The Wonderful Doula told me to relax but every contraction pulled the strings of my muscles tighter. And I shivered because I was cold. Josue said it broke his heart when I looked at him and whimpered, “it hurts, it really really hurts.” Although I knew I must have been getting some progress done, I also felt like this was never going to end. And then, using all my energy to open my mouth and push out words, I did what I said I never would, I asked for an epidural. The Wonderful Doula asked me if I was sure. She told me that I may not be able to feel the contractions and wouldn’t know when to push. I said I was sure. I knew I was supposed to be able to do this without it. I knew that thousands and thousands of women around the world do this without it. But I didn’t care. I tried not to feel like less of a woman, like a disappointment, like I had failed the natural childbirth movement in Puerto Rico. And the nurse with the face that said she hated that I was making her do her damn job came in with a needle and gave me the shot.
I didn’t have time to feel it. Within five minutes, the baby made it clear that it was time to push. In our birth preparation classes, I always wondered how I would know when the baby was ready to come out. How would I know when to push? But once I felt a big baby head pushing down against my vagina, I knew it was time to place that head into the hands of the man who put it there in the first place. Josue. Josue, thank God you are here with me and looking into my eyes.
The Wonderful Doula told the stank nurse I was ready to push and the doctor came in to see if I knew what I was talking about. When he saw for himself that I knew a baby was about to burst out of me, he and the nurse began to prepare the room for another person to join it. In that moment, I wished there were two of me: the me on the bed pushing and another one sitting on the metal stool where the doctor was, watching the arrival of the person that had been living inside of me for the past nine months or so. I wished that second me could see the baby’s head peaking out and then shrinking back in. The second me would tell the nurse to shut up because her saying “largo largo largo largo largo” was annoying, unromantic, and not what the first me on the bed wanted her baby to hear as she made her way into the world. The second me would squeal in happiness when after three long hard pushes, the baby’s head would be completely out of my body (two eyes! one mouth! one nose! oh the nose just like Josue’s! two ears and lots of hair!). The second me would hold that head in her trembling hands and Josue would be waiting for the warm and slippery body to fill his up. Then when it did, the second me would marvel at the skinny little arms and legs that sprang to life as soon as they were given a little room and the tiny voice that cried out as soon as it breathed in the cold air, and finally the puffy vagina that let her know that the person dancing around inside of her, hiccuping inside of her for the past few months had always been Odessa Liliana.
Epilogue: Of Mothers and Scars (September 2011)
She is ten weeks old now and has the most beautiful smile in the world. I know the inside of her mouth and the bottoms of her feet. She falls asleep on my chest and mimics my breathing. Nothing is better than her warm new skin on mine. In these moments before we both go straight off the cliff of sleep, I measure how much she has grown. When she first fell asleep on my chest, that first day we brought her home, she barely reached my belly button. I almost couldn’t feel her six pound body on mine. What is six pounds? The biggest sack of sugar at the store is five. The pernil my parents get for Christmas is always about ten. The bag of onions imported from Norway on sale at the supermarket is three. This is a miracle and it is six pounds one ounce. This is the weight of my life changed.
She doesn’t mind the scars on my arms when she nuzzles into them to nurse. Nor does she care about the ones on my thighs when she leans her back against them as we play with our hands. It’s s funny thing to “be strong for” someone else. If that means promising to not be depressed anymore, I can’t do it. I don’t want to mask my fear, sadness, or anger in front of her. I want her to know that I am a full human being with a wide range of emotions. I want her to know that I struggle with depression, that every minute of every day I have to choose not to let that depression consume me. So if “being strong for” Odessa means making that decision more often, I suppose I can do that. She deserves a mother who knows she deserves to live and be happy.
I don’t know how I will answer her on that day she asks me where these marks on my body came from. Will I tell her everything right then and there? Will she be too young to understand? What does too young to understand even mean? I feel as if everything can be explained to kids as long as you explain it to them in their terms, right? The dismally non-confrontational coward in me wishes that somehow all these scars will disappear before we get to the point where Odessa has developed enough cognitive ability to turn the words in her head into coherent questions. And what about her friends? What if they ask her and she explains and they don’t get it? Do I care if her friends think I’m a freak? I do if that means they make fun of her for it.
She is asleep now. And I take a break from writing to watch her chest grow and shrink with every breath she takes, the air from the fan blow through her fuzzy hair, and her lips curve into secret smiles that only make sense in her dreams. I take a break to imagine us both at the beach, the place where I am most uncomfortable about the visible hurt on my body. I imagine us both sitting at the shore, our legs outstretched, she sitting in between mine and a pile of sand, rocks, and shells in between hers.
We mostly go to the beach at night. I hold her in my arms and Josue and I watch the lightening storm over the Atlantic just a few miles out or we watch the massive cruise ships, now just dots of yellow light, wasting gasoline as they drag themselves lazily from one Caribbean paradise to another. We walk down the shoreline. I feel her in my arms. I feel my feet forcing the sand underneathe them to give a little, the cool nighttime ocean on my ankles, her breath on my neck. I hold her and feel her weight. I feel like a mother. And I imagine all the mothers that have walked on this shoreline, babies on their hips, wishing to the same stars dangling above me now that every moment that comes after this one will be just as perfect. Taino women who protected their children from the monsters that came to these shores, African women who protected their children from the monsters that forced them to these shores. Women on hard-earned vacations, women from the projects down the street. I feel like a mother. And that feeling is heavier than the weight of any scar on my skin.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
the start of something dope
The hardest part is the starting. Starting to write entails that you believe that what you have to say is important enough for people to read and engage. You want to start conversations. But you’ve never been that great at self-promotion or putting yourself out there in general, I mean, unless you were really wasted.
So the hardest part is always the starting.
The first I’m sorry, the first person to dance at a party, the first time you hold a baby, the first to ask a beautiful face out. The hardest. The first blog post after a long time of not writing publicly, after realizing the other blog you started a long time ago was popular but not really you. You wrote about anal sex and then everyone thought you’re like this sex queen when really you’re just insecure and depressed so much so that you couldn’t even think about sex without first a few drinks with your eyes closed hard.
Then you start to get to know a guy a good guy and one day, out of the blue, you ask him if he wants to have a baby. You don't know what you're doing and neither does he but it turns out to be the best decision you've ever been impulsive enough to make. Then, well shit. BAM. You're pregnant and after lots of thinking and arguing and second-guessing and finally just knowing, you decide to have a baby. Then your hormones go batshitcrazy and make you more insane than you'd ever been and you make another decision, to love your baby/your body and so you start taking antidepressants. Something your depressed ass should've done a long time ago.
You give birth and dios santo el dolor. But as soon as it's over, it's over and you have a slippery little fuzzy baby in your trembling arms and it's a girl. Tu nena. And suddenly this newborn has six teeth, crawls with a toy in her mouth so she looks like a puppy and is no longer a newborn but eleven full months old. And you can’t wait to make her a healthy birthday cake to mark the first year of what you hope with be a long, important and challenging life. She dances to Aretha Franklin and falls asleep with your nipple in her mouth. Your stomach still has the long dark line that divided your pregnant belly in half, only thing not that dark anymore and now it ends before it runs into the soft mound of pubic hair.
And you’re happy.
And you and your good man drive to the beach in your 2001 Honda Civic with the broken AC and the dented fender. Baby is in the car seat and you're listening to eighties dance music and eating platanutres and the sun 'ta violento. You and your good man talk about having a big family even though so many mouths to feed means so much money that you still don’t have. But oh the love inside of you. To kiss those mouths and see them stretch into their first smiles.
This new love that you feel challenges you to be a better person. To brush your teeth every night even though sometimes you're so exhausted you can feel it in your fucking fingernails. To stop screaming when your mad. To call your mother every week. To make the world a better place, even though that sounds really naive and just writing it made you get MJ's "Heal the World" stuck in your head. Because now that you are a parent, everything is different. War is different. Airstrikes that blow up entire families into thousands of bloody unidentifiable pieces are different because now war is not just a series of generally fucked up situations, these are not just civilian casualties but the children of many mothers who now weep loudly into their empty hands. You are more anti-war now than you have ever been because as you look into your daughter's eyes as she crawls towards your open arms, for a moment you are the mother who remembers her own child doing just this, years ago when he was warm and alive.
Racism is different; being colonized has a sharper edge, makes you clench your jaw a little tighter when you're children are also colonized. Sexism, homophobia, gender and feminism are different, especially (especially) as the mother of a little girl in a country so hot you want to run around half naked but every time you go out you feel the stares of the men you pass stick to your sweaty skin like mosquitoes. That skin that burns a little hotter.
You see everything now as a mother. And so you write about it. Aunque 'ta fuerte. Even though the baby is biting the hem of your shorts because she’s tired and wants you to put her down for a nap. Even though she may or may not just have swallowed a chunk of banana that’s been on the floor since breakfast time and you should probably like sweep or mop or something. But you write because you want to start conversations with other parents, with other women, with men, with those who don’t have kids, with activists, and other writers.
This is not a parenting blog. This is an invitation to talk about the real shit that is happening in this world in which we raise the next generation. It's an invitation to talk about your shit since I will certainly be talking about mine because being a parent has also challenged me to confront my own shortcomings. I think it's important that our children know that we don't have everything figured out, that we're still working on ourselves, and that it's more than okay; this evolution and evaluation is necessary.
I sincerely hope you join the conversation and spread the word. There is a lot of healing to be done in the name of our children. Thank you. Peace.
So the hardest part is always the starting.
The first I’m sorry, the first person to dance at a party, the first time you hold a baby, the first to ask a beautiful face out. The hardest. The first blog post after a long time of not writing publicly, after realizing the other blog you started a long time ago was popular but not really you. You wrote about anal sex and then everyone thought you’re like this sex queen when really you’re just insecure and depressed so much so that you couldn’t even think about sex without first a few drinks with your eyes closed hard.
Then you start to get to know a guy a good guy and one day, out of the blue, you ask him if he wants to have a baby. You don't know what you're doing and neither does he but it turns out to be the best decision you've ever been impulsive enough to make. Then, well shit. BAM. You're pregnant and after lots of thinking and arguing and second-guessing and finally just knowing, you decide to have a baby. Then your hormones go batshitcrazy and make you more insane than you'd ever been and you make another decision, to love your baby/your body and so you start taking antidepressants. Something your depressed ass should've done a long time ago.
You give birth and dios santo el dolor. But as soon as it's over, it's over and you have a slippery little fuzzy baby in your trembling arms and it's a girl. Tu nena. And suddenly this newborn has six teeth, crawls with a toy in her mouth so she looks like a puppy and is no longer a newborn but eleven full months old. And you can’t wait to make her a healthy birthday cake to mark the first year of what you hope with be a long, important and challenging life. She dances to Aretha Franklin and falls asleep with your nipple in her mouth. Your stomach still has the long dark line that divided your pregnant belly in half, only thing not that dark anymore and now it ends before it runs into the soft mound of pubic hair.
And you’re happy.
And you and your good man drive to the beach in your 2001 Honda Civic with the broken AC and the dented fender. Baby is in the car seat and you're listening to eighties dance music and eating platanutres and the sun 'ta violento. You and your good man talk about having a big family even though so many mouths to feed means so much money that you still don’t have. But oh the love inside of you. To kiss those mouths and see them stretch into their first smiles.
This new love that you feel challenges you to be a better person. To brush your teeth every night even though sometimes you're so exhausted you can feel it in your fucking fingernails. To stop screaming when your mad. To call your mother every week. To make the world a better place, even though that sounds really naive and just writing it made you get MJ's "Heal the World" stuck in your head. Because now that you are a parent, everything is different. War is different. Airstrikes that blow up entire families into thousands of bloody unidentifiable pieces are different because now war is not just a series of generally fucked up situations, these are not just civilian casualties but the children of many mothers who now weep loudly into their empty hands. You are more anti-war now than you have ever been because as you look into your daughter's eyes as she crawls towards your open arms, for a moment you are the mother who remembers her own child doing just this, years ago when he was warm and alive.
Racism is different; being colonized has a sharper edge, makes you clench your jaw a little tighter when you're children are also colonized. Sexism, homophobia, gender and feminism are different, especially (especially) as the mother of a little girl in a country so hot you want to run around half naked but every time you go out you feel the stares of the men you pass stick to your sweaty skin like mosquitoes. That skin that burns a little hotter.
You see everything now as a mother. And so you write about it. Aunque 'ta fuerte. Even though the baby is biting the hem of your shorts because she’s tired and wants you to put her down for a nap. Even though she may or may not just have swallowed a chunk of banana that’s been on the floor since breakfast time and you should probably like sweep or mop or something. But you write because you want to start conversations with other parents, with other women, with men, with those who don’t have kids, with activists, and other writers.
This is not a parenting blog. This is an invitation to talk about the real shit that is happening in this world in which we raise the next generation. It's an invitation to talk about your shit since I will certainly be talking about mine because being a parent has also challenged me to confront my own shortcomings. I think it's important that our children know that we don't have everything figured out, that we're still working on ourselves, and that it's more than okay; this evolution and evaluation is necessary.
I sincerely hope you join the conversation and spread the word. There is a lot of healing to be done in the name of our children. Thank you. Peace.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)