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.
