Hera's Birth

When I look back at the birth of my first child, I am still angry at myself.  Why wasn’t I bigger? Badder?  Why didn’t I bust out with the F-bomb?  Something like “what the fuck is going on?”

But instead I was something different. I had been in labor for 2 days—bedridden for most of that and I wanted to see my baby.  The birth, delivery, and now the “presenting of the baby to the mother” had not gone anything like my previous experience.  Admittedly, I had never had another child but I had seen television depiction-- happy sitcoms or overwrought emotional dramas. More disturbingly the whole birth had been nothing like what I had seen in my birthing class videos.  To get to the heart of it—babies are born yelling, crying, screaming, or making some kind of noise.  Doctors and nurses comment on the strength of the lungs or the beauty of the baby.  But there was no noise from our daughter when she was born and the doctor handed her off to another doctor without holding her up for a second for me to see.   “Well she is out,” was all the doctor said.  She didn’t seem happy --she seemed annoyed.

“Please go check on the baby.” I said to my husband again.  Though I wasn’t insisting just kind of weakly requesting that he do it. 

“It will be ok,” he says.

“Just make sure she is alright.  She isn’t crying”.  But I did not act like myself-- demanding and yelling, possibly swearing.  I suppose it was because that some part of me didn’t want to know what was wrong.

The sneak football pass from the obstetrician to the pediatrician was done so I won’t see that my daughter needs to be revived when she is born.  At first, before my daughter became stuck, there had been just one nurse, loitering near the plastic bassinet.  She had dyed blond hair and a face like a bulldog.  Then the birth became a cock up.  The baby was in distress.   She was stuck.  Then the bodies in the room multiplied.  I couldn’t keep track anymore.  It was immense pain despite the epidural and at one point the doctor stood up and placed her fist high up on my stomach close to breasts and began to twist her arm like a corkscrew.  I felt like the world’s largest tube of toothpaste.

I continued a few feeble pleas with Shannon, my husband, to check on our daughter when someone shouted in the demanding nurse voice “Dad. Dad come over and hold your daughter.  Let’s bring her over to mom.”  The words were an attempt at normality but they felt staged. 

Shannon, walked over to the plastic bassinet and returned shadowed by a short brunette in scrubs.  The baby is cleaned and wrapped in a white blanket.  But there is something so strange about the way she looks.  He holds our daughter up so I can see her.  She still hasn’t made a noise.  Instead she just blinks with enormous almost black eyes.   Her skin is pale and wrinkled. The first thought I had was that she looked like a grub. 

I am not allowed to hold her.  Shannon showed her to me and his nurse/ warden was already steering him away down the hall to the Neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).  Strange, I didn’t realize even as they were leaving to go to the NICU how serious everything is.  

In reality, I don’t really understand that she died.  The idea that at one point before she was born she was alive, then she stopped being alive and had to be revived.  Someone had to physically do something to her body to bring her back to life.  I don’t get this until I see the hospital bill:  recitation-- $672.00.