Something Funny
What I remember from my twins being born: my water breaking in the living room when I stood up. Just 31 weeks pregnant. Driving to the hospital. It was the end of September and in between light and heavy jacket weather. I couldn’t decide what to wear. My then 13-year-old stepdaughter stood at the desk helping them look me up in the computer system.
I remembering seeing the doors to my left. I hardly even knew what the NICU was.
In the room, they were trying to trace my twins’ heartbeats with those blue circular sensors attached to my belly. Asking me to sit in the hospital bed. I couldn’t sit still. I was in so much pain. I paced and threw up. The nurses kept saying the monitors weren’t picking up contractions.
Then what the fuck is happening, I hissed at them.
Finally one of the nurses said, Look, I think you probably are in labor. Okay.
A few hours later they said I was complete.
Hospital protocol was to deliver in the OR in case intervention was required.
Would you like to feel his head crowning? the OB asked, sitting at my feet in the stirrups, when she told me it was time to push with my first son.
I reached down. I gasped. My baby. A human. There was a human, about to come out of me, and I had touched his head. This human that I had grown inside my body.
Cooper was born screaming, black-eyed, flapping his tiny arms. I had never seen anything so beautiful, I remember thinking. When I look at pictures now, I think, they look like little sewer rats. My god.
But in the OR, also, I remember thinking: I did it. I made it. I don’t have to have a c-section.
“We call this baby’s first toy,” the OB said, holding the hook to rupture my second son’s sac. The boys were in separate sacs and had separate placentas. With the hook, the OB manually ruptured Llew’s sac. His cord prolapsed.
What I remember from my second son, Llew’s birth: The anesthesiologist pressing the mask over my face to put me under general anesthesia. To make my body limp so they could cut my son out. So they could save his life.
I remember sitting in my hospital bed and asking again and again and again what the boys’ weights and lengths were. I couldn’t remember anything.
I don’t know that I ever fully came back from being put under. It was hard to know if I was a different person because I was now a mother, because of trauma, or because of anesthesia.
Finally my recovery nurse was so tired of answering me she wrote it on a piece of paper. I held tightly to that piece of paper, picking it up over and over, as if the information might change, as if my sons might return to my womb:
The first time Llew’s name was misspelled.
Later I read my medical records.
This first cesarean, delivering my second twin, 25 minutes after delivering my first son, was performed “urgently, without time for a proper count of tools,” according to the surgical report.
Following the surgery, while I was still unconscious, an x-ray was performed to ensure no tools had been left inside my abdominal cavity.
Llew had swallowed and choked on a lot of amniotic fluid. His APGAR scores (out of 10) were 2 at 1 minute and 7 at 5 minutes. At that first minute, he received one point for his pulse being below 100bpm (as opposed to absent) and one point for pink body (despite blue extremities).
The neonatologist who resuscitated him referred to his beginning as a “rough start.” She was German. Dr. Weinheimer. Everyone called her Claudia, perhaps because Weinheimer was difficult to remember or pronounce, or, perhaps, I thought (and was pissed about), because she was a woman (and a young white-blonde woman, at that).
Later when Llew started talking, he shouted “Nein, nein, nein!” and I thought perhaps he remembered, perhaps that was what she said while working on him, “Nein, nein, nein,” securing the mask over his tiny face, pumping his little heart, “Nein, baby, we’re not through with you. Come back to us, little baby.”
It was a Wednesday in the beginning of spring. The twins were seven months old. They were getting bigger, stronger. While I told everyone they were NICU babies, and while they had an adjusted age (seven months actual, five months adjusted), it was becoming less obvious that they had been born eight weeks early.
We were in Spokane, Washington. I had just quit my job in favor of working with my then-husband, Loren, at the tree care company we were building and I could not have been happier.
I was going to recover from our NICU time, working outside like this, I thought. We owned our business and I was going to have time to heal.
We were pushing enormous Pine rounds up a hill that day and loading them in our trailer. The removal was at a lawyer’s house, and he, delighted, had filmed the top coming down and watched the rest of the removal from his deck.
I couldn’t stop yawning.
“I’m tired,” I remarked then.
“Of course you’re tired,” Loren said. “Tree work is hard work.”
“I don’t think I’m tree tired,” I said. “I think I’m baby tired.”
Because I had started working in the field and stopped working in an office, I had stopped breastfeeding, and because I had stopped breastfeeding, I had started drinking.
On this Wednesday, I decided to take a pregnancy test. I set the test on the counter.
One line.
Thank God, I thought, and breathed a sigh of relief.
Then I looked back over.
Two lines.
No, no, no, I said. It can’t be.
I spent Cade’s entire pregnancy dreaming of the moment he would be born. At first it seemed I would be able to deliver naturally because I had delivered Cooper naturally, but the ultrasounds made apparent that my IUD had become lodged in the cesarean scar tissue.
It was safest, the doctors advised, to have another c-section to reduce the risk of uterine rupture because of the births being just fifteen months apart, and because they had to recover the IUD.
At my pre-op appointment prior to Cade’s c-section, the OB asked if I would want to tie my tubes. I was 30 years old. The twins were fifteen months and I was pregnant with a baby I did not want in the slightest.
The thing is, I said, I just really want to hold a baby on my chest.
I might not be done, I said. A silly reason to have a baby, I said. But you know, what if.
Whatever you’d like done, the OB said.
There was a low likelihood that I would be able to hold Cade on my chest because he was measuring so small. The IUD had caused a subclinical infection in the placenta and based on ultrasounds, it looked like he would be just over 2,000 grams. He was so small they measured in him in grams. He was 4lb 6 oz (2040 grams) at birth.
And they did have to take him to the NICU. My heart shattered into a million little pieces.
And then, Loren had a vasectomy, and I stopped dreaming of holding a baby on my chest just after birth.
What I remember of my daughter’s birth: I was shaking. It was so cold in the OR. I was so scared.
I had been divorced and remarried. The twins were 6, in kindergarten. They could read. Cade had just turned 5 and could name every predator in any given region.
My second husband, Billy, was with me in the OR, and it was his dream that I hold this baby on my chest when she was born because he knew it was my dream.
I had a relatively uneventful pregnancy with Abigail, aside from being born a few days early as a result of my blood pressure being slightly elevated. And that I was 35 and of advanced maternal age. I didn’t think I was of advanced maternal age until my body let me know that yes, indeed, 35 was significantly older than 30 when it came to carrying a baby.
In the OR: I shook.
Almost there, the doctor said, cutting, I’m sure, through the layers of fascia and scar tissue. They pulled the blue curtain down and there she was, behind the clear screen. Bloody. Furious, her eyes pinched closed while she screamed, having been unexpectedly extracted into this bright, freezing, sterile room.
She was so beautiful.
My husband cut her cord and I could see her pink legs. He took a picture of her on the table where they worked to clean her, and weigh her, and measure her, and he showed it to me.
“No penis!” I said. “A miracle.”
She was 6lbs 13oz. A bit petite, but bigger than my other babies.
“Oh my god, Billy,” I said when he brought her over to me.
“She’s so beautiful,” he said.
I held her body against my body. I had dreamed so long and wanted so badly to hold this baby on my chest. I was trembling.
“I’m so cold,” I said. My mouth was so dry. Her skin was on my skin, as I had always wished and wanted. My husband held my hand and kissed me and cried, watching me cry holding our daughter. Our precious, brand new baby girl.
And then. All of a sudden. I became very scared.
“I can’t hold her,” I said. “I’m afraid I’m going to drop her.”
I was shaking too badly. I had wanted this so badly. Forever. Billy had wanted it so badly for me, too.
And here it was. The thing I had wanted more than anything else in the whole world. The thing I had tried not to think of every time I had closed my eyes, but the thing that came to the forefront of my mind in any moment that it began to wander. The thing I fixated on for Cade’s entire pregnancy, the thing I had wanted and wanted and wanted.
So Billy took her and bundled her and held her head next to my head.
Our daughter Abigail left with Billy while they finished stitching me up, another thing I had dreaded, watching her being taken further and further from me when she had spent only minutes outside my body.
I cried when she had to leave. And then I didn’t speak. I was difficult in the post-op, demanding I breastfeed her, that I put her on my chest. I was still so thirsty. My blood pressure wouldn’t come down.
When the OB came to check on me, she said to the nurse, “Just let her try to feed the baby.”
My blood pressure went down after I had Abigail on my chest, her skin on my skin. And she did begin to nurse, right there in the post-op room. My mouth was so dry. They brought me ice chips.
She sleeps in a pack n play in our room. She punches her bottom lip out when she cries. She latches to my breast. She is the perfect breastfed baby. This first task together, feeding her with my body. We were able to do this skillfully and successfully, without any misgivings, my daughter and me.
So what’s the something funny?
It’s not funny, ha-ha. It’s funny like life.
I wanted nothing more in my entire life than to hold a baby on my chest.
But not for me, not in this lifetime. I won’t ever hold a baby on my chest, the umbilical cord pulsating, still attached to the placenta, the bloody baby on my chest, rooting around my breast.
I thought getting sober was the ultimate punishment, the worst thing that could have ever happened to me.
But it’s this: gratitude. This gift, every day in my life: holding my daughter in my arms, my daughter, who will never see me drunk.