Jill just linked to this intensely personal piece by Jessica Valenti. In it, she describes trying to sort through the feelings of wanting to love her daughter, but being scared because it was never certain if her daughter, born almost three months prematurely, was going to be okay. I didn’t have Jessica’s experience, and it resonated in very weird ways for me. This isn’t a complete version of events (there are definitely some parts of it that are too personal and painful to write about, even now), but it covers all the basics.
I had a completely painless pregnancy. I was more tired than usual early on, but I never had morning sickness, no acid reflux, nothing. I can’t even remember being uncomfortable. The worst thing that I can recall about the whole thing is getting food poisoning about 7 weeks before my daughter was born and having to sit in Labor and Delivery while they gave me an IV and tried to convince me to have a few saltines.
That was all before I went through labor and delivery. My due date had come and gone and my midwives wanted to make sure that there were no signs of fetal distress, so they sent me for a monitoring test to check. The results were initially inconclusive, and the person who was on call in the testing center was not one of my midwives, but a physician who specialized in high-risk obstetrics. He came over to me and my husband looking very grave and said I needed to get ready to have my daughter that afternoon. After a lot of back and forth, I reluctantly agreed and asked if I could have time to go home, pack a bag and get organized. They agreed and so I did that. I was admitted to the hospital on a Thursday afternoon. (My daughter wasn’t born until very early Sunday morning.)
When I came back, one of the midwives was there and she talked with me about options. After an excruciating experience with getting my IV placed, we agreed to try mechanical induction first and then go from there. That didn’t work. Neither did pitocin. Neither did rupturing the membranes. I was still there on Saturday, exhausted beyond belief. I hadn’t eaten anything since Thursday lunchtime and late on Saturday night, it was finally agreed that they’d do a c-section.
It was *awful*. Because I’d been having contractions for so long, my muscles were incredibly fatigued and overworked. The measured blood loss was 1800 mLs. (At 2000 mLs, you need a transfusion.) They screwed up the pain meds. I remember them telling me I had a daughter and then blacking out.
When I came to, my daughter was clean and wrapped up. I could see her next to my bed in a bassinet, but I had no idea how I was ever going to get to her. I felt worse than I could ever remember feeling in my entire life. When the nurses came to check on me, I told them that I had terrible abdominal pain. They said that was normal. I insisted something was wrong. The pain seemed totally unrelated to where the c-section was and it didn’t feel like stitches or an ache. The nurse took my concerns to the high-risk obstetrician (again on call), who seemed to think that I’d never had a baby before and had no idea what I was talking about, that pain was normal. He said I was fine and that I could eat something. My mother had brought homemade blueberry muffins, so I had one. It was the last thing I had to eat for the rest of the week.
The pain that I was feeling turned out to be a ileus, which is when the GI tract stops working for a period of time. It’s well-known in abdominal and GI surgery, but extremely rare in c-sections. You mostly hope that an NG tube will keep things out of your stomach and that the situation resolves itself in a few days. You can’t eat or drink anything, and it’s *miserable*. My situation was severely exacerbated by medical mismanagement of the NG tube and the entire situation culminated with me throwing up is the most pyrotechnic ways imaginable and briefly not breathing. After that, I demanded to be moved and they sent me from the mother baby unit up to med/surgery. I got a negative pressure room that would normally be used for burn patients so that there wouldn’t be concerns about the baby picking up any weird hospital-based infections.
And that was how I tried to bond with my daughter right after she was born: terribly ill, in excruciating pain, tethered to all kinds of mechanical equipment, and a tube up my nose. I had no earthly idea if I was going to get better and if I did get better, what might happen after that. But I was determined that no matter how sick, how miserable, and how wretched I felt, I was going to take care of my daughter.
She was mine and I was not, under any circumstances going to let anything happen to her. I would drag myself upright, force myself to take the two steps to the bassinet where she was crying. I would nurse her in weird positions because my arms had been stuck like pincushions for IVs and there were limited ways to position her that didn’t involve mangling the needles. I couldn’t even believe that nursing worked because I was growing ever more dehydrated and I wasn’t eating, but I absolutely refused to give in.
If you asked me, I don’t think I would ever describe what I felt for my daughter then as love, at least not a sort that I’d ever heard anyone else describe. It was just fierce determination to make sure that she was okay. I didn’t feel giddy or mushy or ga-ga over her. All I wanted was to protect her and to make sure that whatever agonies the hospital was visiting on our room were falling on me. I can remember thinking, “Kid, you are asking so much of me right now. Please just make this worth it, because I am having such a hard time seeing it right now.”
It was a very long time before I grew out of that sense of feeling like I was throwing myself physically in front of whatever was happening. I never really knew how to relate to mothers who talked about holding their children immediately after birth and feeling blissful. I am 100% certain that bliss never, ever even crossed my mind. As much as I wanted to feel happy when I looked at her, my own pain (which was being treated with fucking ibuprofen) was blinding. There are two pictures of me in the hospital and one of me leaving the hospital with my daughter. In all of them, my face is kind of gray and I’m not smiling. There’s sort of a keep calm and carry on sort of vibe about them. They look like they’re about survival.
When people ask me now how sick I was, I just tell them that I lost all of my baby weight plus another 10 pounds by my daughter’s two week check up. I spent 11 days in the hospital and was given an extra three weeks of medical leave (in addition to my six weeks of maternity leave) to recover enough physically to go back to work. It was about a year before my body really approached the state it had been in prior to that epic disaster.
I love my daughter more than anything, but it’s always going to have the mark of what happened at the hospital when she was born. At this point, it a very faded scar, but it is the sort of thing that won’t ever fully fade. I’m perfectly fine with not having been blissed out with my kid at birth, because she is an amazing child who astonishes me every day. But like Jessica, I really, really wish there was a better narrative for this sort of thing.