TUCSON, APRIL 2020, 100°
QUARANTINE WEEK 7, GESTATIONAL WEEK 24
The days and weeks and months of my pregnancy slip by so quickly that I feel pained when I track things like my weight and how much time I have left to pay off my credit card debt. The arrival of the baby is a hard deadline for so many things, the most inelastic one I have ever labored toward, the first one I truly cannot ignore or walk away from. I don’t want to, which is lucky.
I read books about childbirth and N joins me in taking a birthing class, which is held on videoconference because of the pandemic. We mute ourselves and eat homemade sweet potato fries and make off-color jokes during the class. What kind of birth control will you be using after you have your baby? the facilitator asks. We look at each other and snicker and say Sixty-nine at the same time. He takes the last fry off the plate and puts it in my mouth. I worry sometimes that I should be taking the class more seriously, being more intent or intense, but as the time draws nearer—in weeks, because that is how pregnancy time is measured—I feel less and less anxious, more and more sure that I will be fine.
I spent a few tense months in the first trimester of my pregnancy feeling daily mild panic about the not-unlikely chance of my body ripping and tearing. It is not the pain I am afraid of—though I am not unconcerned about that—but the damage. I am afraid that after so many years of being a vehicle for hurt, this body that now easily hosts love and pleasure and closeness will be shredded back into a painful thing. I read deep into postpartum internet forums and learned about fourth-degree tears, about prolapses, about bad stitches and incontinence and nicked bladders and diastasis recti. I heard more birth trauma stories than I could hold. Many of my friends who have children were so eager to recount the blood and terror and blades that were part of their children’s births that they did not notice my blanching face, my lack of response. I read about dead women, dead babies, bad choices and bad doctors and C. diff. I read too much.
In the sixth month, my belly has swelled enough that being pregnant is the defining feature of my existence. I consider, obsessively, the pros and cons of homebirth. I interview a midwife and talk about little else. I think about bloodstains in our apartment, about amniotic fluid on our bed, about the possibility that I will need more help than an out-of-hospital midwife can offer me. I look at my diminutive bathtub and try to imagine me and N, who hates baths, both crammed into it, the faucet gouging one of our necks, the shower curtain sticking to someone’s damp biceps, the floor slippery and the toilet mere inches away. I don’t know what to do—I am afraid of the hospital, of COVID, of an institution’s ability to seize my bodily autonomy. I think so much that it makes me feel ill, so much that I consider truly unhinged things like wandering into the desert and having my baby in the bed of my truck where no one can touch me or hurt me—or, critically, help me.
We finally decide to use a birthing center—within the hospital, which I hate the thought of, but staffed by midwives rather than doctors, so no grabby male hands on me. As soon as we decide, my fear shifts. I stop looping the body-damage fear thoughts; they are still present but quiet and faded, pixelated in the dusty corners of my mind rather than front and center in high definition.