I was induced at thirty-seven weeks because, as the doctor put it, my body was creating a “toxic environment.” The baby needed to come out. But the same body that couldn’t keep her was not ready to release her. Chemicals were used to start the labor process. It was many hours, long and exhausting. I knew ahead of time I wanted an epidural; I was too much of a wimp to do it any other way.
Yet when it came time to push, I was surprised at how much it hurt. If this was labor with pain medication, I couldn’t imagine labor without it. The nurses kept asking me to make a distinction if what I was feeling was pain or just pressure. I wasn’t sure. I’d never pushed a baby out before. Was “both” an acceptable answer?
“We need to remove your catheter to get ready for pushing,” one nurse told me with an excitement in her voice that sounded forced, like she was trying to convince me that the pushing would be fun.
As she removed the catheter, I yelped in pain. I watched the nurse’s eyes quickly lock with another’s. “You felt that?” she asked with alarm in her voice.
Obviously, I thought. Haven’t you been listening to me?! I could hear the screaming in my head, but I nodded silently.
“The epidural has worn off,” the nurse announced to the room. It was the first of many nurse announcements I would hear that day. I was thankful for the affirmation that it did in fact hurt, but annoyed it took this long to get their confirmation.
“We can keep going or take a break to give you more relief.”
“I want to stop,” I whispered, though I wanted to scream, Really? Is there any question? What crazy woman would keep going?
“We’ll need to get the anesthesiologist back in here.”
The pushing was put on hold while the anesthesiologist was called out of surgery to put more chemicals in my body. Derek and my mom stood on either side of me, massaging my shoulders. I squeezed their hands until their fingertips looked like purple grapes.
Once the pushing started again, it was my turn to make an announcement. “I’m done! I can’t go anymore.” I was quitting. But even as I said it, I knew how dramatic it sounded and how impossible it was.
My mom got in my face to give me the pep talk, our noses just inches apart. “You can do this,” she willed. If body-to-body transfer of energy was possible, she would have given me her every breath. I knew she was right. I had no other way out of this but to push. I kept going.
Fifteen hours after we started, the baby finally came out, and they announced we had a girl. My body was shaking from head to foot. Relieved the process was over, I was hardly curious about the baby. Wrapped in a pink and blue striped blanket, she was laid on my chest for just a second. I looked down to see the face of someone I didn’t recognize. Her skin was red and her eyes were slits. As she blinked at the bright lights in the room, I could see dark coffee bean pupils. What could she possibly be thinking right then? That the world is too bright?
Because of my “toxic environment,” my daughter was whisked away by the pediatric medical team for a full head-to-toe check.
Why was I shaking so much? I looked up at Derek, but his eyes were on the other side of the room with the baby. I shifted my eyes to my mom.
“You did it.” She was crying and touched my forehead. I nodded. I had done it, and I was so glad it was over.
“Do you want to hold her?” A nurse returned with the swaddled baby burrito.
No, I didn’t. I was afraid I would drop her with all the shaking, and there was a part of me that wanted nothing to do with the cause of all that had just happened the last several hours. Besides, I was wondering if she was really my baby. Why didn’t I feel an instant recognition? That’s what I’d pictured since the first time I thought of having a baby: that they would hand her to me and I would just know. I’d seen those baby reality shows, read the books—other people felt immediate connection. Shouldn’t I be instantly drawn to her?
“You hold her,” I mumbled to Derek. He held the wrapped bundle in his big man arms, walked over to the windowsill, and sat down on it facing me. I watched him bend over her and put his face next to hers. I was watching through water, with everything distant and unreachable. Even in that fog, the image of him gently holding her embedded itself in my brain.
The full-circle nature of that moment was not my first thought in my post-labor drugged daze. Watching Derek hold his new baby girl, our baby girl, was the promise of a new story. Of a new family structure. Of a father for my daughter. Despite my postpartum haze, my subconscious knew to capture that picture to remember forever.
Thinking back on my first meeting with my father, I can’t help but think of my blue and white Dutch-style dress. And now my daughter’s father was even a Dutchman. My last name, our last name, her heritage. No blue and white dress required. It was part of her blood. Her blonde hair and fair skin would later scream it. She had just come out of my body, but she was ours, both of ours, and we would do this together. I knew it in my soul.
Suddenly I knew I was going to be sick. My mom raised the baby-blue plastic hospital container to my chin, and I threw up for the third time that hour. The shaking wouldn’t stop. And really, the delivery wasn’t over. There was the placenta and the stitching, repairing the damage done to my privates in the process. I lay there wondering how much longer this could go on. I thought I was done when the baby came out. It was as though I had run a marathon and after crossing the finish line was told I needed to run just a few more miles to really be done.
For the next hour, the nurses kept offering me the baby to hold or try to nurse. I had no interest. I let my mom hold her, my mother-in-law, my sisters-in-law in the hall. I was not ready. And there was this growing feeling that something was not right. I should want to hold my baby.
Everyone else was happy and excited. I just wanted to sleep and be by myself. Finally a nurse said, “It’s been an hour, and you need to hold your baby.” She pushed the bundle toward me.
I had no choice but to put my arms out and take her. I was still operating underwater, and it all felt foreign. I looked down, hoping I would now recognize my daughter. “She doesn’t look like either of us,” I told Derek. “Who is she?”
To start with, she was a girl. That was a shock. Not because we’d had an ultrasound that indicated otherwise; we’d told our friends and family we wanted it to be a surprise on delivery day. But despite that public proclamation, in our minds we’d decided we were having a boy and we would call him Benjamin.
Derek, the only son of an only son, knew that his grandfather Papa, who’d stormed the beaches at Normandy, wanted us to have a boy. I knew because Papa told me outright when we got engaged years earlier that it was my responsibility to “get those boys out.” A sweet man, already in his nineties when he gave me those instructions, he was able to be straightforward with what he wanted. His hopes and his death during my pregnancy probably impacted our expectations, as we imagined the doctor declaring, “It’s a boy.” Benjamin was now Gabriella. Gabriella, meaning “God is my strength.” Gabi, our daughter.
I didn’t hold Gabi for long. I passed her off, and the nurse announced it was time for me to move rooms. “You are too weak to walk. We’ll take you in a wheelchair.” She took one of my arms and instructed my mom to take the other, and they hoisted me into the chair. Taking the baby from whoever was holding her, the nurse announced, “This mom needs to hold her baby.” She was calling me out, telling the world that it was obvious I didn’t want to. But I was the mom, and I needed to step up and claim the title. I held on to the baby as Nurse Ratched pushed me through the maze of corridors to the room I would occupy for the next few days, barking her announcements along the way to strangers.
“Look at this mom. Didn’t she do a good job?” I felt her pointing the spotlight on me as she pushed me through the halls, asking passersby to affirm me in my first identity crisis in motherhood.
We arrived in the room. Derek had gone ahead with armloads of pillows and bags filled with all of the things the pregnancy books told us we needed to take to the hospital but never touched. The ChapStick, the suckers, and the CD of calming music only served to make me feel prepared in the days prior. In this recovery room, the drugs would begin to wear off and the reality would begin to sink in: the baby had arrived safely, and I was now a mom.
The next few days in that hospital room, I felt increasingly better. The exhaustion and drugs started to wear off as I slept some. The hormones came to stay, though. The moods. The milk. Everything seemed to be wet and drippy. My tears. My breasts. My need for maxi pads.
The hospital is where the constancy of motherhood begins; there is no difference between night and day. The baby needs to be fed every two hours. The nurses flick on the lights in the middle of the night, making their nurse announcements about needing to check a vital sign or, worse, my stitches.
That first night the nurses took Gabi to the nursery. “You sleep now, while you can, and let her be with us for a few hours. We’ll bring her in when she’s hungry,” they promised. The idea that Mom needs to take care of herself to take care of the baby had started during pregnancy. Eat the right things. Don’t eat the forbiddens. Get sleep. Avoid stress. Drink water. Continue to exercise. Take care of yourself so you can take care of the baby. Now the baby was out, no longer part of my body, and the nurse was telling me the same thing. Take care of yourself so you can take care of the baby.
And so I slept. After what seemed like only five minutes, the light came on. Really? It can’t be time. But I heard the cry. The newborn cry that sounded so frantic, so awful to my ears, and made me sit straight up. I now knew she was my baby. My eyes started to tear, and I wanted to protect her, to stop that awful, painful scream. There was relief in my response too. I felt like the mom. That bond must have been in there somewhere, because I couldn’t wait to hold her. I thanked God that something in my heart had clicked, had been opened, to know I’d been created for this.
I looked over at Derek, who was still adjusting to the blinding light in the room. Didn’t he hear his baby’s cry? How scared she sounded? He didn’t seem to get it. He wasn’t jolted up like I was.
“She’s hungry,” the nurse announced, and we started the new foreign process of trying to nurse. This thing that was supposed to be so natural but in reality was so awkward. By that point I’d lost all sense of modesty. The gown came off, the pillows were arranged, and I tried to get that sweet but squawking baby to latch on. I was sweating. I needed her to stop crying. I wanted to do this right. I wanted to give her what she needed.
I’d uncovered a new kind of love. A love that surpassed anything I’d ever felt before. It consumed me from my bed head to my delivery-pedicured toes. I was the mom. I didn’t come to that realization in the way I’d expected, but the result was the same: a mother was born.