Have I told you about angels?

In response to the Sandyhook massacre in Connecticut, I found myself grieving deeply for the parents who are now living with new and permanent gaping holes.
My own little son played innocently at my feet and I smiled faintly at him, distracted by a heavy cloud of sadness.
I felt cheated for the families who have been robbed of these moments with their own kids, moments that are the reward for the life's work that is guiding someone through childhood and beyond.
I felt the need to speak to them, to mourn with them, and I wondered what they might have said upon departing from their children that morning, had they only known what would transpire and could do nothing to stop it.
This poem came out of that wondering.

Have I told you about angels?
Have I talked about their wings?
Old and warm and wide as hills
And feathered at the ends.
Have I described their voices,
Soft and spun like gold?
Always close enough to hear
And lighter than the snow.
There's a song they tend to carry
It's one you've always known.
I couldn't sing it if I tried
When you hear it, you will know.
I need to tell you of their arms
Long and soft and strong
They'll pull you into safety
And carry you from harm.
Have I told you that you've changed me
In ways you'll never know?
I don't know how you found me
But I'll never let you go.
Have I told you about angels
And how far they can fly?
Have I told you that you're with them?
Have I told you now you're mine?

Trick-Or-Treat

This One Time When I Had A Baby Part Three

Disclaimer:
This part of my birth story is somewhat horrifying. I don't really recommend it to anyone.
Unless of course you ain't skeert, as my husband would say, in which case, venture on. Though, if you do get scared, please keep in mind that this phenomena almost never happens.

If you're continuing from Parts One and Two then you're up to speed on the birth story thus far, and believe it or not, those first parts of the story are the most pleasant.
What followed were two things that were not expected or common in any way. In fact, I had not even heard of either of them before, despite the research I had done on childbirth.
When I gave that final push and squeezed out the head of my seven pound one ounce Oscar, thinking to myself, "Oh yes, that most definitely feels like a head," I fully expected that the hard part was over. I was wrong.
As Oscar lay on my body and we got acquainted, I was continually distracted by the midwife and nurses fussing over what was going on down below. Namely, awaiting the delivery of Oscar's placenta. Some minutes had gone by and the placenta still hadn't come.
The midwife was "manipulating" my uterus to encourage its release. In this case, manipulating means she was kneading my already tender abdomen with her fingers. In pain, I tried to push her hands away, and she reminded me to focus on my baby, ever increasingly difficult as it was. In all of the commotion, Oscar was eventually removed from me and given to my husband to hold.
I was trying to enjoy the relief of having just delivered my first baby, and couldn't figure out why all this medical personnel was badgering me.
The nurses tried to kickstart the breastfeeding process, hoping the nipple stimulation would increase the flow of oxytocin, thereby inducing uterine cramps to help release the placenta.
Much ado was being made and I was quite sure that the placenta would come in its own good time and that all I really needed was for all of these people to go away and leave us alone.
I asked the midwife what all the fuss was and how long after a baby it usually took for the placenta to be "born". She said ten, fifteen minutes. Surely it hadn't been much longer than that. I asked her how much time had passed since I'd delivered Oscar. She said almost an hour.
By this point, I was hooked up to that IV I had managed to evade throughout my natural delivery and it was pumping me full of pitocin to try and get those cramps working and doing their job. The midwife had called in an obstetrical surgeon to assist in removing the placenta.
After the initial "manipulation" from the outside, I was told that the surgeon was going to try and do the job from the inside, basically using his hands and brute strength.
At this point I was given the option of adding stadol to the IV, which decreases pain and coherence, but doesn't completely eliminate either. Since I was already hooked up and had been through enough pain for the day, I conceded.
The midwife and surgeon went about trying to literally rip out the placenta while I basically writhed on the table, stadol and all. This seemed to go on for a ridiculous amount of time. My husband stood nearby in the corner, holding our new baby, and watching me bleed out as I begged them to stop in a stadol indued stupor. He later told me that the surgeon was up to his forearm in my vagina.
This method turned out to be futile. Oscar's placenta, for reasons that remain unknown, was completely fused to my uterus. I would need to go into surgery.
The surgeon spoke to me in a loud, clear voice, explaining that he needed me to sign a waiver, which if he could not remove the placenta surgically, would allow him to give me a hysterectomy.
The word hysterectomy shocked me out of my drug state. I could not believe what was happening. This, again, was not the birth experience I had signed up for.
"WHAT?!"
I stared at the ceiling, my reflexes too slow to turn and look the doctor in the face.
He went on, "Sarah, trust me, there's nothing I want more than for you to go on to have five more children after this..."
I don't remember what he said after that. I just remember thinking, 'I don't want five more children. I'm just not quite ready to part with my uterus.'
I signed the waiver, weighing the pros and cons of a hysterectomy.
"That would mean no more periods." My husband gave me the 'not bad' face, trying to keep on the light side of things.
As they began to wheel me off to surgery my midwife made everyone stop and said that first my husband and I needed to kiss.
While we rolled down the hall I swam through the blur of fluorescent ceiling lights overhead as they flashed by with my control over my own fate. This could be it. It was possible I might not come out. Not likely, but possible. I was already in danger of bleeding to death and now I was going under general anesthesia. When I woke up from this I would not even know my reproductive status.
Things went pretty quickly. They didn't wait around. A mask was placed on my face and I believe I was asked to count and I was out.
I came to and my midwife was still right there waiting. I asked if it was over and she said yes. I asked if they had done a hysterectomy and with a smile she said no.
We were waiting for clearance to move into the maternity ward to be reunited with Scott and my new son.
At this point, I felt very good from the anesthesia and the high of the worst being behind me (little did I know). I took it upon myself to make drunken chit chat with my midwife.
I asked her how many kids she had (five) and responded with the appropriate exclamations. For some reason, I felt the need to apologize for a comment I had made earlier when talking about my husband having been raised a Jehovah's Witness. I don't remember how this had made it into any conversation, or if I had hallucinated its mention altogether, but I was sure I had cast an unfavorable light on Scott's experience with the religion and somehow had gotten it into my head that my midwife could have possibly been one and I was afraid I had offended her.
She said that, Oh no, she wasn't a Jehovah's Witness and that all she wanted was for all religions to get along, but that that would be up to man.
When she mentioned man, meaning mankind, what I heard was The Man, as in, The Powers That Be, as in The Guy In Charge.
Trying to follow along in this very worldly conversation, I responded, "You mean Obama?"
'Yes,' I thought to myself, 'It will be up to Obama.'
"No, I mean man as in humans."
I tried to seem cerebral and enlightened there, in my johnny, on my back, with my uterus still in tact, "Oh, right. Right. I get you."
Just for the record, if you have red hair, general anesthesia may not adequately prevent embarrassment from social awkwardness.
Happily, the awkward silence was broken when we were given clearance to leave obstetrics for the maternity ward.
I was wheeled triumphantly into a room where my husband waited, already bonded for life with our Oscar, and made a small celebratory sound at the sight of me.
I was set up with my IV and we were left alone for a minute.
I looked at my love, my hero, my Scott, holding the baby that up till now had only lived in my body. Scott was looking at him. He looked like a different person than the one I had known for eight or so years prior. He looked up at me and said, "It's amazing how much you love your own kid."
And I knew indeed that he was a different person and that our lives were forever changed.
That night as Oscar slept soundly in the crook of my arm while I recuperated in the hospital bed, I stared into his new little face. The tiny rivet leading from his nose to the heart of his top lip was deep and a diminutive, peaceful smile rested on his mouth. He looked like a small lion, bundled in the flannel blanket in his little cream colored hat.
I couldn't sleep that night. The nurse told me that my hormones wouldn't let me. I spent a lot of time gazing at my little lion.
In the morning the surgeon came by our room and informed me that I had suffered from what is known as a Retained Placenta. He said that of all of the complications suffered by new mothers, this was the one he dreaded the most because it was the only time he'd ever had to tell a new father that he would be a single parent. He also had a half-cocked, unsupported theory about my having been an ovo-lacto vegetarian during the first half of my pregnancy, but other medical people I've run it by have shot that theory down.
He described the updated state of my uterus with a metaphor of what remains after having torn old wallpaper off a wall. He literally said, "You don't even want to know what I had to do to get that thing out of there."
Um, considering I may need to use my uterus again, maybe I should? Or maybe just write it down, put it in an envelope, and when the PTSD has subsided, I'll look at it.
I was warned that I had lost a significant amount of blood and that eating red meat again was advisable, especially if I planned to continue breastfeeding. I was pumped full of antibiotics and monitored closely for signs of infection. Every few hours a nurse came in pressed on my abdomen to make sure my uterus was still shrinking.
Hearing the details of what had actually occurred was unsettling in the way that information can be when it causes a sort of emotional hangover and you actually wish you could go back to before you'd ever heard it.
I counted my lucky stars that everything had gone okay, and that the three of us would be going home together, exhausted, in love, and on the mend.
But of course, I was wrong about that too.
Oh yes, there's a Part Four, which I'm not looking forward to writing.
But for the time being, a new family was born.

We Visited Smiling Hill Farm in Portland, ME today. Here are my favorite pics.

This One Time When I Had a Baby...Part Two

Disclaimer: 
This post is still about having a baby. I do not recommend this post to any person who
a.) is lousy with hormones
b.) has a lot riding on an orgasmic childbirth
c.) is content having obtained their life's knowledge of childbearing from viewings of Look Who's Talking or The Blue Lagoon
d.) believes in the ability of the woman's body to "shut that whole thing down"
and, as always,
e.) does not in any way want to read anything wherein I acknowledge having a cervix, or its surrounding area.

In typical sitcom fashion, Scott helped me to the emergency room to check in. I breathed heavily while trying to recite, let alone remember, my social security number for the intake person. I noticed through the corner of my eye that we were of great interest to the other patients in the waiting room. One of the men waiting actually asked Scott if this was his first kid as we tottered by. He sang the praises of parenthood and wished us luck. Scott seemed a bit too flustered and panicked to be appreciative.
We were finally ushered upstairs. When asked if I needed a wheel chair I actually accepted, though after it became apparent that I was going to be waiting for one for about as long as a match for a heart transplant, I asserted that I would brave the long haul up to the labor and delivery ward on foot.
When we arrived in the room it contained only a chair. It was explained to us that it wasn't set up yet due to being a newer room. The L&D nurses assured us that the rest of the furniture was en route that very moment from another part of the hospital and told me to change into the hospital gown on the chair.
At this point, I was looking for anything, anywhere, to provide me with the slightest bit of comfort and confidence. I had yet to find it.
I don't know what my ideal birthing room would have been right then- maybe a simulated lake with gin vapor steam beading up on the surfaces of lily pads while a virginal harpist with naturally blonde pubic hair strummed Greensleeves in the corner- but all I could remember thinking was, "Oh this is awful, just awful. This is going to be awful."
Don't get me wrong- we had toured the hospital a couple weeks earlier and found it calm and clean with nice soft lighting and hard wood floors.
Nothing had changed since that original tour - it was just where I was in my labor experience. Nothing seemed to be going as planned and it was still early. Despite having chosen and stayed with my healthcare provider since early in my pregnancy, having gone over labor techniques with a midwife in a private birthing class, having toured the very floor where I would be giving birth, and reading enough Ina May Gaskin that I considered my fertility my own personal assistant on an unpaid internship, I still felt totally unprepared and like I was in the middle of an emergency with a freakout level of, say, having accidentally sawed off a limb with a large piece of farming equipment.
I took the hospital gown into the bathroom and hastily took off for the last time what had become my pregnant-lady uniform, the double-knotted drawstring pants and brown cotton maternity tee shirt.
I remembered having perused "special" and "attractive" laboring gowns on Amazon a month earlier and now scoffed at the idea of being at all concerned with wearing something flattering to do what I was about to do. I had actually considered buying something of my own to give birth in until, I'm glad to admit, I realized what a stupid concept that was.
It wouldn't be too different from buying a special garment in which to pass a kidney stone, you know, so if you happened to catch yourself in a mirror (as you peered down between your legs) you'd feel good about yourself.
No. A starchy, standard issue, non-organic, open backed, hospital johnny (the same kind people die in) seemed just the ticket right then.
When I came out they had the room set up with all the typical birthing equipment. A bed, monitors, the baby station.
Because my midwife specialized in providing as natural a birth as is possible in a hospital, I was only subjected to a minimum of monitoring while in labor. They charted the baby's vitals a handful of times during contractions and I was not on an iv. Which meant no drugs. Which meant I could move about freely and go to the bathroom all by myself. Which meant no drugs. Did I mention I opted for no drugs?
Here's my whole thing about that.
Okay, I took out a bunch of paragraphs here that detail my schtick on why natural birth was right for me, which I may publish in a separate posting another time for those who care, but because I know you didn't come here for that, I'll sum it up: 
I'm less scared of pain than weird drugs and i.v.'s and not being in control. And no, I don't think I'm better than you if you had an epidural. And no, I don't regret my natural birth. And no, it's not for everyone.
And that is why chose to give birth the way I did.
So, where was I?
After obtaining the baby's vitals, it was the nurse's job to read me a waiver and have me sign it. I was not able to read the waiver myself because I was laying on my side and clinging for dear life to the bed rail the nurse had made the mistake of attempting to remove to better be able to place the monitors (yeah, she decided not to do that).
The waiver was very long and it concerned our valuables, those of my husband and I, and the hospital's lack of responsibility for them. Apparently, some people like to wear Tiffany's diamond encrusted tiaras while giving birth. Yeah, us, not so much. (I wear mine to scrub the pit stains out of Scott's shirts.)
Remember the casually aforementioned back labor? Yeah, so, that was pretty much hurting like a bitch, and I had a really hard time finding it in myself to be polite enough to let this poor nurse read through her waiver without interrupting her with my display of emotion.
So, after a minute or so I kindly asked her to stick her waiver up her filing cabinet. Actually, I believe what I said was, exasperatedly, "Can we do this later??" because I actually am very polite. Apparently that was all I had to say because that was the last I heard about the waiver or our non-existent valuables.
The rest of my labor is a blurry sequence of events. It does go fast, or it did for me, anyway.
Here are the things I remember:
I remember being in the bathtub (See? I told you it was a good birthing hospital) and being surprised that the sensation of being immersed in warm water was actually quite irritating to me. The midwife had to add cold water to the tub because I felt "trapped."
The midwife kept telling me to let my legs fall open like a frog. She's not the first OBG-type person who seems to be under the impression that I have some weird ability to "let my legs fall open" while my knees are bent. I realize what got me in that situation to begin with, but believe you me, those positions take effort and are usually not assumed for my benefit.
My husband continually offered me ice water until I got annoyed and the midwife warned him he might end up drenched in ice water.
At one point, I locked myself alone in the bathroom and when Scott knocked on the door and asked to come in I screamed "NO!!"
And then there was the time I accidentally kicked the corner of the metal trashcan, cutting my pinky toe, looked down at it and thought, "Normally, that would hurt, but right now, toe pain is not in my realm of feeling."
Then there was the moment I could hear a nurse asking Scott if he had eaten and saying it was a good time for him to get some food. Things were blurry at that point but I have the distinct memory of looking up from the hospital bed between contractions to see Scott sitting in a chair with a plastic tray of food eating hospital ice cream out of a paper cup.
I guess on some obvious level it seemed a bit unbalanced, that I would be delirious with pain in attire that purposely left my ass exposed while my husband watched and enjoyed the culinary reward that is ice cream. But then there was this other aspect, that he hadn't eaten all day and was having to watch his wife writhe around in pain and this was probably the worst ice cream he was ever going to have. In fact, this experience could actually ruin ice cream for him. (Don't worry- it didn't.)
But really, it was just awkward. Like, fake-wood-paneling, Dad's-mustache-in-the-seventies, awkward. I was creating life. He was having a frozen desert treat. A cervix's gotta open. Dude's gotta eat.
Around that time the pushing had begun. The midwife told me when I felt an unbearable pressure that it was time to start pushing. I considered telling her that the whole third trimester was a lot of unbearable pressure, and, come to think of it, all of K through 12, but I digress.
I wasn't sure whether I was really feeling the right kind of pressure yet or not, but I remember having a contraction and thinking, 'Works for me!' and telling her that my inner goddess was giving me the thumb's up, hoping my eagerness would help get the whole thing over with sooner.
We moved to a birthing stool, the midwife sitting in front of me and my husband sitting behind me. To this day, I know Jesus loves me because somehow, my husband didn't notice me inconspicuously poop on the floor. (Another seasoned midwife trick- rapid disposal of evidence).
And then back to the bed for more pushing.
At this point I had just about had it. This is what those in the birthing field call transitioning. It is literally when you are on the brink of squeezing out your baby. The contractions become insane and thus, so do you. Most women who deliver naturally have a breaking point and usually, this is it. They decide that they've changed their minds and do not, in fact, want to have a natural birth, and come to think of it, a birth at all.
When I began to transition I went into the bathroom after a contraction and threw up (another symptom of transition).
I was done. This whole baby thing just wasn't working for me.
I returned to the bed and told my midwife that something would need to be done, I'd given it my all, but that it was time to call in the big guns, i.e. drugs.
She calmly agreed, said she would get me something for pain and also for hydration and nausea since I had just thrown up. First, she would just have to check my dilation to see how close I was to delivering.
What do you think happened next? Go on, guess.
Turns out, I was dilated to eight centimeters. I was going to be having this baby naturally after all. For a moment this was devastating, but the thought of the birth being almost over was motivating. I literally was going to have to push my way through it. That's when the real pushes began.
Between me, my midwife, and a bottle of olive oil, we got that baby out pretty danged fast, and with no tearing, to boot. (If you don't know what tearing is, it is what it sounds like.)
My son was born at 3:01 pm after ten hours of labor at seven pounds and one ounce.

We all lived happily ever after. The End.
And... SCENE.

If you have the feeling there's more to this birth story, you're right.
If this were a Choose Your Own Adventure, I'd advise you to stop reading here.
But this is a real story.
Thusly...

The midwife laid him on my stomach and I looked down at my still unnamed Oscar, chalky and swollen, stretching out in his new found space, his weight on the outside of my body for the first time.
He craned his head in the direction of mine and simpered the most curious little smile, a cosmic look that effused the secrets of his gestation ending and life beginning.
I had just seen these secrets briefly, but had no way yet to speak of them.
But there we were, on the same side of a door that was whispered to me in the midst of my begetting. I retained the impression of how easily we go from one side to the other and how the details of that passage are so beyond our influence as to make our efforts to control it laughable.
I didn't know then why that threshold was visible to me. But it would be one of the first things my son and I would glimpse together.

This One Time When I Had a Baby...Part One

Disclaimer: 
This post is about having a baby. I do not recommend this post to any person who
a.) is about to have a baby and is feeling fragile (i.e. is about to have a baby)
b.) still believes in the stork
c.) refers to fallopian tubes as women's plumbing
d.) believes that menstrual cramps can be "prayed away" (in fact you should avoid my blog altogether)
e.) is related to, or well acquainted with me, and whose relationship with me might be unfavorably and unalterably changed by the image of me doing any of the horribly unflattering things associated with having a baby.

Capisce? 

In that case....

On August 27th, the day after my 32nd birthday, a tropical storm was whipping its way up the East coast. Its name was Irene. 
I was thirty-nine weeks and three days pregnant. I had just put in my last day as a part time hair salon receptionist in Provincetown and was making yet one more "last" grocery shopping trip before having this damn baby.
This time while stocking up on more food to bring with us to the hospital I was also throwing in gallons of spring water as we were being warned of a possible shortage should we lose power, which was pretty much a given on outer Cape Cod.
Sure enough, Irene blew through with fifty mile-per-hour winds. Even though we only got hit with the outer bands of the weather system, we still lost power, and as expected, water. 
Not having clean water for a few hours is a pain in the ass, not having it for a day is unsanitary, and not having it while in labor is an emergency. I knew this, and though I wasn't yet in labor, I had an uneasy feeling.
The day after Irene blew through Scott and I went on a walk during the power outage to survey the wreckage. I was pretty big at that point and we walked slow. We ran into various acquaintances around town and chit chatted. We were even invited to join in on some drinking and bocce ball. Being that we weren't in a drinking and bocce ball sort of mood we waddled back home and planned for another evening without power, eating as much of the food in our no-longer-frozen freezer as we could. 
We watched Austrailia on Scott's battery-powered laptop, listened to a battery powered radio, and fell asleep.
Earlier that evening I had noticed the slightest pinkish hue on my toilet paper (by the way, I am going to talk about stuff having to do with my body in an explicit way, as it is pertinent to the story, so if the thought of reading about my cervix is upsetting to you in any way, then you should go find a blog about soccer, or Labradoodles, or something non-cervical.)
As I was saying, my bloody show... well, the show had started. 
If you google bloody show you will find out that it doesn't always indicate labor impending within 24 hours, but in this case it did, and somehow, don't ask me how, I could tell this was the case for me. (Might have been that whole hocus-pocus-ladies'-intuition thingy. Go ahead and burn me at the stake.)
So as you can imagine, a little bit of panic had started creeping in. I barely slept that night, thinking about the possibility of going into labor, and being stuck on the outer Cape without running water, or worse yet, driving almost two hours to our hospital further in Cape and still being without running water. It was a restless night. I slept poorly. And when I woke up to pee at that first glimpse of light, I was discomforted by the eerie absence of electrical charge in the air. There was a dull silence; the power had not come back on in the night as I had prayed it would.
It didn't help that after my first morning's pee, the toilet paper was now tinged bright red.
I went back to my sleeping husband and laid down next to him. I was going to try to fall asleep. I was not going to freak out. Maybe I would fall back asleep and when I woke up the power would have come back on, our water would be restored, and I'd have a nice shower as my labor began.
I actually did drift off briefly and barely for maybe a half hour, when, at 5:32 am, I experienced a sensation that was at first dismissible and then at once obvious and painful. 
It was a tightening, more pressure than pain, but strong and ominous in nature. I opened my eyes and it took a moment for it to register that surely, that had been a contraction.
I laid there mentally skimming over my poorly committed hypno-birthing notes. The techniques seemed clumsy and irrelevant and barely accessible. I had had one contraction and already I was losing my grip on myself.
The second contraction came and went less than a half hour later. My husband woke up to the sound of my "breathing techniques"- only he called them "hyperventilating."
I told him I'd had two contractions already in the last half hour. He told me I needed to slow my breathing waay down. This wasn't something he'd picked up from birthing literature. It was something you say when you're trying to keep someone else from freaking out.
I called our midwife. She assured me that the hospital had power and running water and that being my first baby, it would be at least another twenty-four hours before I delivered. She told me to go about my day as calmly and normally as possible, and hard as it was, to try not to think about being in labor. She said to call when my contractions started coming less than a certain amount of time apart or when I they became very painful.
I called an hour later during a contraction. I handed Scott the phone after dialing. He stumbled, telling her he wasn't sure what to say but that I dialed and handed him the phone. I grabbed the phone and told the midwife that the contractions were much stronger than the previous hour. She said to come in.
Would you believe that I didn't have a bag packed? The thing about that is, most of the things you would put in such a bag are things you use every day. I believe I had a bag out, ready to be packed. And we did the typical sitcom throwing things into the bag, waddling and breathing heavy to the car, mad dash to the hospital. There really was no time to do any last minute things, as I was sure there would be.
There was no cleaning for hours, or baking, or long walks, or relaxing showers. There was that crunchy feeling you have after being awake all night and not having been able to bathe for a day and a half in addition to the late August humidity, swelling, heartburn, and probably worst of all, borderline panic.
Wareham was one and half to two hours away, normally. Scott got there in an hour. 
I had heard awful things about having contractions in cars but I shut my eyes, put the passenger strap to the test, vocalized every contraction, and honestly, I sort of went away.
I don't mean that I fainted, or astral projected, but I did sort of leave my body. 
Don't get me wrong; I felt everything that was happening, but if I kept my eyes shut, all that existed were the contractions, the noises I made in reaction to them, and the relationship between the two. I was existing on the edge of what was happening. At times, I distinctly remember thinking "That one wasn't so bad. I stayed ahead of that one. It is like the ocean. It is like surfing waves. I just need to do that for the next one." And then I would misplace whatever mojo had kept me out of the pain during the last one.
Either that, or some of my contractions just weren't as bad as others, in no particular order. Which I want to address, does in fact actually happen. 
One thing that surprised me about labor, it wasn't quite as mathematical as my reading had lead me to believe.Yes, the contractions get progressively stronger from first to last, but they do wax and wane a bit in that pattern. Not only that, the amount of time between each one fluctuated too. It didn't only get shorter and shorter. 
Although in my case, it didn't make too much of a difference since I was actually in back labor, which means basically that it just hurt the whole effing time. It hurt most during contractions, and slightly less between them. 
You heard me. 
I know my anxiety didn't help and maybe was even the catalyst for the back labor, but no wonder I was freaking mess. I didn't have a chance to come down and regain composure and get all Giselle-y about it between contractions.
The midwife had asked us to meet at her office before going to the hospital, if I felt I could make it, so she could check my dilation and make sure I was in labor enough to be admitted.
When we got there and she examined me, which I also found painful, she said I was dilated to four centimeters.
Four centimeters after a couple of hours of contractions for a first baby is atypical and some might even say impressive. I don't mean that I had actually done anything deserving of applause at that point. I mean it's not the medical standard, though obviously, not unheard of.
Well I, for one, was not impressed. 
As I stole a glance at the bloody latex glove our midwife pulled off her hand, I told her I was a little disheartened that the pain I was experiencing was only that of a four centimeter dilation while I cowered at the thought of what was to come for the remaining five centimeters and god knows how many hours.
I didn't like where this was headed. Already several facts I was planning to rely on had been disproven by my freakishly strong labor.
Cue wavy fantasy montage... A full day of uneventful contractions with hour long breaks between while I relaxed and bathed in my own home as I eased my baby down... That was the labor I had signed up for. Not relentless pressure and pain rendering it impossible to poop, let alone breathe, as I leaked enough bright red mucus to make a phone book maxi pad necessary before even having given birth yet.
This was shaping up like a crime scene.

The Gravity is Implied

It's a shade before nine at night and the fog outside is thick. Thick like clouds have decided to lay claim to Cape Cod as sky. Thick like I half expect to have been transported to David Bowie's lair in The Labyrinth once it has dissipated. It lends a lovely sense of etherealism, or it would rather, if it weren't for the ominous alone feeling that crept in fiercely about three hours ago.
Oscar had just fallen asleep after a day of errands and insufficient napping. I had begun realizing just before initiating an early bedtime routine my own depletion. The variety that is threefold. This was highlighted by an unexplainable reaction to a kiwi, the fourth of its kind and this week, chopped into tiny pieces for Oscar, and unfortunately less sweet than under-ripe. The parts that I ate were so tart that a sore flared up in my mouth and I began to worry about Oscar who had at that point had already eaten good bit of it. Aside from making it clear he too found it tart, he had ignored his aversions, gone for the gold, and seemed just fine, if not somewhat ornery due to being an underslept baby. Looking back I can only conclude that my reaction may have been due to using the plate as a cutting surface and not rinsing off a few strands of kiwi fur that must have stuck to the flesh. Or one of those razor sharp seeds. Why I am I feeding this to my baby again?
Having a sleeping Oscar and a chopped heart of Romaine lettuce for dinner (not in that order) seem to have balanced things out again for the most part. My glands seem to have gone back down, the sore is less so, and I can feel my blood becoming more oxygenated as we speak.
But my mood...
I should have prefaced by saying that my husband, and co-parent, is out of town for four days. This is day two. I am adrift in the four-day-oasis of single parenthood. These times always call to mind the single mothers I know. How on earth do they do it?
Really, for me, it has only continued to become more manageable over time. But that doesn't mean it isn't still hard.
I found myself by this afternoon doing the thing I hate. Trying to find something to occupy Oscar so I could have a half hour to my own thoughts and do an internet search I'd been thinking of. Essentially, I was trying to avoid my baby. I used to think this made me a terrible mom and possibly even crazy, but I've come to accept that this is a (sad?) fact of being a stay-at-home-parent. Sometimes you need quiet, to cleanse your brain, to not focus on anyone else for, say, an hour (ha!) and you just can't have it.
No one can be 100% focused 100% of the time.
Oscar seems to sense when I'm having one of these moments. It is then he becomes obsessed with a) the trash bin, b) my computer, c) my purse (which is really his diaper bag), and/or d)absolutely none of the perfectly safe, colorful, age appropriate, non-toxic toys I continue to buy and leave out in new and enticing positions in the middle of the carpet next to, but not on top of me.
Not to mention that tiredness, both Oscar's and mine, leads to clumsiness. It's not Oscar's job to protect me from banging my hip on the car door or tripping over the mattress, but it's mine to keep him as unscathed as possible in the many times throughout the day that gravity seems to blindside him.
We do pretty good on this front when we're in good spirits and rested enough. Oscar seems to invariably land on his well padded bum every time, I don't bump into things nearly as much, and when I tell Oscar to heed a hard surface, slapping it with my hand and saying HARD, he seems to understand, at least for the minute and a half following.
But in the face of exhaustion and impatience, unruly surfaces seem to find us both, and it doesn't take more than one of these instances in Oscar's case for my heart to momentarily break into a million pieces.
The heartbreak is much less about any actual damage- I'm not exactly situating him in death defying positions- than not having prevented it in the first place.
That cry- the one that tells you that something hurt or was scary, the one that asks how you could have let something happen when you were inches away, the one that accuses, and then recedes just as quickly as it began, into your hug and the reminder of assurance- that cry can be unbearable.
And yet, despite how many goose eggs and face plants we prevent, those little shocks are absolutely necessary in the formation and development of physicality and personality.
This is the labor. This is the love.
That you will try in spite of yourself to do everything perfect and you will fall far far short of that. But you will continue to try and continue to fall short.
And that, so far, is how I can best explain being a parent. And where I find myself tonight.

The Tarot Cards Were Right...

A few months before the end of my pregnancy I spent some evenings alone while my husband spent time working on the house in Maine. Usually when he is out of town my sleep patterns change and I tend to stay up well into the am, tackling a knitting project and watching asinine "squat to piss" movies, as he calls them. Behind my meticulous crafting is the droning of Lifetime network movies where all men are villains, and the protagonist a helpless heroine, or some mindless romantic comedy on one of the bad movie channels. The chance to indulge in stupidity and get lost in some stitches without the regulating routine of having a partner to pattern my daily habits by is a throwback to my autonomous days, when I leaned more to the nocturnal side of twenty-four hours. Momentarily refreshing, it simultaneously reminds me of why I prefer to be partnered in the first place.
I have heard Scott say similar things about his time alone in Maine, where he chisels away at our house, his life's project, often inadequately sheathed against the elements and improperly nourished, returning home with chapped lips (and once with hypothermia) after eating cold soup from a can for dinner for a week and eventually working his way back around to feeling the need for a hot shower, clean bed, and warm body to enjoy a real dinner (and other things) with.
For some reason, on this particular stint, I indulged not in insipid movies, but disturbing ones. The specific two that come to mind are A Requiem For A Dream, which for some reason I had never seen in its entirety.
After the movie ended around 4 am I lay in bed reeling with the haunting score pervading my brain well into the next day or so. It didn't help that much of the movie centers around a woman withering away on speed in front of her tv at 4 in the am, providing the sensory illusion that temporarily I, in fact, was this character, forcing my brain into awakeness well beyond the point of tiredness, and while pregnant, nonetheless.
As someone who has been acquainted with various chemical addiction since the age of 14 and lived to come out on the other side, realistic movies on the topic strike a visceral chord with me, dangling a rotting carrot before me in case I wonder where I could have ended up.
The other movie was one of the Hanibal series, a later sequel, not necessarily the best one (which we all know is Silence of the Lambs), but with a couple of gruesome enough scenes to have stayed with me anyway.
What was most horrific about this movie was the way the predator stalked the objects of his violence, kidnapped and murdered the family dog weeks before his attack so as to ensure a quiet break in, and did away with an entire family in the most violent way imaginable.
True to single girl fashion, every time I got up to pee I would check the locks and spare room for lurking strangers, just waiting to harm me and my unborn in the absence of my husband. (Not that the present husbands seem to help the victims in movies like these anyway).
It all seemed very silly and I knew I should have been avoiding these types of movies, due to my overactive imagination and lack of the usual stabilizing SSRIs to keep panic attacks at bay, which I had forgone due to the pregnancy.
I will touch on the event of my weaning off of my medication and tell you that I was, in fact, in quite a dark place in reality, which is probably what fueled my fear mongering movie bender in the first place.
Over the first 20 weeks of my pregnancy I decreased my Lexapro in 5 milligram increments, despite most of the medical community claiming it wasn't necessary, and with each step down my Magrittian water colored cerulean sky succumbed to sudden splotches of muddy water, dripping into my universe from an invisible painter with a change of mood and heart.
It changed me, as tinkering with one's brain chemistry will, and most lightness and pleasure that accompanies pregnancy seemed to dissipate for me. Physically, all seemed well, but behind that was a haunted person whose demons were steadily creeping back in, without any excepting regard for my special condition.
During this time I must have logged some twenty or so hours making nighttime pee trips to the bathroom. Our bathroom had a window behind the toilet that was right on a busy street. The window had a curtain, but usually when I would turn to flush I'd pull the curtain away far enough to view the dark street. I would think back to the scary movies, and the psycho killer always lurking in my mind's corner would materialize in the darkness and grow a heartbeat. Sometimes the foggy amber light cast down by the street lamp would coalesce my feeling of doom by blinking out completely, cementing the darkness, and I felt exposed there, pregnant behind a warped glass window on the other side of a night I could no longer see into. In those moments I was sure there lurked a danger, a killer, waiting to eat our surprise.
When the unimaginable did finally happen months later, and we bode our time in the custom cut hell that took place for us in a sea green hospital maternity ward just West of the Cape Cod Canal, my husband shared his own personal omen that had plagued him as the trimesters had wheeled by. That he had kept seeing the number 911, mostly on clocks, for some time. 9:11. 9,11. 911. Danger. Something's wrong. Trouble.
And something was wrong. The whole time. The flawless ultrasound and our confidence at being on the right side of the statistics was illusory, as we would soon find.