Mum's the Word

Welcoming a daughter, embracing interdependence, and celebrating amid uncertainty

You waited for the doula to return from her family Christmas sojourn in Brazil — for her to sleep, eat, and take the train. And, just barely, for the midwife to bike over in the sleet, after the doula called her to clarify that I had meant, in my slanted way when I have to ask for something important, to come.

Two of your older brother’s daycare bugs had had you on edge for months — sick mama made impatient baby. When you came out, your long legs further explained why you’d been kicking up in my ribs while your head bobbed down deep in my pelvis for weeks. Could be you came a bit early, because your inn was out of room.

Tall daddy and small mommy made a long girl, slender, with features so petite and fine, the pediatrician commented it wasn’t your size or weight, but your build that made you seem so tiny. Still, the look in your eye was anything but delicate. You seemed to know this place, issuing wry smiles and precise commands early and often.

Although the latest of many unnecessary ultrasounds had suggested as much, I was still surprised you were so lean. In my belly, I had felt you early and often. Before the test, it felt as if something were stuck and heavy. I thought you were twins.

The day you were born, the hot water was out again. The dishwasher had been broken since Christmas. Luckily, a small but dedicated band of alloparental associates had been on hand for three weeks — cooking, shopping, cleaning, and entertaining your older brother so that I had the wherewithall to eat an early dinner without puking when you pushed up on my stomach in bed.

I woke early and spent all morning trying to get the work done that I hadn’t gotten to for three weeks: posting a blog early, sending and drafting emails, and reorganizing to-do lists and trying to work them before going to bed with worsening cramps I hoped would pass. They did not.

The thing I remember most vividly about your birth is the singing. The moment when, in the room made dim for our work in the winter darkness, we had heaved together through the threshold between life and death, and stood together on the right side. We were also literally in the doorway, or nearly, of my bedroom, where the doula had hung a sheet over the door for me to pull on from as high as I could reach, to as low as I could squat, redoing the length of it in the same contraction for relief.

Suddenly, the work was done. There was no more doubting I could do it, clocking the pain, reassuring myself I wouldn’t have to do it again, or reminding myself how much I had always wanted you and that there was, anyway, no easier way out.

The baby has to come out somehow, and every other possible way involves, in my estimation, more risk of net pain and harm for longer periods. C-sections are major abdominal surgery, with attendant risks and postoperative pain. Epidurals can compromise laboring women’s mobility and create their own pain and stress, during and after. Even “gas and air” (nitrous oxide) risks B12 deficiency in infants.

When you had come out in the usual somehow, there was no more calculating the likely distance remaining (short), or wondering (fleetingly) if I needed to be wondering what I was doing, while I was busy doing it. No more touching your head in a standing pause to ask if it needed to stay still or go back for a moment, saving my skin.

There was just the great, loud singing of the happy body that has paid its due. For a few moments, I seemed to also feel a great singing swell all around us, as if my ancestors and your father’s ancestors were standing on the other side of the shore, having helped with the pushing, cheering us on.

And then, like a hiker looking down from on top of a mountain where he might have died and knows it, I wanted desperately to do it again and again. The days I got to give birth to my children were the happiest days of my life. To hold you for the first time, swimming in oxytocin and exhilaration, giving thanks for our safe journey, made my heart bigger and healed my brain.

Eventually, I looked around and realized there was a lot of blood. But nothing seemed to hurt or be hurt. You had held your cord tight, the midwife explained; and when she told me to grab you, we had pulled it in opposite directions. Precious drops of stem cells and iron had pulsed all over when it broke. I’m still finding and cleaning it up.

There is always, my darling, something to do better in retrospect. Consider it your own special confetti. An umbilical piñata. We’ll get you some iron.

Although we kept it dim except for a smattering of medical checks and paperwork, I saw light dancing all over your skin like brushstrokes, like seawater dripping from your journey across the waters of time and existence, and like invisible hands leaving traces of caress. I thanked you again and again for coming to be my daughter.

In the absence of a hot shower, I rinsed the blood off myself from a pot of teakettle warmed water in the tub and laughed to myself — because this will make me sound tough, when the reality is rather that my body seems to do birth very well, and other things (like breastfeeding) fairly badly.

I waited a week to name you, watching your changing face gain in fullness and color, attending you and having you attended asleep and awake, wondering how much more you would change — and who would be your family in affinity and in action. It had surprised me how easily I got pregnant still; how impossible it was to get what I needed to stay with the great man I loved, who had promised to be good to me; and how things unfolded when I left. It surprised me, when you were born, how safe I felt being cared for by my mom and stepdad, how we all got to share the love high of smelling your head and stroking your barely-visible eyebrows, and how lasting the exhilaration of birth then was — full of French toast on demand, and (mostly) obeying instructions to rest and recover. That week was the best vacation ever.

“Nobody gives birth like you do,” the doula laughed later, having arrived for both my children’s births right when I needed her. “If you had told me you couldn’t time or talk during the contractions, I would’ve taken a car. Who does that?”

“Someone who’d rather give birth alone in the woods,” I explained, “but realizes in labor that she needs help.”

Birth is neither the beginning nor the end of all that. Not for me, and not for us.

If there is one, unifying modern struggle, it’s around interdependence. How we hate, modern Western subjects, to acknowledge the limitations of our perspective on our perspective. How dependent we are on webs of trust even in the human enterprise of science or the technologically mediated one of AI. Just how vulnerable and stupid we are, in configurations both together and alone. And yet, sometimes, how strong and smart.

Propping upright a burp-resistant newborn, I watch her smiling in her sleep while her brother hums and jostles. She rests on my lopsided lap, and I think of Madeleine L’Engle’s words on creation, connection, and the joy of finding yourself part of something so wondrous as new life.

“Rejoice!"

By Madeleine L’Engle, The Ordering of Love

Rejoice!

You have just given me the universe,

put it in my hands, held it to my lips,

oh, here on my knees I have been fed

the entire sum of all created matter,

the everything

that came from nothing.

Rejoice!

Who can doubt its power?

Did not this crumb of bread

this sip of wine

burst into life

that thundered across nothing

and became the cause of all our

celebrations?

Oh, the explosion of nothing into something,

into flaming, raging suns and shouting comets

and drops of dew and spiders’ webs

into mountains bursting forth with brilliant volcanoes

valleys falling and rising

laughing with joy

earth’s cracking, primordial rains flooding

a snowdrop’s star, a baby’s cry

oh, rejoice!

rejoice and celebrate

eyes to see and ears to hear

fingers to touch

to touch

the body’s living warmth

hand stretched to hand

across nothing

making something

celebrate

lips to smile

to kiss

to take the bread and wine

rejoice

flowers grass pavements

gutters garbage cans

old people remembering

babies laughing

mothers singing

fathers celebrating

rejoice

around the table

hold hands

all round

like a ring circling a finger

placed there as a promise

holding the universe together

nothing into something

into joy and love

rejoice

and celebrate!