A Mother is Born

A seismic change occurred in my life on July 11, 1989. I thought I was prepared for it. I had planned for my whole life to be a mother someday. It was a given. And I had been pregnant for nine months already, after all. We had dutifully attended Lamaze classes in the preceding weeks, and learned how to breastfeed and change a diaper and even mastered the football hold, which is supposed to calm a colicky newborn. We listened attentively as the instructor recommended that during labor, we should use the hee hee whoo whoo breathing technique to manage the pain as long as possible before requesting drugs. If we really needed the drugs, we were told, we could request stadol, a narcotic that would “take the edge off.” If the pain was too great, we could request an epidural but the instructor was sure we could manage our pain effectively without resorting to such drastic measures. Oh yes, we could also try a tennis ball. Evidently rolling one around on your back is also helpful. The clear subtext in all of this was that nature’s way (read: pain) was vastly superior to that of modern medicine.

At work, I had arranged to take maternity leave beginning two weeks prior to my due date. I told my boss that while I was out of the office those three months, I thought I’d write a scholarly article for publication on the subject of insider trading. Even if I was becoming a mother, I was still a securities lawyer, dammit, and I was going to have all this free time on my hands. My boss, a woman with two preschool age boys, smiled and said, “Mmmm hmmmm.” Was that laughter I heard as I left the conference room?

At home, the crib was all set up in the nursery, the walls papered with yellow polka dots and pastel elephants marching around the border, at baby-eye level, the better to pique the infant’s interest in his surroundings. We were stocked up on diapers and onesies, those tiny one-piece T-shirts that snap at the bottom for easy changing. All that was left was to deliver the baby into the hands of his capable parents. We even knew it was a boy. If the doctor knew, we figured, so should we.

We waited. The due date of June 25, calculated with much precision, came and went without so much as a cramp. We waited some more. One week past the due date, the doctor suggested we start thinking about inducement. “If you say so,” we said, just to humor the man. In our hearts we believed this kid would arrive in his own good time and without the assistance of contraction-inducing chemicals. Another week passed. Nothing. By that time I thought those chemicals sounded rather inviting. We agreed to the inducement on July 11, the day of the All Star Game that featured Bo Jackson, the two-sport all-pro baseball/football legend who was America’s darling. “Bo knows babies.” That seemed like a good omen.

We arrived at Magee Women’s Hospital in Oakland at the appointed hour, 4:30 a.m. I was promptly connected to all sorts of tubes and wires and we settled in for a long day. We played cards and read the newspaper for a while. Wait, was that a contraction? That wasn’t so bad. Hee hee, whoo whoo. How was I supposed to go to the bathroom when I was all plugged in like some kind of kitchen appliance? My husband and I have no secrets. I used the bedpan. Around 2:00 I began to experience pain. Not a twinge but stabbing twisting contractions that wracked my body. Hee hee whoo whoo hee hee whoo whoo, my husband coached me. I can’t stand it, give me the stadol. I was sticking to the program.

I’m not a large woman. Even at nine months, from the back I looked normal, skinny even. When the label on the medicine bottle says take two every four hours, I take one every six, and even then it’s too much. No such adjustment was made when they administered the stadol directly into my veins, right next to the petocin and the saline. Stadol is supposed to make you feel relaxed so the contractions don’t bother you so much, while doing nothing to minimize the pain. Personally I didn’t find it very relaxing to hallucinate dinosaurs and vomit while my body was contracting in nature’s effort to expel the alien from my womb. But that’s just me.

By 6:00 I was desperate. I was a weeping pathetic writhing sweaty wife with bad breath from all the hees and whoos, and truth be told, I felt in somewhat bad humor. I demanded the epidural. When the anesthesiologist arrived an hour later (Jesus H. Christ Where In The Hell Have You Been? Can’t You See I’m Having A Goddamn Baby In Here!) I was instructed to roll into a ball and not to move while the good doctor inserted an instrument roughly the dimensions of a knitting needle into my spine, excuse me, the epidural space, and if I had a contraction, he said, use my hees and whoos. My husband, the one who got me into this mess, was not allowed to be in the room during this procedure. There was no justice. The doctor succeeded on the second try and as my lower body went numb he was forgiven for his late arrival. In fact I felt like kissing him.

It was smooth sailing, more or less, for the next few hours, and we watched Bo catch a fly ball with his bare hands. My son will also be a star, I thought. A captain of industry. A brilliant scientist. A standout athlete. If he ever gets here.

Around ten p.m., I was wheeled into the delivery room so the obstetrician could perform his magic. I pushed when they told me to, and to my great relief the enormous hulk that had been my companion for months, pressing down on my lungs and bladder and kicking my husband in the stomach when we hugged in bed, was gone from my body. The doctor held up the infant, perfectly formed, wiggling, hot and wet. He looked like me.

“Omigod,” I thought, “it’s a baby!!” It was a miracle.

As I segued into my new role as mother, I was astonished at the transformation taking place in my body. If the baby cried, my body responded by producing milk. I would wake at night anticipating that he was about to cry, and my body made milk. Any gesture by my husband sent me into weeping fits of self-pity. (“Honey, do you want some ice cream?” “You don’t love me anymore!” “Yes, dear, I do still love you.”) These feelings lasted only around two weeks, so compared to some new mothers I got off easy.

When we first started taking the baby out in his stroller, people stopped to admire him. Yes, I thought, he is quite extraordinary. We ran into a woman from our Lamaze class, who had delivered her child a few weeks before ours was born. My God, I thought, that is one ugly baby. Not nearly as gorgeous as mine. I started noticing that no baby was as beautiful as mine. How clever was mother nature, to instill this sense of wonder in me, this sense of pride, this absolute love for a person I had known such a short time.

About a week into this adventure, one of my superiors from the office called.

“I have Mr. So-and-So on the line from Oklahoma City. Can you do a conference call right now on the blue sky implications of a private offering where a few of the investors reside out-of-state?”

“Ummmm….I guess so.” About a minute into the call, which I could barely hear anyway, I heard the baby wailing from his crib. It was chow time and the milk began to flow. I gracefully exited the call (“Bad connection, I’ll call you later.” Click.) and attended to the needs of my baby.

Clearly this new identity of mine was going to require some adjustments. Thank God I had my mother, who had successfully raised not one but eight children, and stayed with us for a week until I mastered the art of breastfeeding and made sure I got a nap every day. She even planted a garden for me. I returned to work full time after three months, having secured the childcare services of a wonderful experienced mother/grandmother from Homewood named Marlene Worlds. She introduced the baby to mashed potatoes and Jerry Springer and Gospel music. She made sure I knew when the baby was not dressed warmly enough. I could not have survived my return to the land of lawyering without her. She arrived early in the morning and stayed until I or my husband returned, often twelve hours later.

I did have a lactating incident at the office, in which my silk lavender blouse acquired two dark purple stains strategically placed so there was no doubt about the state of my body, but I got past that and survived the transition, at least until baby number two came along 21 months later.

I wistfully recall those days of new motherhood. When I see a newborn I want to hold him, smell him...and give him back. Not that I didn't love having an infant (four of them as it turned out) in my life but my joy and pride in them has only increased with every passing year. I would hold my baby and think "how could life be any better than this?" Then my child would learn to walk, to talk, to question, to love. It only got better. It's still getting better. So to new mothers I usually say "How wonderful! You have so much to look forward to!" And it is the voice of experience.