Letters from Grenada

(Click here to start at the beginning.)

I am on my back, musing that it totally sucks to be a turtle. The doctor holds one leg and my mom holds the other. The doctor looks down and reports, huge smile on her face, “Your vagina is stretching quite nicely!” Um…  Thank you? I almost laugh, but I have no breath to waste. Mom hasn’t seen me naked since I was a kid, but now she’s looking right between my legs, telling me she can see the baby’s hair. It was, she told me later, the most magical moment of her life.

I push three times, once to test the feeling, twice to see how far I can go, three times to finish. Three times. It’s 11:11, and Jack is born.

His skin is darker than I expect, not the right color at all, really and I’m confused. My mother is tearful and frightened, but I know he’s OK. He coughs. I say, “I feel so much better now”, laugh. The baby is on my belly for a moment, before they take him to the other side of the room.

No one is looking at me. I ask, “Are his balls supposed to be that big?” I don’t get an answer.  I don’t see them suction his nose. There’s amniotic fluid in his lungs, bubbles rising from his nostrils. It’s because my labor was so fast, because I was induced, because of the pitocin, because my doctor wanted to schedule my body and my baby.

*

Later, after Lyndon has come and gone, they put the baby in an incubator that is really just a little plastic heated box. Grenadians are notorious (says I) for overdressing their children. They are obsessed with keeping warm enough, strange, when you consider that the temperature rarely drops below 90.  I think of all the Grenadian babies I’ve ever seen, and recall that they were all wearing socks and long-sleeved shirts and warm caps under the blazing sun.  That night, in order to dry out the fluid in his lungs, the nurse sets the temperature to 104. 104! The pediatrician, Dr. Lowe, rolls her eyes but says nothing.

They all leave.  Mom and I are thunderstruck. “They want to cook him!” We’re afraid to take him out of the box, but I can’t believe it makes sense to leave him either. We watch. After a few minutes, Jack starts to wind his arms like a slowly waking windmill. We’ve just met, but I know my child. I know what he’s trying to tell me. He’s too hot. He wants out.

For a while we attempt to compromise. We’ll leave him in the box if we can turn down the temperature. I figure out how to lower the temp, but I set off the alarm. It beeps at us until the nurse comes in, clucks at us and puts it back the way it was. But she doesn’t tell us to stop interfering. I replay Dr Lowe’s eye roll. I realize it’s my decision. I decide to trust my instincts.

I take him out and set him in the bassinet next to my bed. Mom takes the first watch.

I sneak a bath and look at myself naked in the mirror. I am shaped like a literal pear. I have never seen anything like it. Gah. I look away, focus on getting clean. I am a little shaky, standing in the tub rinsing myself off. I know I’m doing something they’d never let me do in a hospital in the States. I’m proud of myself.

After hours of exhaustion, of fantasizing about naps, I am suddenly too wired to sleep. It’s after 2:00 in the morning. Mom and I talk most of the night. I eventually drift off, but she stays awake to make sure Jack’s breathing remains unlabored.  It does.

Lyndon brings breakfast the next morning, and it is heavenly. I’m so hungry. I’ve never been this hungry. I thought I was hungry while pregnant, “eating for two”, but this is different. This hunger is profound and gnawing. My stomach yawns as if I’ve missed days of meals. The bread is fresh; the ham and egg sandwiches are just how I like them. The sweet tea tastes like a bakery smells.

Dr. Q comes by. She neither acknowledges nor apologizes. She squeezes one of my nipples, hard. Bitch, I think, that is the last time you will ever touch me. I am too tired and happy to do anything but smile serenely at her, but I mean it. I never saw her again.

A nurse patiently teaches me to feed the baby. Every suck sends a sharp muscle cramp tearing across my belly. My uterus is shrinking back to its original size, and it hurts. In spite of this, I am grace personified, a feeling that lasts until Jack is almost four months old. Today, when I look at pictures of myself taken during those first blissful days, my mother doesn’t have to tell me I’m beautiful, because for once I can see it for myself. My skin was rosy, my eyes pacific, and my smile soft and full of light. “State of grace,” my mother says.

I still wonder if things would have been different and terrible if I hadn’t pushed so hard, gotten him to air so fast. I’ve resolved not to obsess about that, but I can’t forget.

At the clinic that afternoon, the day after Jack’s birth day, I was anxious to be in my own bed, nursing in private. Jack was dehydrated from the “incubator”, but they wouldn’t let us go home until he peed. I fed him and fed him, for what felt like hours, until we were both frustrated and slick with sweat. Finally, finally, his diaper got wet.

I pulled on a pair of jeans, wrapped my hair in an African print scarf and put on my sunglasses. On our way out, the nurse saw me in the hallway and assumed I had to be the sister of the new mother. When she saw how gingerly I walked down the steps, she realized her mistake and laughed in surprise. “Goodbye, darling. You take care dat beautiful boy, hear?” I smiled, nodded and said thank you.

We were home by 4:00.

That night, the world fell away as I watched the baby sleep. I watched his chest rise and fall. I memorized the details. His baby blue and white striped newborn tee, snaps in the front. His fingernails, already in need of a trim. His round knees. His soft cheeks. The fuzzy down on his head, auburn like mommy, curly like daddy, thick like both of us. His perfect bow lips.  The birthmark on his back that matches my father’s.

I fell in love a million times a minute. He sighed and I swooned. Sleeping, he pulled up his legs and tucked his arms against his chest, curled up like a little bean. It was the posture of a baby in the womb. Bean, I silently called to him. Baby Bean, oh Bean! Your mommy loves you so much. The nickname stuck. Today, when I’m feeling effusive or silly or both, I address him as “Joaquin the illustrious Bean”.

Read all the books, take all the classes, meditate with all the midwives, you are never prepared for childbirth. I certainly wasn’t. I didn’t expect to feel out-of-control, yet powerful. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that the actual moment of delivery would be the least painful part. Never could I have guessed that I’d set eyes on my son and feel I already knew him. How could I have fathomed how much I would adore him?

When Jack was a few weeks old, my mother said to me, “Maria, the beautiful thing about being a grandparent is that you don’t have to worry about everything turning out right… Because it already has.” I don’t fully understand what she means by that, but it makes my throat tighten with emotion.

When I’m honest with myself, I know it doesn’t make sense to try to distill what motherhood has meant to me. It’s too early. Jack is not yet three. Every day something new happens, sometimes beautiful, occasionally frightening, and never ever boring. I can’t plan it, I can’t predict it, I can’t control it, and that’s ok. The future teems with uncertainty. The only thing I know for sure it that this is only the beginning.  I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Posted on October 12th, 2008 under Grenada • Tags: backstory, Grenada, living abroad, motherhood, pregnancy. •  Print This Post •  Email This Post • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback