All the Horrible Girliness

I can't speak without choking back tears. Even if I'm just talking about online banking.

***

I ask my inlaws how the baby is doing, if he's okay, because I think that's what I'm supposed to do. When I ask, I don't know if I care.

***

Then I have these nightmares. In the most recent one, I'm still pregnant. My mother and I go to a new gym with nice facilities. We are impressed that the bathroom has sitz baths. These are bath-like things, but you sit in them with your legs out like a chair, in hot water. I took sitz baths in the hospital. They feel good on stitches and lacerations and what-all else I have down there now.

So in my dream, I sit in the sitz bath and I leave, but I've forgotten something, and when I go back to find it, I go through lines and lines of these sitz baths looking, and one of them is clogged. I'm annoyed that someone would clog up a sitz bath. It looks like a big bundle of toilet paper. But then when I pass it again, I see that it's my baby floating in there. And I grab him out, knowing he's okay. And I check for his breathing, and he isn't breathing, and I say, "He isn't breathing," and I say, "He's ----."

***

When I try to tell Mr. Aran this last part, he stops me. Don't even say it, he says.

***

While he was being cleaned up and whatever on the other side of the room, I watched the doctor pull out my placenta and stitch me up. He is a kind man, very patient. Everyone else was over with the baby, who was screaming up a storm. The doctor and I did our thing. He looked at my saddest bits, intent, concerned. He explained that I had a laceration that would hurt, later, when I peed. I watched him pull the string up and thread it back through. It seemed to take a long time. He said there were layers to it.

***

Melanie, my lamaze teacher, said the pain would be like nothing I'd ever experienced before. So I was expecting something altogether new, like I'd grown whole other parts and nerve endings during pregnancy specifically for the purpose of this new pain.

When it came, though, it was just like menstrual cramps. Except altogether different. I try to come up with adjectives, like "intense," but they aren't right. I have to use more words.

It's like being in the ocean. Trying to stay on top of the waves. Every muscle tenses up, no matter what you do, no matter how you breathe. If you turn your back on it, you'll drown in the pain. All the breathing does is keep you barely above the wave.

At one point, my epidural machine, not yet hooked up, started beeping. In all the sound, I couldn't concentrate, and I drowned.

MakeitstopMakeitstopMakeitstop I cried.

***

I can't think of people holding him without picturing him falling. How he'd look, in pieces, on the floor. The noise I'd make. The rest of my life without him. It's impossible. I can't even think of the pain.

He's not breathing.

He's ----.

***

On his second morning in the world, my son and I watched the sun come up together. I explained it all to him: what the earth is and what the sun is, and how earth moves in two different circles, and why it was getting lighter outside, and how it would get dark later.

posted by Samus @ 8:02 PM