There’s no dignity in childbirth.
The first two days are the worst. All that cushioning, nurturing blood your womb’s been holding is not expelled during childbirth. No, it waits until the baby is wiped and measured and wrapped, and you’re resting in bed and then have to get up to go to the bathroom, alone finally after having a gaggle of nurses and the doctor examine your messy, spread-wide vagina for thirteen hours.
My trip to the bathroom was a ginger, creaky shuffle. I made it halfway across the room before my uterus clenched and I felt a pop, and a hot torrent of blood gushed out of me, splatting on the floor like a wet mop. All I could do for a few moments was stare at it, Lamaze-ing.
He- he-, hooo. He- he-, hooooo.
I waddled to the bathroom to get towels, but when I turned around and saw my smeared bloody footprints, the huge pool of bright red blood, and felt gloppiness still oozing out of me despite my best Kegel exercises – I knew I’d make things worse with every helpful squat.
I leaned on the intercom and said, “I made a mess.”
I waited in the bathroom doorway, counting the times I heard the blood splink at my feet. I counted what was still white, what I’d missed: 17 floor squares on the left. The privacy curtains. Three walls. I’d gotten to 22 floor squares to my right when the nurse arrived. I apologized, eyes averted.
“Oh, honey,” she said, wiping my quivering legs with a scratchy white towel. “This is normal. Now you get in the shower and this’ll all be gone when you get out.”
In the shower, forehead resting on cold tile, I watched my blood curlicue in the water and knew that all that blood was coming from where my heart used to be.
I’d ripped it clean out of my chest and all I could do was bleed on everything.
Relinquish: to renounce, abdicate, surrender; to hand over. Relinquishment is in Roget’s under the heading Abandonment.
According to Mama, not only was I abandoning my child, I was giving away my best chance of love. “What about walking side-by-side down railroad tracks?” She wrote me when I first told her. “What about his first word, Mama?”
I folded her letter up tight and shoved it in my underwear drawer with the cocoa butter she’d sent for stretch marks.
I got out of the shower, clean, but feeling the glops gathering inside. Wishing for cocoa butter.
I wrapped a towel hard and snug around my head—the hospital gown was so loose—and scrunched another towel between my legs under my panties and maxi-pad. I creaked and Kegeled back to the bed before another vaginal explosion could mar the room and I eased under the covers. I was sucking in the smell of the bleached sunshine sheets when another nurse came in.
“Would you like your….” Her hand wavered in the air. “The baby?”
“Yes.” Like there was any question.
Two days.
Hot-eyed, hollow, I bottle-fed my baby while my breasts burned with un-used milk. When the nurse came, careful, kind, with the relinquishment papers, I’d been cradling my son, rocking and whispering love into his tiny ears. Suddenly he was a load of bricks in my arms, his weight foreign. Not mine.
“You can change your mind,” she said. “You have a six month grace period.”
Hope clanged against my rib cage. But.
The baby’s father was a one-night stand who hadn’t even made me come. I had no job. My mother had told me I couldn’t live with her. Were I to keep him I’d either bring him home to a dorm room on a Conservative Baptist college campus, or I’d bring him home to my molesting father and to a savage stepmother who slapped and slugged my younger sisters for dumping shampoo on the floor and forgetting to do chores. Who asked me if I’d give her my baby.
He – he-, hooo. He- he- hoooooo.
Hell, no.
I nestled my son on the covers between my knees and signed the papers over his head, then shoved them at the nurse and waved her off. I wanted to feel my baby’s weight one more time. So I could lock his square face, his blue eyes, his perfect knees, his pink tiny mouth, all of him into my memory. My flower.
My best friend, Jill, who’d given a baby girl up the year before, told me that my sacrifice could be someone else’s blessing.
I believe that.
But I haven’t breathed properly since.
12 Comments
February 25, 2009 at 5:43 pm
The beginning is so horrifying Stacy, but in a good way. It really engages the audience. You want so to look away but you cant.
February 26, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Oh Stacy.
What really gets me (and affected me at the real life fire pit) is the link between blood on the floor and the young mother attempting to work out how to work this situation out. The imagery of splinking blood and culicues down the drain are very well balanced against the count down of time and responsibility toward herself and her son.
Perhaps consider spending more time with the mother and her experience at the hospital before you come to the paragraph that begins the part about relinquishment. It seems to lessen the impact of the abandonment when you define relinquishment prior. Consider saving the definition part for later in the piece, perhaps after we are introduced to the son in her arms.
The literal spelling of the he, he, ho, ho sections are confusing to me. I think I’d rather have those feelings and what the words are trying to portray delivered as narrative or as dialogue. They seem to be in a middle ground at the moment and I find them difficult to sound out.
I understand this is an experpt, but I suspect you can draw out some of the events a little bit longer. I could stay with these few moments in the hospital room about 50% longer.
A very affecting piece. Thanks for submitting it.
March 5, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Incredibly well-written. Your use of imagery is fantastic.
March 14, 2009 at 4:07 pm
I could feel this viscerally. I did not want to finish reading it because it so perfectly brings the reader into the moment and into that hospital room. I cant wait to read more.
March 15, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Oh my goodness. You write beautifully, Stacy.
April 17, 2009 at 7:27 pm
This piece hit me in two ways:
1. This is truly wonderful writing
2. I am now scared shitless to give birth
May 6, 2009 at 12:51 pm
POWERFUL, descriptive & intrusive… Stacy your “Black Sheep Sings (Excerpt)” is wonderful… So rarely do I have imagery dancing for so long as what your words invoked.
May 18, 2009 at 5:40 am
[...] Memoir excerpt Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Hey Mom!Birth was the easy part.Post at fMhMy last post at BabyCenter – Goodbye! [...]
May 18, 2009 at 8:30 am
[...] Memoir excerpt [...]
September 22, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Hi Stacy
I think you have very powerful writing indeed, with strong imagery and tight rhythmic control over both your sentences and dramatic content. Hopefully we will see more of this in the future.
Cheers,
Andrew
January 21, 2010 at 10:32 pm
Stacy,
Thank you for inviting us into your world. By sharing your experience and your feelings through your chosen words you have given the reader a taste of what it is like to be in your shoes, even if only for a short time.
Even though there are billions of people on Earth, the birth of a child, in my opinion, is still an incredible miracle. I am a father to a child with special needs. Our son, Matthew, was born with a serious congenital heart defect. His diagnosis was Pulmonary Atresia with VSD. He also has ADHD and allergies. To date, our son has undergone 5 heart surgeries as well as other non-cardiac operations. Matthew is 15 now. As I look back at his early childhood years when he was so very sick, and spending nights on the couch holding him close because we were so afraid that he would stop breathing or his heart would cease beating, I learned how precious life truly is.
I love how at the end of the piece, your best friend Jill gives a different perspective. Even though you went through much emotional and physical pain, Jill points out the fact that your baby can be a blessing to someone else. That is a very powerful thought, and I am glad you included it.
Take care and God bless you,
Jim
June 19, 2010 at 6:31 pm
Stacy –
WOW….don’t know what to say. I had no idea. Powerful doesn’t even come close. I can’t wait to read more.