If I push like I’m Mean Joe Greene, every cell aligned, every breath funneled into that final energetic burst, I can get this kid out of me and have that turkey sandwich I’ve put off the entire day.
Yeah, I know it isn’t your conventional Lamaze focal point, but I am hungry and the sooner I deliver her, the sooner I can satisfy my inner Ethiopian.
I don’t eat, because my friends have told me I will shit all over the table, and the idea of shitting all over the table in a room full of strangers is worse than the notion that soon a crying bomb that also eats will explode from my vagina and be mine to supervise for the next 18 years.
Mine and my ex’s, who I don’t know as my ex yet because I am still deeply in love with him and still so happy I can do like the Paul Anka song tells me to do by Having His Baby. What I lovely way to say how much I love him.
Seinfeld is on the TV in the birthing room at Arlington Hospital. They don’t tell you this in Lamaze either, but I am way beyond the point where soft music in the background will have any kind of calming effect. The episode is the one where Elaine is dancing like she has MS and there’s this moment where I actually think Elaine could be a more interesting name than the name we picked, which was Catharine Marlene. Elaine is my mom’s middle name and it might be— Oh Christ. I don’t even get to finish the thought because it’s interrupted by a contraction that leaves me thinking:
“I would choose a sudden impact car accident over this.”
It lingers for what seems to be an hour, but it is less than 60 seconds. I imagine for sure I will hear her cries any minute, but Dr. Rossi says I have more work to do.
What could be more labor than 50-hour work weeks right up until the water-breaking?
There were bets in the office that I would have her on a Friday night and come back on Monday morning.
It was Thursday, and truth be told, I was looking forward to the 3 month hiatus baby Kate would gift me.
But for now, it was just “Turkey sandwich, turkey sandwich!” If I just keep thinking of that stack of meat with romaine, plum tomatoes a little Swiss and mustard on rye, my toil would be over.
“Breathe,” my ex says.
“The fucking breathing doesn’t work!” I snap.
He can’t run out of the room fast enough to find the epidural team. He’s like Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment running around the hallways shouting,
“GIVE MY WIFE THE SHOT!”
We have prepared for this moment for 9 months and 10 years leading up. We have a team of fertility counselors, boxes of parenting books; the nursery is set with blue bears and pink rabbits. We have the monitors, the Diaper Genie, car seats, high chair.
We are going to be the Uber-parents, we will raise a genius. We have everything except that FUCKING TURKEY SANDWICH!
“PUSH!” The doctor says, “Push as hard as you can!”
But I can’t help but hear it like the Salt N’ Pepa’ song and sing to myself “Push it real good, do do do do do do do do do do do.”
The sky was so blue this morning. The nicest we’ve had in April, and the cherry blossoms are in full bloom. I wake up to dress for work, climb one leg into a stocking, and before I can say, “Are you kidding,” I am standing in a puddle before I get to blow dry my hair.
It takes me a few minutes to figure out the basics:
A. I know I am going to have a baby,
B. probably within the next twenty four hours,
C. I just don’t know when, so I pass on breakfast before we head off to the Dr.’s office.
Doctor Rossi examines me and I am not nearly as dilated as I need to be.
“Go home and take a long walk,” he says.
So my ex and I stroll around Golden Meadow Circle and I decide I really don’t want lunch either. I can smell the kitchens of the homes around me and it’s teasing, but I opt out because of the whole shit thing and now, as I am straining and pushing and putting the Mean Joe Greene face on.
Focusing my breath and thinking of turkey like it’s the sacred body of the Messiah, I begin to realize that starving, because food is, after all, the fuel in which our bodies need to do its best work, is a bigger mistake than the tons of them I will make in the years after Kate’s arrival. I will have so few answers and become my own mother when I least expect.
Ice Chips. What for?
I mean really, what’s an ice chip going to do for me when I am ready to eat the limbs of the nurses around me? No thanks, I tell them. I am working on the sandwich of the Holy Grail.
There is one last breath for me, one last plunge into intervening space.
OK, I am ready.
They tell me her head and shoulders are out, I hold my ex’s hand. It’s our best moment other than conception, one of the few where we are not in disagreement. Elaine is still dancing on the TV, and there are no birthday parties yet to schedule, no first days at school to shop for, no Limited 2 with those slutty little tops she will someday ask for. We have not taken our cross-country road trip yet, her heart has not been broken by that bastard Billy Ramoney, she is not driving her car into those people’s bumper in the Giant parking lot, she has not lost her virginity.
And I am still just as good at this as parenting thing as Glenda Carter, the entire PTA at Wakefield School, and my own imperfect mother, who I suddenly love more than she has ever known.
