Women's Work

Part One

How to Disappear
 
 
 
Chapter 1
 
It was a Tuesday morning and Tom was packing to leave me. He was headed out into the hinterlands, to a small town in south China where the Communist Party was cracking down on rioting factory workers. This was Tom’s kind of adventure—a trip out into the provinces, into The Real China, to witness a fracture in the power of the Party. A substantial assignment with a light dusting of adrenaline.

As for me, I was just trying to get comfortable. I experimented with pressing my spine straight against the floorboards, then raising my pelvis into the air. I sighed and groaned.

Rolling clothes into logs and stacking them upright in his backpack, Tom pointedly ignored me. 

“Are you really OK with going on this trip?” I asked churlishly.

“Come on,” he smiled at me. “You’re not due for two more weeks.”

“That means anytime from right now.” With a heave I rolled over to my side, letting the heavy sac of water and child splash dully onto the floor.

“The doctor said you’ll probably be late,” he pointed out cheerfully. “I bet it’ll be three more weeks.”

“You don’t know.” No, that wasn’t comfortable, either. I pulled air into my lungs and held it, trying to push my ribs off my womb.

“There are flights every hour.”

I sighed. The baby punched. He had to come out, somehow. My flesh stood in the way of his life. Tissue would tear, blood must flow, pain was a promise.

“I’m going to the airport straight from the office,” Tom dropped a kiss on my hair. “Text me and tell me what the doctor says.”

“Don’t go.” I was too hot to think straight. I begrudged him, in some confused way, the airports and adventures that I had relinquished. Maybe I sensed that our fates were about to diverge radically; maybe I was trying, clumsily, to make him share my inconvenience and immobilization. Maybe I just wanted a companion, my love, the baby’s father. Maybe I was scared.

“Honey,” he said. “I can’t sit here for four weeks.”

And he went.

*
 
“Your fluid is too low,” the doctor announced the next day. “He has to come out right away.”

“What?” She might as well have said I was pregnant with a kangaroo kid. The indignation I had unloaded on Tom was, at bottom, an empty flourish of spousal guilt. Never for a moment had I believed the birth was imminent. “Why is the fluid low? What do you mean, right away?”

“The fluid is low because he’s not peeing. That means he’s not getting nourished. This can happen with gestational diabetes. The placenta sometimes stops working.”

I was numb, trying to follow. Then a spike of horror. 

“He’s starving?”

“He’s not starving,” she said gently. “But he does need to come out now.”

“My husband isn’t here. I mean he’s traveling.”

She squinted at the ultrasound report, pen on her lips. “Can he be here tomorrow?”

“Yes.” Goddamn right he can. “Are you sure it’s okay to wait?”

“One day is OK. Go home. Take a long walk. Hopefully you’ll go into labor and we won’t need to induce.”

“So I’ll have the baby tomorrow.”

“If not tomorrow then Friday.”

“But the baby is coming now. Like, this week.”

“Yes.” She was laughing at me.

I called Tom, too shocked to be smug. Then, alone in the apartment, I started calling friends. I’m having the baby tomorrow. Repeating the words, I tried to make myself believe it was true.

I hadn’t packed a suitcase. Most pregnant women pack for the delivery months in advance. Checklists clutter the Internet: Soft pillow, relaxing music, favorite chocolate. But I, who had thrown together hundreds of suitcases for all manner of climates and crises, who had once kept a “go-bag” stuffed into my office closet for the next suicide bombing—I had never faced the ritual of packing this one, particular bag.

The baby was coming. I wasn’t ready. Tom wasn’t here. The entire enterprise was slipping off track.

I can no longer remember why this seemed important at the time, but during my pregnancy I’d become obsessed with the idea of a natural birth. I wanted to push my baby into the world through the vagina and without drugs. I told myself that I was a writer and an artist, a woman unbound by fear and pain and convention. I wanted the undiluted experience.

I knew everything about birth, or so I thought. Of course, I knew nothing about birth then, and I know nothing now. I only know that the only people who know anything about birth are women who are in the act. Like all great pain, like every altered state, it can only be apprehended from within. It can’t be anticipated or remembered.

I thought birth would be the texture of the soil; the color of the moon. I thought labor would be simple work. I thought pain would not be pain. In my imagination, it was like that.

I didn’t stop to consider that a truly “natural” birth would probably consist of a teenaged mother facing a decent chance of death, nor that there had been nothing natural about my pregnancy so far. I’d staved off motherhood with birth control while I built my career, only to discover that I needn’t have bothered. Pregnancy eluded me until I flew halfway around the world to undergo surgery for endometriosis.

A thirty-five-year-old frame stiffened and battered by decades of hard living and neglect, my body was hardly the youthful web of flexible ligament and muscle that biology would favor as its maternal vessel. “Advanced maternal age,” the doctor had written across the top of my file.

Nor was my temperament suited to natural birth. I’m a runner and an insomniac, not a yogi or meditator. I’d distinguished myself as the least relaxed mother in the Hypnobirthing class I’d attended with Tom in tow. The midwife had rolled her eyes and clicked her tongue over my tensed shoulders, so I ground my teeth and tried even harder to relax. I tried, really I did, and somehow that was part of the problem. I didn’t know how to stop trying.

During all this moony preparation, I hardly thought about the baby at all. This new human life was a misty idea, a blurred bundle of my own emotion wrapped in an impossibly fluffy blanket which, come to think of it, I didn’t own.

It was a lot to think about. Maybe this is how our contemporary psychology confronts massive change. Couples drown out a fear of lifelong commitment by obsessing over iris-and-ivy centerpieces and the vocabulary of the vows. Who wants to think about diapering and colic when you can sip chamomile tea with beatific pregnant ladies and swap tactical advice designed to outmaneuver the dreaded obstetrician? (“They’re surgeons, you know. They think it’s their job to cut you open.”)

I approached birth with the competitive, adrenalized mentality of hard-charging newspaper work. Labor was an arena in which I would struggle and—inevitably, eventually—triumph. I would do it. Me. Motherhood itself lurked out in the margins of an old map, scribbled with sea creatures. Here be dragons.

Tom struggled to get home. Thunderstorms raged in southern China that night. His flight lingered for hours on the runway. Hunched over his computer, dripping sweat, he hammered the interviews into a news story. Finally the plane took off into the night sky, carrying my husband north.

Harried and soggy and exultant, he reached our apartment at 3 am. I was lying in bed, wide awake.

Four hours later, we drank a pot of coffee and took a taxi to the hospital.

*
 
A cot with bars and perfectly white sheets. Instruments with dials and screens, steel tables, metallic skeletons and hooks, things that rolled away. A pullout sofa for Tom.

I kicked off my shoes and climbed onto the bed, but lying there felt like an affectation. Hospitals are for broken bones, surgery, stitches. Now I felt, obscurely, that I was making much of myself, swanning around on a perfectly normal Thursday morning.

 “What are we going to do all day?” I asked Tom.

I kept looking at him and thinking, You should be at work! I think I even said it once: “This could take a while. I could call you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.

I hated the bars that made the hospital bed resemble a cage. They delineated the man from the woman, the mother from the father. I malingered in plastic and metal and hospital pajamas. Tom sat with his exhausted complexion and street clothes. I wanted Tom to find it strange, too, but he didn’t share my agitation. When I fretted over the bars he frowned. “They’re just for—you know, physical safety,” he said absentmindedly.

If he realized we’d been split from one another, he didn’t mind. Maybe he had been raised to expect it; maybe I had not. The memory of those bars would stay in my mind for years.

The doctor came. The doctor frowned.

“The baby has not dropped,” she said. “The head is not engaged. Your cervix is closed.”

She tucked her clipboard under her arm and looked into my face.

“This induction is not going to be easy for you,” she said. “I know you wanted a natural birth, but under these circumstances I recommend an optional C-section.”

This was precisely what the midwife had warned us to expect—the doctor wanted to medicalize my birth!

“I don’t want a C-section,” I snapped. “But you said it’s ‘optional,’ right? I have a choice?”

“Ye-e-s,” she said slowly. “I can’t say it’s imperative. Not yet. So, of course, it is your choice.”

“Then no,” I said firmly. “No C-section.”

“Fine,” she said. “We’ll start by trying to soften your cervix and start contractions. Then we’ll see how it goes.”

*
 
The summer day pressed upon the hospital and the city, pressed upon my belly with an immobile and dull ache. We pestered and pressed the nurses for permission to go for a walk. Getting out of the maternity ward was like getting out of prison. Forms were signed; promises extracted; bracelets issued.

The drab side streets of northern Beijing offered no promising place to stroll. The sidewalk came and went in unhelpful patches. We passed faded dusty storefronts and stalls hung with crutches and stale bandages and flimsy wheelchairs folded like dinosaur skeletons. A chain Italian restaurant, heaps of fruit, laundry. All was pavement and towers and walls, all was mineral hard surface.

“Let’s go in here,” I said. “It looks like there’s some kind of playground or park—”

“It’s a workers’ compound,” Tom said. “They built these all over China. All the people who live here will have worked for the same factory or ministry or whatever.”

Through a rusting gate we entered a constellation of brick apartments. Old men played mah jong at picnic tables, shuffling their tiles, cupping their hands over cigarettes. A sweaty day, sky clotted with smog, air thick with coming rain. The young and the elderly had fled cramped quarters for the cracked pavement and weedy beds of the courtyard. Clusters of women bent their heads together and children roamed wild. There was a miniature amusement park with a tiny merry-go-round, sun-faded plastic animals, a trampoline. An old man took coins for the rides. Only one small girl had pocket money; she spun alone and serious, as if she’d done this ride before and it was never what she’d hoped. The old man hawked and spat. Soon her turn would end.

“We won’t be able to get out this way,” Tom warned.

“There must be a second gate.” 

“These compounds usually have only one way in and one way out,” he said. “But we can try.”

“Okay.” I kept walking.

Our path was shrinking; the buildings closed around us. I led us down one alley, then another, but each one was a dead end.

Tom was right.

“You were right,” I told him.

“It’s not about who’s right,” he said.

Forward momentum hit the wall. We could only return, retreat and go back to where we had started.

*
 
Back in the hospital room, painful contractions gripped and vanished in pointless rhythms. The hours dragged along but the baby didn’t budge.

A nurse tucked sheets over Tom’s sofa bed. I crawled in beside him, sluggish and sick, and twisted in contractions until sunrise.

Morning brought breakfast trays and yellow light. Smog stood thick in the air. In the schoolyard behind the hospital, children sang their morning anthems to the Communist Party and then counted off their exercise drills. I had been in the hospital for 24 hours and practically nothing had happened. Morning fell to afternoon and sunset clotted into black but still the baby stuck high. Another night in wakeful limbo. Too much pain to sleep and yet I was desperate for more pain, enough pain to tear this baby, once and for all, from my body. In the morning the doctors urged me, again, to have a C-section, and again I refused. With grim, we-tried-to-warn-you faces, they hooked a sack of Pitocin to the IV and flooded my veins with birth hormones.

I had been stultified and swollen, but now my body began to shift around with excruciating speed. I distinctly felt my hipbones dragging themselves apart. The sensation reminded me of the rack, of hapless medieval lieutenants drawn and quartered, horses pounding in opposite directions to spill hot blood on stinking dust. Torture, execution, European history—God! I didn’t want any of that in my head. I had expected some tearing and stretching, but this sensation was deeper and deadlier and unspeakably painful. My skeleton was being dismantled. There was nothing in my brain but gruesome images and a single mantra: I am going to die.

I was supposed to be thinking of other things. The midwife had trained us to meditate and “go to a place deep inside,” as one of the hippy moms had described birth. But it wasn’t happening. I had been awake for two days straight and my strength was blown and that place inside of me, if indeed it existed, was not findable now.

The hospital room had disintegrated into its own drabness. I rolled far out at sea, in the fogged dark of night, and the waves pushed and tossed and I couldn’t keep my head above water. I’m here, I’m lost, let me go. Another life is buried within me. It is also my life. My own life must rip itself from my center and leave me dead. Let them take it. Let me go. His life, my life. Take it, do it. I can’t anymore.

“Give me an epidural,” I gasped when I could speak again.

The contractions were fast.

The needle was huge.

I couldn’t have cared less.

“You have to stay still, even when the contractions are coming,” the doctor warned. “If the needle slips you can be paralyzed.”

Cold steel slipping quick oh God that’s my spine. I was still at sea but now it sloshed with the sweetness of nothing. I was too limp to talk. “I’ll take a shower,” Tom said uncertainly.

“You should,” I agreed. He withdrew into the bathroom and I heard the slap of water on tiles. I luxuriated in nothingness.

But something was happening. Monitors beeped, buzzers bellowed, nurses raced in from the hall. Suddenly the room was crammed with people rushing, chattering, flipping pages.

“You’re going into surgery,” somebody shouted. “The baby’s heart is failing.”

“One, two, THREE!” They heaved me onto a stretcher. Tom came dripping and bewildered from the bathroom, and then he was running beside me, somebody had given him a cap and a mask, somebody had given him scrubs. I was losing moments. I understood what was happening and I understood that it was happening to me. It had already happened a very long time ago. It was a memory in real time.

The surgery was freezing cold and snappingly bright. Nausea rolled and curdled.

“I’m going to throw up,” I whispered to Tom. “I don’t know how—”

“We’ve already cut you open,” a nurse barked. “No moving. I’ll put a towel under your chin and you vomit there.”

I did as I was told.

I heard a baby crying.