Already and Not Yet

On Ramona

At forty-one weeks pregnant I went to the hospital to get induced. First I packed my eight-year-old’s suitcase with his favorite oversized t-shirts and stuffed horses. My in-laws came to take Wes and the dog back to their house. “For two or three days,” I told Wes. “Longer if I need a c-section.” It was sixty degrees. He was curled into a lawn chair with the sun on his face when he asked If I’d still love him after I had the baby.

I said, “I only wanted a baby because I love you so much. I was like, hey, I need another one of these kids!” Later, when pain swallowed me whole, the only thought that helped was the thought of the sun on his face.

Packing my own bag, I found a Lorrie Moore collection that Dan gave me in college—or sometime after? His note said he hoped it would help me finish my own book, “not that you need help.” Which book? Did I finish it? I brought the Lorrie Moore to the hospital thinking Dan might read out loud to me. My fantasy was of a working epidural. When Wes was born eight years ago, the epidural failed and my doctors seemed to simultaneously blame me and not believe me. In the end, the umbilical cord was wrapped tight around the baby’s neck, repeatedly pulling him back into my body. The OB’s shift ended. A new OB took her place between my legs and, without using a local anesthetic, cut an episiotomy and vacuum-extracted my son. NICU doctors whisked him away. The OB stepped aside to let a resident practice suturing. Someone told my husband to calm down: “Your kid will still play on the soccer team.” To no one in particular, I said, “I didn’t even get to meet him. I only came here so I could meet him.”

To the hospital I wore the Midland shirt I bought in Alabama in July, when I was skinny, sunburned, barely pregnant. I braided my hair. My overcooked baby kicked at me from inside. When Wes was born, it was sub-zero degrees in Toronto, the worst day of my life. Having him is the best thing I’ve ever done. He has always loved me more than I deserve.

We never read any Lorrie Moore. The epidural didn’t work. The fault may be in my spine, after all. I made the anesthesiologist remove the useless catheter from my back so that no one who entered the delivery room would act on the assumption that I had pain relief. I was in active labor for eleven hours. Each contraction hurt more than the last and more than I remembered was possible. When I mooed like a calf getting branded, my twenty-five-year-old nurse perked up and said, “Good job!” She’d learned about the mooing in nursing school. My mooing was textbook.

Shortly before midnight on March 21^st, the OB on call—who was calm, and confident, and respectful in every moment—told me to push. Deciding to push out your baby is like deciding to cut off your arm when you’re already trapped beneath a rock and the landslide is imminent. You want to survive but you’re terrified to cut off your arm and pretty sure you’re dying either way. You do it because there is no going back to a time when you weren’t trapped beneath this rock. You do it because on some primal level you understand it’s your mind that rejects what your body is capable of. You do it because your mom, who did it three times, is standing next to you promising it’s almost over.

I had forgotten to tell my husband it’s common to deliver the baby’s head on one contraction and her body on the next. All at once Dan could see the landslide. Then our daughter was born and the whiplash of elation left him lightheaded. He lay down on the hospital floor.

“Dad usually cuts the cord,” the doctor said.

My husband got off the floor.

It wasn’t the comfortable birth I wanted, though it was perfect. If I had to do it again tomorrow I might die instead. Believing you could never do what you’ve already done is a postpartum conviction that wears off in time—hence Ramona.

While I was pregnant, nothing tasted good and the only new song I liked was that Julien Baker & TORRES single “Sugar in the Tank.” The line that got me was: I love you now already and not yet. It’s not a song about a baby, but in my infinite impatience to meet her it became a song about my baby. She’s here now. Everything tastes incredible.