2012–04–22
The following are two pieces about the birth of my daughter. The first is a fictionalised prose poem I wrote in 2018 for a writing class. The second is a personal essay I wrote on her birthday in 2016.
It was only two hours ago that we were in the room but it feels like ten years. I step in and close the door to take it in all over again, shutting out the sterile white light that washes the windowless corridors outside. The blinds are raised now — maybe they have been the entire time. High above the interstate sparsely beaded with headlights is a pinkening swath of cloudless sky. I am alone in the kind of dark that befits this beautiful stillness.
The bed is as we left it, the sheet bunched and looped over itself. Every wrinkle and twist in the fabric recalls a push, a squeeze, a squat, a moan, a scream. There is no blood in sight, but I remember so much of it. The stirrups are pointed away from each other at an impossible angle. A detached tube dangles from a depleted bag on a pole. All around the room, wires lead pointlessly up to dark displays and resting gauges. The odd green or orange light blinks on some panel every few seconds. The whiteboard hanging on the door still has our names, which I wrote, and the time of birth, height and weight, which the nurse added afterwards.
I want to touch something but my mind already sags from the weight of all that I have touched. In a few more hours, our claim on this cube of space, this slice of time, will weaken. They will come in to scrub and steam, disinfect, deodorise, refill and refold. Our names will be dry erased from its memory. Everyday it will re-emerge to conduct another new life into the world, numb another new mother’s pain with her involuntary surrender to destiny, anoint another new father with his own disbelieving tears. But we get only one chance at this new sole purpose, so we will go home, laden with possibilities, and the audacity of a plan.
Every year, on Adoo’s birthday, I have replayed the memory of her birth over and over in my head, and always emerged from the mellowness that washes over me to ask myself why I haven’t written about it yet. And every year, I have made the excuse that the experience hadn’t receded far enough for me to even see all of it, let alone truly understand it. The truth is in that moment I felt an emotion and awareness so intense, so unalloyed, so transcendent, and which I have stowed away so carefully untouched that the very thought of unboxing it and rendering it in language threatened to diminish it, to bring it crashing down into the realm of all those lesser things my words have stretched themselves around. I was new to my thirties, powerless against life constantly cutting me down to size, and when confronted with a task this enormous and a failure this certain and spectacular, my defence was to slink away with dignity.
This morning, while walking Pipou, his poop still warm in my hands, I relived it all, came just as close to tears as always, yet, somehow, this time, I came out thinking, Fuck it, I’m ready.
The first thing this memory is, before it is anything else, is incomplete — my brain responded to the overload by shutting down one or more senses through most of it. It is of indeterminate duration, because my sense of time was among those jettisoned. For the same reason, it is also non-linear. Any chronology I assign it is purely in hindsight — this must have taken five to ten minutes and must have happened in a particular sequence, because that’s how it ought to be.
I think it began when Adoo started to crown. The first sight of the top of her head tore me in two. One half of me remained as a much more motivated but much less effective birthing partner, mumbling encouragement in the form of incoherent descriptions of the curls of her hair, urging Chandana to push so I could get a better look at more of Adoo’s head and consequently relay richer descriptions back to her. The other half of me considered the weight of what was actually happening — that Baby Bumpy, the one that turned in her mother’s belly like a concrete mixer, the mystery of whose face deepened with every ultrasound (except for her button nose, which she offered up in profile after unchanging profile), was about to arrive in the world, and our every conception of her, her every possibility, was about to converge on one real baby, a sliver of whose head I had just seen, and whom I already loved — wait, how is this possible? — more than every single thing I’d ever known and more with each passing instant.
We knew it was going to be a vacuum extraction. The doctor came in, put on his gloves. He moved with such grace and confidence, he made all the nurses who came in before him (and now arranged themselves on either side to do his bidding) seem like flailing amateurs. I knew immediately everything was going to be all right. I think I briefly fell in love with the man. In her last pushes, Chandana’s pain broke through the epidural barrier and her screams escalated and my hearing cut out. My mother-in-law came closer, her hand was on my shoulder, but I ceased to feel it. I was aware I was crying but my eyes were unwarmed, unmoist. In the daze that followed, Adoo was hauled into this world. My hearing returned with her cries, my sense of touch when I cut her clamped cord with what seemed like pliers. Her head was slightly elongated from being pulled on. All of her face was swollen, like a soaked raisin. Her tightly shut crying eyes were the same ones I continue to see, to date, during her worst meltdowns. The blur that I remember all this as is not a faded memory but the perfectly recalled view through thickly teary eyes.
I caught myself counting fingers and toes as she was carried off to be cleaned, weighed, measured, to have her APGAR scores determined. One half of me followed her, the other stayed and kept an eye on Chandana, whose job wasn’t yet done — she was having a large brain-like placenta taken out of her, and her perineal tear was being sewn back up. I remember physically running back to Chandana from the tray in which I finally saw Adoo’s eyes open long enough to know for myself and then to declare to her, “She’s definitely an Adaa. No question about it.”
From this moment on, I remember being whole again. For all the things I do remember in stunning clarity, there are many that I don’t. I don’t recall when I first got to hold Adoo, and I have completely forgotten what that weight feels like for the first time, how it makes muscles that have merrily contracted all their lives suddenly feel unsure of themselves, and how it sets the ball of parental worry on its lifelong roll. I know I took a few photos after birth only because those photos now exist and their timestamps help me untangle this story. I have no recollection of carrying my rather heavy camera through any of this.
This memory was a privilege, something I needed to be in the right time and place to be offered without question. I’ve grown up on the image of fathers waiting nervously outside delivery rooms. Now I am enraged to think of the condescension inherent in some silly old sexist establishment giving the father the news. I hadn’t intended there to be a message to my post but if you could wring one out, this would be it — if you have the option of being in there when your child is born, take it. If it isn’t given to you, fight for it.
Four years later, the one thing I realise looking back that I hadn’t earlier, was that this was an extremely lonely moment. Not physically — my mother-in-law was in the room too — but because I was the only one there who was passively, and to the best of my recollection, painlessly, experiencing the birth of their own child. My transformation in that moment was uniquely mine, and mine alone. Nobody else can shine a light on the knot it makes with my purpose in life. It’s taken me this long to do that by myself.
