Photo by Gina Easley

By Reyna Eisenstark

The birth of my first child was the most traumatic event of my life. Nothing has come close. I’m talking about trauma in the physical sense, but also in the emotional sense, and truly in any other sense that you might use to describe trauma. What I’m supposed to add right here is that at the end of it I had this beautiful child, who is now a remarkable young woman, seventeen years old. This is true, of course, but she had nothing to do with it. This is about me.

The very same day my daughter was born, seven convicts broke out of a maximum-security prison in Texas. They stole guns and a getaway car and spent six weeks on the run, stealing money and weapons and additional vehicles and murdering a police officer before they were finally captured. Just before they escaped, the men had left a note in the prison that said, “You haven’t heard the last of us yet.”

•••

I don’t know what would have happened had I not overheard a nurse, at some point early in my labor, say that when she was in labor, she just sat in a rocking chair and rocked and rocked. It was the last thing the functional part of my brain picked up and latched onto right before it abandoned me. Picture me, a hugely pregnant woman rocking and rocking in a chair, her eyes wild and clearly no longer connecting to this world. If she could have spoken, she would have said, “Help me, please, help me.”

There’s no point in describing the pain because if you’ve gone through it you know exactly what it feels like, and if you haven’t there’s nothing I can do. However. The second time I gave birth, I discovered that contractions do not last for hours. I finally knew what people meant by a “break” between contractions. I understood that there really was time to catch your breath. But the first time around, this was not true. The steady wrenching pain across my back was simply punctuated by bursts of even sharper wrenching pain. The term for this is “back labor” which, like so many other birth-related terms, is a euphemism.

And yet, we had learned so much at our birthing technique class! For example: why would you avoid drugs throughout your pregnancy only to take them right at the end? And so, contrary to my natural predilections, I avoided drugs. Instead, with my desperate wild eyes, I rocked and rocked in a chair like the mental patient I had become, and, just as they tell you never to do, I held my breath with each contraction. The midwife on call and a nurse stared at me in my crazy chair. Stared and watched me rock and rock and hold my breath through a contraction. “She’s doing great,” said one of them. “Yes, she is,” said the other. And they left.

My then-husband, also in the room, by the way, happened to be the kind of person who waited to see how long he could go, how cold it would get outside, before turning the heat on. Let’s wait until November first! he’d say every year with a delighted grin. And later, when we had a wood stove in the living room, he insisted we heat the entire house with it except for a few hours very early in the morning. I had grown up with a mother who turned the heat down at night to 68 degrees. She was a desperately needy person, needy for attention and for luxury. I was not going to be like her, I’d decided. Instead, I spent my winters huddled around a wood stove.

One thing I didn’t know about giving birth was that the midwives, nurses, and etc. check in on you from time to time, but if nothing’s happening, they don’t stick around. Mostly, it was just me and my ex-husband, who tried to be encouraging. Really, though, I didn’t even want him to look at me. I could not bear to be in that kind of pain and have anyone’s eyes on me. It had been probably twelve hours by now.

At some point, the midwife and my ex-husband got into a verbal disagreement. He was probably refusing some kind of test that we were supposed to refuse according to our birthing technique class. But the midwife was nasty, something you might find surprising. The male doctors in that practice turned out to be patient and gentle. The midwife snapped at both of us. She threatened to leave if he kept disagreeing with her.

I had no energy to intervene.

This same midwife, after even more unhelpful hours had passed, offered me something that was too good to refuse. What if we gave you, she said, something to take the edge off? What she meant was Demerol. I had a thought that I might be able to climb back to myself, if only briefly, and I agreed. This was when my ex-husband got angry. At me. Hadn’t we decided that I wouldn’t take any drugs? We had decided that, yes.

I don’t really want to say this, but what happened next was that he turned away from me, picked up his Economist, and started reading. He was done with me.

Unfortunately, the Demerol’s effects only lasted a short time. But in that short dreamy time I could collect my thoughts. The pain was no longer me. It was a little separate from me, and I felt something like relief. But my ex-husband, the man I had come to the hospital with, the man who had stayed with me for all these hours, was angry. Somehow he connected the pain that was wracking my body with the child we were going to have. I did not. I never had.

Time passed. Twenty hours in, I said to a nurse, I feel like I have to push! I didn’t really. But I knew that pushing was supposed to happen eventually. My words were like magic. Suddenly, there was action, people coming into the room and not walking out again; they were wheeling in trays with equipment, acting busy, like I was finally, after twenty fucking hours, doing what I was supposed to be doing. Well, now I couldn’t let them down. And so, I pushed. I pushed as fiercely as I possibly could, the way someone who isn’t pregnant at all might push, just thinking that by sheer force, but with no help at all from my own body, I would push this baby out. It turned out that I strained my pelvis muscles so badly that over the next few days I could barely sit up from the pain. But at that point, I was fierce. I tried, I really tried. But nothing happened.

At nine p.m., after twenty-four hours of labor, I was wheeled into the operating room. If the past twenty-four hours had been my greatest trauma, my greatest moment of relief was the next one, when the anesthesiologist stuck a ridiculously long needle into my spine and I felt the absence of pain, which is sweeter than anything you can imagine. This is what I’d been waiting for, wanting, for twenty-four hours. Someone, this beloved stranger, had simply known.

•••

Not long after my daughter was born, I would be told that the midwife at my practice had stopped attending births. “She was burned out,” someone would explain to me. Ten years later, I would tell my husband, the man who had turned away from me, that I could no longer be married to him.

As for the Texas Seven, as the men who broke out of the high-security prison came to be called, I need to point out that during those same hours that I spent rocking and rocking, trapped in pain, the men made their escape. It was midday, a time when surveillance of certain areas in the prison was a little more lax. The men had worked out a plan beforehand, which seems improbably simplistic but ended up working out perfectly, according to news reports: one of the men would call someone over, while another would hit this man on the head from behind and then throw him into a maintenance closet (just like a movie about men breaking out of prison). After the men had stolen the clothing and credit cards from their victims in the maintenance closet, they made their way to the back of the prison. There, the rest of the group was waiting with a stolen prison pickup truck. Finally they drove off. They were free.

•••

REYNA EISENSTARK is a freelance writer and editor living in Chatham, New York. She is a regular contributor to Full Grown People. You can read more of her writing at reynaeisenstark.wordpress.com.

 

Read more FGP essays by Reyna Eisenstark.