My body provided so much pleasure. Such freedom.
My commute from work was a run through the Bois de la Cambre, a forest that cuts through Brussels. Every day, I watched light through the trees, felt the air knife my lungs, the tension in my quads, the growing power of muscle and thought, “This is joy.” Even cold rain on my skin in winter’s dark days.
Then, for two days, peach coloured blood stained my underwear. Running home from work, I ducked into a pharmacy.
At home, I peed onto a stick, sunk into the bath, let the test marinate on the sink. When the digital screen read “2 weeks” it felt like clean water pouring through me. An emotion seemingly untouched by thought or reason.
But then, I’ve never trusted emotion. Certainly not happiness. Never love. But then, I’d never met you.
Before I became one, I’d never been interested in mothers. Those lumpen creatures with sagging faces, boxy, careless clothes, bad hair, beholden to a small dictator. Certainly, I’d never become one.
Now here I am, stranded on this distant planet and when I cannot hold my bladder, balance on one foot, run, move without back pain, or do any of the other things that used to be so easy and automatic, I feel it as a terrible loss. As anyone might.
Know this: Talking about pregnancy and childbirth feels like pressing my naked, broken body against cold, soundproof glass and screaming.
(Can we forgo the disclaimer about how I love my child? About how I wouldn’t change a thing? How I would do it all over again?)
Once there was a tree....
and she loved a little boy.
And everyday the boy would come
and he would gather her leaves
and make them into crowns
and play king of the forest.
Shel Silverstein,“The Giving Tree”
After two weeks, you make your presence known. I wake at 5 to write, but am overtaken by nausea. By 6 a.m., our hormonal dance sends me gagging into the toilet. After three months, I tell people with a fake cheer, “Well, this part will be over soon!”
I am wrong.
I cannot find myself in pregnancy books or message boards. They are populated by procreation fanatics, zealots of motherhood. Expressions of mourning for the free, childless life are pathologized, doubters accused of depression. Loss sublimated into instructions to “do something nice for yourself”—go out for dinner with hubby! Book a massage! Get a manicure!
As if manicures are all we stand to lose.
Kate Manne’s Down Girl, comes to me just in time. She writes, “When women are tasked not only with performing certain forms of emotional, social, domestic, sexual, and reproductive labor but are also supposed to do so in a loving and caring manner or enthusiastic spirit, patriarchal norms and expectations have to operate on the down-low. Their coercive quality is better left implicit.”
I am unprepared for how often I will be expected to perform joy. For how often I will be expected to smile through brokenness.
———
I had expected your movements would feel like an alien invasion, but instead you are a burrowing squirrel, running tiny paws along my sides. You scratch at me when music plays, when classes are boisterous. Stop when things go silent.
Some days you are still, and I am overcome with fatigue; then, suddenly, you are back, and so am I, only now I am more crowded with your bigger, sturdier body.
———
I continue running home.
My breath labours. Gravity pulls. My belly, a weighted vest strapped to my torso. Still, running is freedom.
Women tell me, cheerfully, that their bodies were never the same again. Each time I press for details, I get a half-joking, “You’ll see,” as if I am being initiated into a secret society whose secrets cannot yet be revealed.
Because they smile I think they mean a wider bum, looser stomach, slacker boobs.
I am wrong.
And so the boy cut off her branches
and carried them away
to build his house.
And the tree was happy.
“The Giving Tree”
At 24 weeks, my sacrum dislocates from too much Relaxin, the aptly named hormone that relaxes the pelvis for childbirth. Sharp pain insists in my back whenever I move. Running is impossible. Walking becomes a shuffle. I ride hot, crowded buses, carry plastic bags for vomit. Sometimes, while teaching, I vanish into the bathroom to gag. During breaks I roll onto bean bag chairs to nap.
When I tell my obstetrician, she smiles, yes. It’s like that sometimes.
For 9 months and 10 days, pregnancy is vomiting, pain, and fatigue.
———
As you grow, my skin is a layer of too-tight clothing, as if my whole body is squeezed into tiny leather jeans.
Summer is the hottest on record. Mornings, we sprawl under glycine, afternoon is yoga and chores wearing only underwear. You move like a salmon, fins flapping and turning.
When I think about newborn days I picture climbing into a long, dark tunnel that goes on for years and it is wet and lonely and exhausting. And something is screaming in there.
Nobody knows what causes labour to begin. Oxytocin, yes. But the mechanism, the reason oxytocin is released, remains a mystery.
You and I certainly don’t know. For weeks, contractions squeeze your body, sending me into my cool bed until they pass.
Ten days after your due date, we go to the hospital to be induced. Our room is like a 4-star business hotel with faux wood furnishings and sliding glass doors. There is a microwave and champagne fridge. A room service menu. An army of midwives.
I am terrified. Of pain. Of dying. Of the unknown. Of you.
They insert a cannula. Check for progress. Four centimetres—two centimetres in two days. The midwife says it will go fast.
I ask, “Can’t we wait and see?”
But they are on a schedule. I am messing it up.
"It’s my body,” I say.
They make me promise to return after the weekend.
We walk Brussels’ hot streets through contractions. My planetary belly attracts stares, and when we bump into a colleague, her shock makes me see myself as she must— shuffling, moon-faced, engulfed by you.
Monday, we return to the hospital, ready or not.
I am hooked to an oxytocin drip.
I bounce on a birthing ball, report on contractions.“That one feels like I hit my funny bone.” Or “This one’s like a pulled muscle.” None as bad as the chronic migraine I had for 20 years.
After four hours, the spikes on the monitor everest. The midwife raises her eyebrow, says, “You must have a very high pain threshold.”
I’ve always suspected this of myself. I feel vindicated.
I never imagined labour could be joyful. That I could lean into pain. Approach it with curiosity, knowing, “It’s just pain.”
For nine hours, my boyfriend and I watch the monitor for how the measured contractions align with my experience. Track your heartbeat alongside mine. Strike poses learned in prenatal class. It’s fun.
———
Until it’s not. The oxytocin is dialed up. My body fills like a water balloon.
The contractions come stronger, closer together.
I mention epidural, wanting discussion, not commitment. But it is dinner time; the anesthesiologist is about to go home, and although he is on call, will not return for a delivering woman. Later, I will be astonished by the degree to which schedules and convenience and dinner trump the unpredictable needs of labouring women.
Suddenly, the midwife is in such a rush, she does not follow protocol to check my cervix beforehand, so she does not know I am 8 cm, and that, indeed, this is the worst of it; these last two centimetres the fastest, most painful part, and if she knew my dilation, the epidural would not be administered because of hospital policy and the risk of stalled labour, and because, left to its own devices, delivery is imminent.
The anesthesiologist threads a long needle in my spine.
Things take a turn for the worse.
Labour stalls. Oxytocin is ramped up. I have already devoured an entire IV bag. Most women take this much, the midwife says, pinching one inch. By the time it’s all over, I will have drained a bag and a half.
Time loses relevance. I go far away. I don’t feel good, I keep saying, I am alone, marooned in outer space.
I am told to do mini pushes, nothing strenuous— until the doctor arrives. She wants to put her own children to bed, and would rather come at the last minute.
For hours, I am on my side, half-pushing, only my hapless boyfriend to guide.
At shift change, a French midwife comes, flips me to my back, sticks her finger in my vagina and says, voice flat and judgmental, that I am pushing wrong. With every contraction, “Non,” shaking her head, frowning—as if I have worn white sneakers with haute couture.
She never tells me what to do, never says to push hard. Only, “Non.”
My blood pressure drops to 60/40. Nobody cares. I am an appendage to a baby, an obstacle, an uncooperative vessel.
The obstetrician arrives and suddenly it is go time. She is a jolly Dutch woman, imploring me to push as hard as I can. Her whole hand dives inside, taking hold of the baby, pulling while I push. The epidural has worn off. I feel everything.
We go for ten minutes. Then, I am not given a choice. They will vacuum the baby out.
I don’t want that.
There are risks to my body. Not mortal ones, but important: fecal and urinary incontinence, infection, sexual pain, hardened scar tissue, torn muscles, prolonged, complicated, and partial recovery. Risks to autonomy and pleasure.
We make a deal, three pushes then we do it. After two, she slices a diagonal line at my vaginal opening and I cry.
“Use the anger to push,” she says.
Even though the pain is manageable, I keep saying it hurts because it is important for everyone to know that I have feelings too.
Birth feels like fettuccine spilling from me. I laugh at the strangeness.
A team ushers the baby away to minister her body.
The obstetrician delivers the placenta. I am told to push, and am so angry about the vacuum, the episiotomy, the judgmental French lady, my own helplessness that I push as hard as I can. The placenta shoots, splattering the obstetrician with blood and goo.
Baby is healthy and alert.
———
When you are placed on my chest, I do not recognize you. You look nothing like me or your father. Which, I think, is right. You are you.
There is no thunderclap of love, only tender protectiveness. As if I have been mangled in a terrible car accident, handed a blind puppy, and told, “Keep this alive.”
Your lips and limbs creep, instinctually, to my breast, latch easily. You make no distinction between the lines of your body and everything else— you are me, the air, the pillow.
Your body is brittle, with no fat protecting your thin bones. I am afraid they will break.
A midwife photographs you on my naked breast. I say, “But what about my boob?” It’s fine, she says, my breasts no longer private parts.
Your first night, you sleep four hours straight. We are pleased because it means we sleep too, but the midwife scolds us, prescribes breastfeeding every two hours.
We begin a rigorous feeding schedule. Although your latch is good, our technique perfect, my milk will not come in. Every two hours we breastfeed and pump. You frequently fall asleep. Even with your father’s help, the whole cycle takes over an hour. I produce only a few clear drops.
———
The boy cut down her trunk
and made a boat and sailed away.
And the tree was happy
... but not really.
“The Giving Tree”
The nurse says, “Press the button before you go to the bathroom. I will take you.”
I’m certain she is being dramatic. I’m a runner—or, at least, I was.
Then I discover my body’s new reality. The ripped rawness. The overcooked spaghetti strand instead of spine.
I waddle past the hospital tray, standing pump, bassinet to the bathroom. When I pull down the mesh underwear, urine gushes down my legs. There is no stopping it.
Later, my obstetrician inspects my vagina, squints apologetically, “You will need physio. The vacuum was very hard on you.”
A physiotherapist demonstrates exercises to jump-start my pelvic floor. Each one amounts to doing a kegel, sucking in my belly, and holding my breath for ten seconds. When I put my hand on my abdomen to feel muscle there is only a mound of raw, risen dough.
She hands me a thin blue book with instructions and offers advice for daily living: do a kegel every time I sneeze, cough, laugh, or lift. I do not realize she means I have to do this for the rest of my life.
———
When I hold you to my chest, your movements mirror the ones on the inside. You strum your fingers across my skin, tuck your skinny arms to yourself, and I think, so that’s what you were doing.
———
I thought that when women talked about how childbirth ruined their bodies they meant, simply, that pregnancy made them fat.
But now I know there is a ruin nobody ever told me about. Or if they did, I never felt the weight of what they had to say. They were not like me. They were mothers—they were giving things.
Kate Manne asks, the simple, radical question, “What would be the case if pregnant bodies navigated not a ‘man’s world’ — that is, the actual world, with its hetero-patriarchal and transphobic structures—but rather a world that recognized everybody’s claims to have moral purchase. And in this world, significantly more effort would be made to accommodate those tasked with bearing the next generation of human beings.” In Manne’s imaginary world, would my body still work? Would I still be whole and free?
My boyfriend and I don’t know what recovery should look like, so we don’t know mine is complicated, that my body will play out the risks of intervention.
My stitches hurt worse than labour. There is a hematoma, a painful gathering of blood, beneath the wound. My body is full of fluid and this, too, puts pressure on my stitches, bladder, and bowel.
The doctor, physiotherapist, nurse, and social worker all bring discharge papers, smiling over my prone body, as if everything were normal. My core and pelvic floor muscles are so weak, the pain and pressure so acute, I cannot move without flinching. A midwife comes last, concerned. “You should not leave. You are not well.”
But it is my birthday, and I don’t want to look like a wimp. I smile, say we will return if things aren’t okay.
Things are not okay. At home, my chest tightens, I lose my breath and voice. I am so full of fluid I have lost no weight, despite shedding a baby, blood, and placenta.
We consider returning to hospital, but I’m afraid they will think I am, literally, hysterical.
A few days later, a midwife comes to our house. I tell her how everything hurts, how everything is impossible.
All normal, she says, serenely.
I want to say: Nothing about my body is normal.
A wave passes over her face after she takes my blood pressure. 175/120.
Hypertensive crisis enters my vocabulary. We go to the doctor, get blood work. She prescribes medication.
Later, the doctor phones—go to the emergency room. The blood work suggests pulmonary embolism, but because she speaks Dutch I think she means heart attack.
We pile into the car—bring an overnight bag, bottles.
I am certain I will die.
A nurse performs an ECG, leaves the room, saying nothing.
A doctor comes, sees the sleeping baby, then me; he smirks, a picture of smug certainty. “Don’t worry so much.”
He is everything I hate—condescending, seeing me as only a mother— a hypersensitive sub-human vessel.
To be treated as a person, I must oblige him. I smile softly, as if to say, “I know. I’m being silly.” I demurely point out the blood pressure, the blood work.
He reads my chart, as if for the first time, draws his lips. Sends me for an MRI.
While changing, blood pours onto the floor of my tiny, bright stall. My bladder empties, soaking my jeans. My legs are dark and sticky with blood and urine.
I am told that I am fine. I am not fine.
———
You are the easy part. From the beginning, our rhythms are synchronous, like earth and moon. You eat when we need you to eat, sleep when we need you to sleep. Night feedings are calm. No fuss. You fold yourself into our lives, or we fold ourselves into yours—it’s hard to say. You cry only between the hours of 8 and 10 p.m.. Even then, all you want is to cradle in my lap until the bad thing passes.
Your body’s needs are simpler than mine. And you are calmer, more straightforward about them. I am, it seems, the baby here—born fully grown into a new body I do not know how to operate.
———
When friends come by and ask about labour, I spill the gory details. They avert their eyes, eat cookies, comment on the garden. It gradually dawns on me that my story makes people uncomfortable. It’s too messy, too much. In the absence of life-threatening complications, they want only one story. Of hazy pain, yes, but mostly the love, the calm, the brisk recovery.
I cannot tell that story. It is not mine.
My story is written all over my body. In the limp across hardwood floors, in my puffy face, slumped spine, inability to run, lift, carry, walk, laugh, sneeze, cough.
Anybody can read it.
———
Because you cannot tell the difference between us, I draw a line around my pain, so it does not become yours. I allow grief and anger to roam during naps, leash them when you awaken. When they are not properly contained, you make it known, howling everything I cannot.
———
The blood pressure medication flushes fluid from my body, though it will be months before it balances.
I wear giant hospital-issue pads, but once the bleeding stops, and I am still peeing myself and shitting my pants, I buy incontinence pads. An invisible sliding door opens in the supermarket to reveal a secret world of leaking, uncontrollable bodies.
I tell my mother-in-law about how my pelvis and sacrum still hurt. I do not tell her about my ravaged pelvic floor, about how I cry, mourning my body.
She says, “Your body is your life.”
If that is true then my life has been ruined. But that’s not something mothers are allowed to say.
Women discuss, in secret, their feelings of detachment, dislike, and resentment for their babies. They ask in motherhood message boards if they’ve made a terrible mistake. The most common answer to these concerns is, “Maybe it’s postpartum depression.”
I don’t want to dismiss the very real postpartum depression, but, also, I wonder if maybe we’ve pathologized what is a perfectly normal response to motherhood in our patriarchal heteronormative society. What would it be like if women could speak complicated truths about pregnancy, birth, and motherhood? What would it be like if the world listened?
———
I wish that I could give you something....
but I have nothing left.
I am just an old stump.
I am sorry.
“The Giving Tree”
Your mood turns overnight. The weeks of easy cheerfulness, of whole days passing without a tear, are gone. We had arrogantly thought it a trophy for good parenting, so now that you spend hours screeching, only satisfied with being held and walked, it is punishing.
I press you against my chest, tell you, which is really a way of telling myself, “You’re going through something.”
This is not you; this is you going through something. This is you at high tide.
Your emotions are so insistent, so pressing, they nest inside me.
I work to disentangle your feelings from mine. I play Yo-Yo Ma, Ani DiFranco, Joni Mitchell, and it works— music offers another set of emotions that are neither yours nor mine, transporting us both.
We go home to Canada for Christmas. You are a good flyer. You stretch out on the seat next to me and sleep three hours.
In Canada, you charm everyone. You charm me, finally. Seeing you with my people, in their arms, at a distance, makes me see how it’s sort of the best thing—being tasked to love you. There is the dizziness of early romance.
I learn love can buffer the world, buffer the damage.
Our days slide by in a dance of predictability and change— the change borne from small, daily shifts, just as the slight changes in the earth’s movement brings new seasons. Each a repetition with difference.
———
The difficult part is: the isolation of my body, the invisibility of physically traumatic labour, the pressure to minimize, deny, tell myself I am making too much of it.
I am lucky. I attend postpartum rehabilitation classes where a tall, skinny woman pokes our bellies, shouts, “Suck it in!” I attend pelvic floor physiotherapy where I play video games using a joystick stuck in my vagina. I have physiotherapy to rehabilitate my back, core, and balance. I perform endless bridges, pelvic tilts, and deep breathing exercises.
Running is a distant dream.
I am among the privileged few lucky enough to access postpartum services, even luckier to have time and money enough to heal.
After months, progress. Small, not enough to convince me that I will ever be the same, but progress nonetheless.
———
You hug now. This was not always true. Newborns do not hug. They squirm, search, nestle, but they do not hug.
After your nap, you kick your legs, flap your arms, smile like you’ve missed me. I unzip your sleep sack and lift you. My back whinges, heaviness presses my bladder. You throw your arms around my neck, push your cheek against mine. You do not demand my annihilation, only my love, which is not zero sum, but infinite, inexhaustible as the sun.
Elaine van der Geld's writing has been published in Kenyon Review Online, Michigan Quarterly Review, Grain Magazine, Hippocampus, CV2, and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for both the Room and EVENT creative non-fiction contests. She holds an MA in English, and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of British Columbia.
Photo by dMadPhoto on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND