We Are Animals

I am riding it out. I am waiting. I am a knife that wants to cut my way out of this place.

 
Four days before my daughter is born, I am at the ob-gyn clinic for a usual, now weekly exam. The nurse straps the blood pressure cuff around my forearm. I breathe slowly, in and out, breathing in calmness, even though I can already see the nurse’s frown out of the corner of my eyes. “Hmm,” she says, like she has at each appointment for the past month. “It’s high. Have you been feeling okay?”

I nod, as I always have. Though my blood pressure has been rising, I drink plenty of water and do not cross my legs. I assume it is just tension: white coat syndrome. When my midwife takes my blood pressure, it is always lower. I ignore the nurse’s comment and focus instead on the flickering lights, on the posters of fetuses gestating, bigger and bigger each month. I allow myself to now, finally, look at the last image: the infant almost fully formed.

I am waiting there, for my midwife’s quiet knock, when the exam room door bursts open and my midwife snaps, “We’re done.” Tall and thin, about the same age as me, her head nearly touches the doorway. Her eyes are focused and fierce, her voice tight.

My first thought is that she is firing us. She doesn’t want to work with us anymore. My husband and I have to get out.

“We can’t have you walking around with a blood pressure of 150 over 100,” she says. It takes a few moments for me to realize that she means the baby. She means it is time for the baby to come out. As in now. As in today.

In the exam room I’ve sat in again and again and again, the exam room that has become familiar to me these past eight months, where Katie has praised us for being calm and for taking everything as it comes, an anxiety that I’ve spent nine months repressing swells into my throat.

Katie talks about induction. About wheeling us to labor and delivery.

I do not hear because I am crying. I do not want to be induced. I know inductions often lead to epidurals, and epidurals to C-sections, and I want neither of those things. Instead, I want to trust my body and let my body do its work. Yet here the nurses are with the wheelchair, ready to wheel me to labor and delivery.

“No, no, no,” my body says, my face says, though the only words that come out are tears.

I am crying in the exam room while my husband stares, surprised, openmouthed.

I am crying in the exam room, wondering what my midwife thinks of me now.

 

Prior to the birth of my daughter, the only medical procedure I’d had was oral surgery: the removal of my wisdom teeth. For someone who rarely allowed herself Tylenol, I was curious about anesthesia. What would I notice? What would I “dream” of? What would I remember of that shift out of consciousness? Of the shift back in?

The morning of that surgery, I considered myself an investigator. I took mental notes as the nurse prepared the IV and explained the procedure. I observed the cabinets in front of me, the tray full of instruments on the counter, the window to the left with its thick blinds.

When the nurse anesthesiologist inserted the IV, I felt my body loiter behind me. The nurses talked among each other. The oral surgeon walked in, washed his hands, and slowly straightened tools on the counter.

Two of the nurses began to laugh. “Do you think Dr. Luke is handsome?” they asked. I was 19 years old, splayed on a dental chair wearing sweatpants and an old T-shirt. I wondered what prompted the question. What expression was plastered on my face?

I did not think he was cute. He was a man in the corner of the room with a mask covering his mouth and nose. Nothing more than that. But my lips were numb. My body was numb. I was floating two feet above the chair.

“You do, don’t you,” they said, all of them chuckling by then.

I tried to respond—to reach out through the drifting and lifting of my body on the chair—but I had no way to respond, no way to correct them, besides the faint shaking of my head, which only caused them to chortle more. And I hated them for that—for that teasing. For my inability to correct their strange and immature assumptions.

Trusting one’s body and trusting medical institutions are two different things, but for years and years I hated them. Even today, I hold a grudge.

Is it a flaw? Is it a flaw to not want to turn yourself off?

I walk a mile through the park behind our house. Walking, I know, is supposed to induce labor. If the baby needs to come out, I might as well help.

In labor and delivery, the nurses have me lay on my side. They watch my blood pressure for an hour. I breathe slowly and purposefully and try not to imagine what the rest of the day might bring. Shortly after lunch, my midwife comes in, along with another midwife and the head nurse. My blood pressure has fallen enough, and my lab results don’t show signs of preeclampsia. “You need to stay on bedrest over the weekend and come in for a nonstress test Monday morning,” my midwife says, “but let’s hope you go into labor on your own over the weekend.”

My husband works Friday and Saturday. Before he leaves in the morning, he stacks DVDs on the coffee table in front of me, fills my Nalgene with water, and adds a lemon. “Take a nap,” he tells me, because I slept poorly that night—awake at 2 a.m. with contractions that kept up with faint regularity before disappearing with the rising sun.

I lay on my side on the futon. My husband kisses my forehead. Worry fissures his face. He hesitates. “Do you need me to stay? Do you have a friend who can come over?”

“I’ll be fine,” I tell him. “I’ll let you know if you need to come home.”

Slowly, he leaves. The door clicks behind him. The car rumbles as he backs out of the driveway.

I lay on the futon, a hand on my overstretched belly. I push PLAY on the DVD’s remote, and then I push STOP.

“This is silly,” I say.

I hoist myself up. I slice onions and pepper in the kitchen. I make a batch of chili in the crockpot. I walk a mile through the park behind our house. Walking, I know, is supposed to induce labor. If the baby needs to come out, I might as well help.

“Are you resting?” my husband texts.

“Yes,” I respond, though I am outside. It is cloudy, 31 degrees. I pause at the top of a hill, the tennis courts and baseball field below me. I welcome the sting of the air.

 

These are the expectations I have: if I keep walking, if I keep doing prenatal yoga, if I eat healthy, I will be fine.

If I keep walking, if I eat healthy, I won’t gain too much weight, I’ll stay in relatively good shape, the baby will be healthy, and my body will be ready for labor. I will be fine.

If I do what I need to, I’ll have a natural birth experience. I won’t need an epidural. I won’t need a C-section. I won’t be stuck in a hospital bed, unable to feel my legs. I will be fine.

If I do what I need to, I will stay in control. My body will remain strong and capable. I will be fine.

 

Upon learning of my daughter’s December 20 due date, a friend who works in a maternity ward warns me of the holidays. “They’ll probably pressure you to have a C-section,” she says. “I see it all the time. They don’t want you going into labor on Christmas.”

I tell another friend, who also had a holiday due date, that I’m worried.

“Oh, I felt the same way at first, but it’s not so bad,” she tells me. “They scheduled both C-sections, I went in, I had the babies, and I was back in the gym within two weeks. They had it completely controlled.”

Which is precisely what I’m afraid of.

 

I do not have a birth plan, but if I thought of what I wanted, what I really wanted, it would be this: I’d notice labor starting. Hardly perceptible at first, like the flutter of my daughter’s kicks, which I didn’t recognize for what they were until a nurse pointed them out on the sonogram, said “I can’t believe you don’t feel that,” and I suddenly connected the palpitations with the movement of my daughter’s limbs. Yes, labor would start like that—hardly a transition between life before and life after, just an easing in. Labor would get stronger, of course, and I would pace, and go on a walk, and cook. I would fill the day with all that I needed to, all I was supposed to do, until I absolutely had to go to the hospital. I wouldn’t be one of those women who turn up at the hospital only to be sent home with a smile and a pat on the head because she isn’t far enough along.

No, I would be smart about it. I would be knowledgeable. And once at the hospital, I would use the birth ball, or the tub. I would pace the halls, letting my body do what it needed to. Giving my body time and space. And when the time finally came, I would squat rather than lay on my back, and who knows how it would be, but I would feel it and be patient with myself. At each step, I’d feel it and be aware.

I wish that once, just once, I could let myself manifest whatever it is I am feeling—whether anger, sadness, or ecstasy—rather than shy away, cut myself off.

When my blood pressure is once again high the Monday after my weekend of bedrest, my midwife, for the second time, tells me it is time to induce. For the second time, the nurse insists I sit in the wheelchair, pushes me out the back “privacy” exit of the clinic, across the hallway, through a series of corridors, and into the elevator that leads to the labor and delivery ward.

For the second time, I am with women I do not know, in a hospital room, and they are hooking me to machines, taking my blood pressure, asking me to change into a hospital gown so well washed the worn ties won’t stay over my shoulders.

And though I am more prepared—have braced myself all weekend for the possibility of induction—for the second time, I am crying. Silent tears that I cannot stop. That I can’t understand.

I am crying as the nurse tries three times to insert my IV. I am crying as the blood pressure numbers flicker on the screen. As the various sensors for fetal heartbeat are stuck to my abdomen. As the nurse tells me to stay on my side to lower my blood pressure, which has jumped to 160/110. “You look like you’re going to melt into a puddle of tears,” she tells me, checking my numbers, strapping things on, taping the IV tighter to my arm.

And I want to say, “This is not who I am,” yet who am I in this room, connected to these monitors? Blood pressure rising and rising and rising?

 

A friend of many years, a friend who I have long admired for her ferocity and professional drive, sends me an essay she’s written about sex. In the essay, she calls herself “the great observer” and admits she didn’t have an orgasm until she was in her late 20s. Though sex was pleasurable, she just was hardly ever fully in her body. She says she wondered if she was flawed. She says she wondered how she could make her body cooperate.

I read the essay and nod and want to say, “Yes! I know! I know! I keep myself awake by thinking, I don’t let myself get drunk, and sometimes, during sex, I find myself preoccupied by other things. How many of us are out there in the world?”

Instead, I pause. What would such revelations reveal about my ability to embrace my full, animal self?

I pause, unable to admit to such things.

 

For a year, I work with high schoolers who can’t control themselves. Almost every day, someone has a panic attack or an attack of anger. They lose control of their bodies—throwing books, punching holes in the walls, spitting—their eyes fierce and wild with anger, but even more with fear. I talk in a steady, calm voice, ask questions, ask how they feel, until they calm and slump against a wall. And only then do I notice that my heart, too, is racing, though my voice has not risen.

I wonder, in those moments, what it is like to lose control. What it is like to not care who is watching. I wish that once, just once, I could let myself manifest whatever it is I am feeling—whether anger, sadness, or ecstasy—rather than shy away, cut myself off. Rather than go on long walks, or write in my notebooks. Rather than turn from my husband, squeeze my eyes shut, and isolate myself until whatever it is I am feeling can be contained.

 

I am on the birth ball. The contractions come with regularity. My husband presses a hand into my lower back. Harder, I tell him. I bounce, slowly, on the ball, move my hips back and forth as the tightening takes over. I let the tightening flow into the ball, let the tightening meet my husband’s fist, pressing so hard it will leave a bruise the next day, though I don’t sense that, then. I like the ball. The contractions come and go, and I joke with my husband between them, and I feel in control. My legs are strong. My lower abdomen is a solid, strong rock as it contracts and tightens.

But then the nurse comes in. “It’s been 20 minutes and your blood pressure is up,” she says. “Let’s have you get back into bed and on your side.”

I want to tell her no. I want to say, “I’m just fine here.” What is it about these cream walls, these metal bedframes, that stops me?

I get back into the bed. I lay on my side. The contraction comes, and this time my belly is in front of me, unattached. My husband’s fist is in the wrong place. Too high. I want to tell him to move it, but the pain clamps my mouth. I am riding it out. I am waiting. I am a knife that wants to cut my way out of this place.

 

For years growing up, images of sex unnerve me: humping bodies, moans, grasping—undiluted desire so visible, for all to see.

When I am in high school, I come upon a mallard mounting a female duck. He clamps his beak around her neck. He is driven, all attention toward one single focus. He has pulled out her feathers. They are splayed around the grass and hang, half-detached from her neck. One hangs from just above her eye. She is ragged. In her dilated iris, I see only fear.

In college, my boyfriend and his roommates keep a photograph of fornicating llamas on an end table in the living room. They took it at a campground. One llama is on top of the other llama in a sandy square. In the side of the photograph, children point.

My boyfriend shows me the photograph the first time I visit his apartment. He and his roommates laugh. They want me to laugh, too.

“That’s a little immature,” I say.

I say it again a few months later to the plastic dinosaurs that line the basement rafters at his parents’ house. One dinosaur mounting another, the tightness of their plastic legs holding them together for years, so that when you pick them up, they leave dusty outlines.

That night, after my boyfriend and I have watched movies, letting the subterranean darkness of the room and the volume of the television cover up our own silent shiftings—after footsteps on the stairway make us freeze, and laugh, and stop—after my boyfriend, who will become my husband, returns to his bedroom one floor above, and I am left on the daybed in the basement, I take the dinosaur couplings apart.

Leave them alone, I want to say. Give them their privacy. Don’t look and laugh.

I do not remember the moment it ended. I do not remember an after. I do not remember if that was me.

At 3 p.m., two and a half hours after they break my water, I am only four centimeters dilated and 80 percent effaced. My midwife tells me that if I continue dilating one centimeter an hour, I may need an epidural later, to relax and speed the process. She ups the Pitocin.

The contractions are strong enough that I have to breathe through them. Katie speaks to me between pauses. She says she is going to grab some dinner and will come back. I feel stuck. Stuck in this bed. Stuck on my side. The Pitocin drips into my arm. I breathe and breathe and breathe.

 

At a state fair, when I am five months pregnant, we sit on bleachers in the cow birthing tent, and listen to her moan. She is on her side. Her moans come from deep within her. Somewhere so deep, it must be beyond her body. My daughter is a half-developed fetus inside of me. My husband pulls at his shirt, sweat seeping up the back. “It’s hot in here. Are you ready to leave?” he asks.

The cow is moaning, people are moving in and out of the tent. Blood from a previous birth stains part of the floor. Or I think it is blood. Not fully swept up or covered with straw. I stare at the cow. I watch her. Kids who do not know what is happening watch her. Teenagers who know but do not know what is happening watch her. They take photographs that they’ll perhaps mock and jeer in college dorm rooms.

At the side of the tent, a day-old calf—the one that left the blood?—naps in a pen of straw. Children reach their hands toward it. The calf’s hair is soft and velvety. The mother is nowhere in sight.

In the main pen, in the middle of the birthing tent, the cow’s eyes are glazed. Her mouth is open. And is it fear I see? Pain? I do not know. But there she is. Alone and on such terrible display. What is she looking at? What does she see?

“It will be a few hours. Maybe even a day,” the veterinarian says. People wipe their foreheads. They sigh and leave.

“Are you ready to go?” my husband asks again. I cannot turn away.

 

Four months later, I am in a hospital room. The room is quiet, but in the hallway: scurrying. Nurses move back and forth. A door opens and closes, opens and closes. And each time: the moaning. The deep moaning. Inhuman in its depth. Uncontrollable. Like old, ancient air, expelled from the lungs. I listen and want to turn away, want the walls to be thicker. I listen and want to follow the sound—to pull my IV with me through the hallways and see what she is doing. I listen, transfixed. I can’t focus on anything else.

I do not remember the moment it ended. I do not remember an after. I do not remember if that was me.

 

Why am I afraid of losing control?

Maybe I won’t seem as put together. Maybe I will seem needy and scared.

Maybe I am needy and scared.

Maybe I will no longer seem like someone with answers. Someone who knows what she is doing and what she wants. And if I don’t know what I am doing and what I want?

I will get trampled. Violated. I will not be able to control what others see.

I do not want anyone to judge and belittle me.

I do not trust anyone enough not to judge.

 

The contractions seem to come close together. I hardly have a moment to unclench my hands from my husband’s arm, from the edge of the bed, before I can feel the tightening begin again in my back. My ball of a belly becomes a muscle of its own, hard as a rock. It clenches. The Pitocin causes it to clench, tighter and tighter.

“There’s hardly a pause,” I say, breathless. “Isn’t there supposed to be a break?”

The nurse, whose name I do not recall, hardly heard when she first said it, says something about the contractions coming back-to-back and double-peaked, which sometimes happens with Pitocin, and she’ll see if she can lower the dose. Her words skip on waves and slow in the water, sinking to my bed like flat stones.

The world is water. The air thick and humid and wet, sounds and people far away from where I am, my body, this clenching. I resort to “he he hoos,” the only breathing technique I can remember from the classes we took, the only breathing that seems to make sense. The lights dim. The faint beeping of monitors fades away. He he hoo. He he hoo.

Do you need pain medication? someone says through the fog and the water.

Heeeeee. Heeeeeeee. Hoooooooooooo, I say, my face closed, my eyes closed. I cannot answer her. I just breathe. Even between the contractions, I can’t answer. I close my eyes and rest, and sometimes look into my husband’s face, which takes up the entire room, dissipating on the edges, not quite there at all, as if the world will disappear any minute. He he hoooo. He he hoooo. All experience exists in that sound, all consciousness, and though the image is there—my husband’s face—I am not.

When we let go of the need to control our physical and emotional selves, does the world around us disappear? Or do we simply become part of something larger?

Once, I fell asleep in a park in Paris. The day was warm. There was live music. My friend and I had lain down on the grass. We’d been walking all day, miles and miles and miles. My feet tingled with joy. The sun was pleasant on my face. I closed my eyes, let the warmth soak in. Let the sun make an orange glow of my eyelids.

“Jennie. Jennie,” my friend said, a hand on my shoulder.

My friend’s profile formed a shadow in my vision. Her hair fell inches from my face. The sun was a halo in the sky.

“You fell asleep. I don’t want you to get sunburned.”

And it was awe, more than anything else, that stayed with me. That I had embraced that warmth. That I had let myself fall asleep. That for however long my friend had let me sleep, I didn’t know where I was. Didn’t know I was in a park, vulnerable and surrounded by strange people, in the middle of Paris.

 

I mention, breathless, to the shadows and the darkness in the room, that I am feeling downward pressure. The nurse whose name I do not know and whose hair color I never see says I am seven centimeters dilated, and then eight centimeters, and then fully dilated. I note her surprise through the fog and water. The pressure increases, inching forward. My body clenches and shudders as I am on my side.

Don’t push, I hear through the water and the fog.

Wait for Katie, don’t push, just breathe.

As if it is possible to not obey my own body, to tell it to wait, to stop. As if I can halt the shuddering sensation, me on my side in the fetal position, my legs curled and bent, my knees as close to my round belly as I can get them.

An oxygen mask appears over my face. I breathe into it. He he hoooo, still. I do not open my eyes to look at my husband. The air enters my nose. A hand presses against my back. Another hand, my own, clenches the oxygen mask. I breathe into it, he he hoooo: two quick cutting breaths and then the long exhale.

Don’t push, don’t push, they say.

Where is Katie, I reply, a voice so strained my husband will later say it broke his heart.

Someone else holds the mask over my face, I grip the edge of the bed, my body shudders, and I cannot stop it, I do not try to stop it, my knees pulled up, rocking, twitching, the downward pressure moving down and down and down. I cannot hold back the urge to push. I don’t hold back the urge to push.

People move around me, talk about the on-call doctor. I shudder and flip on the bed. Like a fish, like an animal, like a body, and whether labor started with Pitocin or not, I know I have moved beyond them. I know I have left this place. The room dark, dark, dark. The oxygen mask. I could be anywhere. I am not here. I am here. We are here. Here in this breath, this body, surrounded by shuffling and breath and air, by gripping and clenching and urging. The cutoff moan of an inability to hold back. Put that energy toward pushing, someone says, and then it is silent. Silent pushing through heat and tissue, tissue stretched so tight it’s fire, and ripping and darkness and air until suddenly it stops and I break out in sweat and there she is, a wet, squirming being with wrinkles in the folds of her elbows and knees, red and clenched on my chest.

“Oh,” I say. “Oh.” Because we are animals after all.

 

Is that what people feel when they are drunk? When they let their bodies melt into a bed and shift into sleep? When they lose themselves in meditation? When my friend, in her late 20s, first let go of herself during sex? When my students at the alternative high school let go of themselves and became fistfuls of rage?

When we let go of the need to control our physical and emotional selves, does the world around us disappear? Or do we simply become part of something larger?

 

Afterward, when we are telling the story of our daughter’s birth to family and friends, my husband will look at me with pride, with amazement. “You pushed her out like it was nothing,” he’ll say. “You just popped her out.”

And I won’t know how to respond.

In his eyes, there isn’t revulsion. Only wonder. Only awe.

Yet, it didn’t feel like nothing. She didn’t just pop out. It was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life. I sometimes wonder if, looking down at myself in those moments, I would have been appalled at the angular shifting and turning, the pain slick on my face, the deepness of that one, single moan. But I wasn’t. I couldn’t be. I was caught up in something, caught somewhere, and trying to understand that space is an exercise I don’t need to explicate.

All I know: in the hours and days afterward, when my body ached with what it had done, even as the memories and sensations slipped away, I didn’t care what my husband saw. What the nurses and midwife saw. What another woman, strolling the hallway of that maternity ward, saw. It simply did not matter. My body had claimed me, and the only thing I felt was power.