Hi Friend,
"I can't do this," I said, desperately, to my husband. And then, more urgently, to the entire fluorescent-lit hospital room: "Someone help me!"
I am currently 31 weeks pregnant with my second son, and I've found myself reliving the labor and delivery of my first. How, as I labored in the hospital, I was so hot I felt like I was burning from within. How Stephen held a latex glove full of ice to my forehead and I squeezed his hand, hard, with each contraction. How he counted aloud so I could focus on exhaling, until I couldn't focus on anything. How the doula held up my water bottle to my lips and—in between spitting and screaming through pain—I desperately sucked out of a bendy straw she'd brought. What should I pack in my hospital bag? expectant moms ask, and I think of saying: maybe straws. For when you need to drink water while laboring but don't possess the energy to lift your water bottle. Also, Gatorade. I hadn't really touched the stuff since my collegiate basketball days, but in labor and early postpartum, I longed to drink it by the gallon.
But maybe not. Maybe a straw would be useless for you. Maybe you'd find Gatorade repulsive; when my husband ate a Peanut Butter Rx Bar and then came near to support me through a contraction, I snapped: "Get away from me! That smell is going to make me throw up." I, who—when I'm not laboring—adore peanut butter. But you're different when you're laboring. And everyone's labor is different. Just like everyone's child.
Some labors are several days long, slow, and drawn out. Many have complications, which I am lucky to have avoided the first time around. Some women choose an epidural, or a scheduled induction, or both. Some involve cesarean delivery, by choice or not by choice. All labors involve laboring. This is one accurately named component of motherhood.
[But I deeply resent the person who coined the phrase, "Sleep like a baby." Ha. If my baby had "slept like a baby," maybe I wouldn't have been Googling "Can you die of sleep deprivation?" four, five, six weeks postpartum.]
I chose a non-medicated labor with Cole. The non-medicated route can be praised, as if it signals inner fortitude, and I do think I went into it with some type of chip on my shoulder, like I was proving something to someone somewhere by rejecting pain meds, but honestly? The profound conclusion I drew when it was over was: "I get why people get epidurals." This has been a theme for me in motherhood. I silently judge another mom for something, then find myself doing that same thing at some future point. A couple mortifying examples: At six months, my child rolled off my bed. At 15 months, I found him in his playpen with own feces on his nose, his hands covered in poop. If you're thinking, "Well, I would never let something like that happen." I get it. I thought those thoughts too; I would have sworn by it. But motherhood is, above all, a humbling state of existence. I've grown to put less weight in the things I think I would surely do if I were simply, you know, living out someone else's life.
Motherhood: When your shoulders are so tired all the chips fall off of them.
Motherhood: Your baby is born and your ego, by necessity, must die.
Motherhood: More poop than you could imagine. And poop, you quickly realize, is the easiest part. Except for on days when it's the hardest part.
Ah, I haven't written one of these in a while and I'm getting wildly tangential. I came here to talk about one moment, really.
When I said, "I can't do this," followed by, "Someone help me," to everyone within earshot, which probably included any pedestrians on 7th Avenue north of 9th Street in Park Slope.
This was during "transition" in labor. The baby slides down, down, down, it's time to push, and the whole physical situation of pushing a pretty big head out of a pretty small opening starts to seem wildly irrational. Of course, I'd abandoned the world of rationality hours before.
My first break with linear thinking came when I was laboring, alone, in my apartment. Stephen was sleeping, and I was determined to let him sleep as long as I could, knowing that labor could span days and one rested new parent is better than none. I'd gotten out of bed at around eleven p.m. when I realized "trying to sleep" was a laughable exercise. I began wandering my tiny Brooklyn apartment, experiencing (what I now know as) fairly mild contractions. I took two showers, inhaling the scent of lavender soap. I recorded the time and lengths of my contractions in the notes app on my phone. I texted my sister. The unrecordable metric—intensity—escalated. A pain so distinct: I could feel it coming in, like the distant waft of the scent of pain, and then it overtook me, swallowed me, peaked, and then I could feel it subside, a wave going back to sea.
Soon, the mounting pain brought me to my hands and knees. I'd kick the tops of my feet into the floor and try to count through the pain, focusing on my exhale. Just like meditating, I told myself. Also accurate: Nothing like meditating.
I reached for my phone to record the time of my latest contraction. A cruel coincidence: It was two in the morning. Again. It happened to be daylight savings time, November 3, 2019, and I had just survived an hour of contractions—from 2 to 3 a.m.—and now I had to live through mounting contractions between 2 to 3 a.m. Again. I knew I couldn't.
I burst into our room, got into bed, woke Stephen up, and said, in a whisper, "I can't do this."
He was wide awake in an instant. "When you're running a marathon on a track, Joyce, you don't count the laps."
To a girl who'd spent large swaths of childhood at track practice and many years engaged in athletics, it was the perfect thing to say. Then, he began squeezing my hand and my hips and pushing my sacrum and counting me through the contractions, which was necessary, because numbers, for me, had slipped away into the land of the abstract.
But hours later, in the hospital, in transition, remembering a track metaphor provided no respite. Marathon? I might not survive the next minute.
"Someone help me," I cried. And what I longed for—more than anything else in that moment—was the most irrational thing of all: a substitute. I wanted out of the game. Someone to step in, tap my shoulder, and, you know, deliver my baby for me while I sat watching from the bench, ideally while sipping blue Gatorade.
When no one came to my rescue, and the excruciating pain continued in the face of my desperate pleas, just in case there was any confusion, I said, again, with utmost conviction: "I CAN'T DO THIS."
My midwife locked eyes with me and said in a voice of calm certitude: "You're doing it."
And then, something shifted within me. Because I knew, in my bones, that she was right. I was doing it. And I did it.
I won't pretend delivering a baby is easy. I won't pretend postpartum was a breeze. But I've reached for that moment a lot, in the months that followed, particularly during these hazy pandemic months. These months where it can feel like we've been repeating a suffering-filled 2 a.m. over and over and over. But we just lived through so much pain! Are we really being asked to endure more? Is it March of 2021 right now, or is it, again, March of 2020?
And there are days when taking a strictly rational lens of the world is an agonizing perspective. Swirling around number of cases, number of shots, number of people. Endless charts, endless trends. Spiking, dropping—is this data right? But what does it mean? What do we do? What do I do? It can seem an absurdly impossible place: another inconceivable big head/small hole scenario. And if that metaphor made you cringe, and you've never thought about this method of human arrival—that is to say, the miracle of birth—I encourage you to consider it. Because all of us have been on at least one side of the birth equation. We all came here via mysterious means which, quite frankly, don't seem like they would, you know, work.
And still, thousands of babies are born every day.
Hope springs eternal. And, I know, some days, the vague hope seems lightyears away, and the pain, well, the pain can rush over you and subsume you; the pain can swallow you whole. Suddenly, sturdy concepts like time, space, goals (ha!) are rendered flimsy, abstract.
But I try to remember, when I feel I have reached the brink, when I enter the realm of "I can't do this" thinking, that, in fact, I am doing it. Maybe some people are setting ambitious life goals and I'm over here trying to remember to exhale fully. But I'm still doing it. I'm still showing up. I'm still in the game. There are no substitutes. Whatever I'm doing is it. This is it.
So that's what I came here to tell you today. That's all.
When you feel like you can't go on, you are going on. When it feels like you simply can no longer do this: You're doing it.
You are doing it.
You are.
You are.
with Love,
Joyce