Matrescence

It was one am in the delivery room and I was hiding in the bathroom. Looming over me like the many heads of Medusa was the machine I was tied too with its many blinking eyes. The machine was pouring synthetic oxytocin into my veins and its own crazed machine manufactured psychotic visions into my soul, and the nurse was knocking on the door. Get back in here so I can monitor the fetal heart rate.

She was hardly the sacred guide through the narrow passage I had prayed for. And with all pretenses of politeness lost on me when my hour had come, I was not afraid to tell her she was more like a robot manning a machine than she was like a birth attendant. Her job was to tie me down and read blips on a screen, she was terrified of the baby being born without the doctor attending. And as the excruciating pain built and my eyes were clouded with semi-psycotic visions, she spent each contraction frantically fumbling with the belt of fetal monitors glued over my womb.

The image of a raging caged circus bear came to mind, and every strap and cord hooked onto my body was like a rope being lassoed around me, the machine with its eyes and blips strangling and whipping me into a beaten submission. I tried to jump up and squat down to manage my pain, I tried escaping to the bathroom, I tried telling her off.

“I am trying to help your baby!” Was the rejoinder. There was a small blip in the heart rate, and so she said, it wasn't her but the doctor that insisten on continual fetal heart monitoring. “The baby's heart rate will spike because you are tormenting me! What's good for me is good for my daughter!” All but fell on deaf ears. I would refuse one intervention, and she would usher in first the resident, than the head laborist, to argue with me over every objection. The contractions were torment but bearable if I could fully relax and enjoy the incredible wave of pleasure that came each time they receeded. But I was not allowed to relax on the down beat, or to bear down.

They had told me you can refuse anything at the hospital, that you could sit on the yoga bouncing ball, even pace. But pacing had become impossible with the long list of cords tied to my body in various ways. I would kick off a little clip on my toe or my finger in various attempts to find a spot better suited to gravity and my baby's head, or shift even slightly in the punishing hospital bed, to be hung over and retied over and over again by that meddling hag. I had never felt so vulnerable, so afraid, so much pain, so much longing for respect- and so dishonored.

It all started the morning before when my water broke and I made the mistake of telling my midwife there were no contractions yet. From that minute on over the next ten hours, the pressure built to go to the hospital. In the United States, it is considered hazardous to have the plug protecting the baby broken and not deliver within the next 18 hours. I knew this couldn't be quite right, and found out later that in many countries 48 hours was the standard. My first mistake was taking people at their word that my wishes would be respected. The midwife came to the house that evening, declaring that of course it was my decision, but she advocated for me to go to the hospital and be induced.

All the supplies I had for a homebirth, and all the candles prepared, the Playlist went out the window. I couldn't rest with my mind racked with anxiety about the labor proceeding. And what I needed more than anything was time, time for my body to be opened. And nobody had told me the midwife is as tied to her medical license with all its rules every bit as much as the average obgyn.

At this point my husband started packing my bag. Wavering, I decided to trust his judgment, though I feared he was under informed himself. Digging in the back of a drawer after putting on earrings of all things, and my crochet work, I found a carton of cigarettes. I smoked one, and thus started my treacherous journey into motherhood with a adrenaline fueled fight with the father of my child.

A week overdue, it was now May first. My belly had been full to bursting and then strained further under an extra seven days of baby ripening. When my mother came into the room and I put on the scratchy, flimsy hospital gown, I was making jokes. I wanted everyone to be at ease and felt guilty that so many people would be staying up with me late into the night. I even told her it would be okay if she left at midnight and came back. The midwife did the same.

The labor lasted an entire 24 hours and started with me wailing and screaming during a painful procedure to open my cervix. The attendants were polite but I could tell my reaction to every step was frowned upon. Be a good little patient and go with the flow. I wanted to be liked and treated well, given a gold star, but every part of my being rebelled against the hospital. The machines, the torture devices, the narrow bed. The plastic yellowed crucifix even hanging awry, when I looked at it and begged for help, it seemed to laugh.

I was raised with an extreme distrust of the medical establishment and had taken steps to stay out of it. And I'm sure all of these doctors and nurses and even my midwife are good people “trying to help my baby”, but as I look back three months ago, and refresh my memory with these delights, I still feel a bit of rage course through me again. Maybe the machine had injected it into me. In those moments that fateful night, my midwife had become my Judas, my husband her co-conspirator, and the nurse the Roman soldier carelessly, stupidly even, carrying out her orders. When she told me in all her years of work she had never delivered a single baby, I scoffed at her.

My mother who did go home to sleep, unable to watch me scream in torment after the opening flogging, had fled the scene like Simon Peter. This experience I had prayed for, and prepared for was completely evaporated into a foggy nightmare, and I was afraid I was descending into psychosis. With mental illness through one family line, it was noted on my chart that this was a possibility. Some women develop their first psychotic break into schizophrenia or bipolar following labor. And as visions flashed through my eyes and I lost all control of my body through pain, and mental anguish from my executioners, it truly felt like my hour had come.

One scene I remember, which perhaps is quite revealing of how my brain has been populated by mythic creatures of the internet, started with the electric bridge scene in Bladerunner. I saw Venus of Wilendorf and Sheila Na Gig, and they waddled along, little stone age creatures, not as terrifying pagan idols of a bygone age, but with the sweetness and innocence of frog and toad. I watched them waddling and was so deeply touched by their childlike timidity in the futuristic scene. They stopped along the bridge, and instead of a girl projecting out in 3d, they looked up into the electric night sky and saw a screen. Immersed into this screen now, I was a young girl of twelve in a sailor dress, Victorian even. She sat in a tiny rocking boat on the rivers of valhalla, the waves raging and crashing around her. She hesitates, staying close to the shore, as the water pulled her into its terrifying passage. Then my perspective shifted back out to the bridge.

The Virgin Mary, dressed in her white robes had been flying along, hovering above Sheila and Venus. And then a creature emerged from the sky, and she flew up, ascending into heaven, abandoning the stone age idols.

The creature that emerged was the chief laborist, with her stony high cheekbones and slate blue eyes. I knew in that moment she represented cruel Saturn. With her were a thousand arms of cords which reached out to pregnant Venus and birthing Sheila. The raging cloud of arms tied them down while they squealed their sweet little innocent cries. They were tied down like little pickmen thrown to the ground, and I jolted back into reality.

I had prayed to Our Lady that my birth would be a certain kind of experience, but instead it felt like golgotha. And in my mind's eye, after taking a journey with me lasting five years, she had left me in the hands of these more primitive deities, and primitive forces.

Luckily for me the machine has its own elixir to ease the torture of these man made horrors beyond my comprehension. At the peak of what felt like a psychedelic experience, I decidedly opted out. After one too many fights and being forced to lie at one particular angle to suit the screen gods, I elicited the fentanyl shot into my spine and received it. All was calm, all visions receeding, at peace at last with the hospital lords. My midwife then arrived having slept for five hours to finish the journey with me, and started probing me with questions to relax my mind. And yes, in a drug induced meditation, I recited to my Judas all the events of my life leading up to this moment. And then, while joking to set all the new barrage of nurses at ease, standing guard over a daunting array of knives and silver tools, I quickly birthed a living soul, again in something like my right mind, determined to pass my baby into this heartless world before they had time to grasp at more violent obstructions.

She came out quickly and was purple, on my belly, with a white cord loosely around her neck. And when it was cut, I pulled her up close to my face and she turned all peaches and cream like a sunrise. Her lungs and heart in perfect condition, and instead of looking like an alien worm like most infants do, she was beautiful and porcelain like a doll. She scarcely even cried. And while everyone rather politely disagreed with me, I declared that the layer of womb sludge she was embossed with smelled like roses and lavender. Something not quite a sweet little naked pup, but not quite an angel had entered my world. And like a million houseplants, she purified the air around her in an instant.

From that moment on I clutched my baby to me and scarcely let her go. However adrenaline was still coursing through my blood stream, and the bear inside me had not quite been silenced. I would cry shaking all over, and was inexplicably icy to my husband, still bitter over the decision to come to this purgatorial sanitized room. They offered me anti-psychotic drugs four times, a bargain meant to cheer me up following their barbaric practices. No thank you, I will cry and shake as long as I want til I recover my mind.

I wouldn't sleep for a long time. I didn't need to sleep. I needed to protect my new little charge. As the hours slowly crawled on, they sent me better and better nurses, at least, each one walked on more eggshells than the last. It culminated in a state mandated blood draw of my baby, wherein I could no longer fend off these demonic seeming entities. I threw myself across the bed wailing, half naked, demanding of my husband if we were just born to be slaves and to allow the intrusion of the state? Finally my hours of rage began to dissipate, seeing my daughter’s sweet innocent face before she was stuck with a needle. I collected myself entirely, swallowed all my rage, dried my eyes. “Everything is okay,” I crooned to my tiny infant, holding her face in my hands.

Indelibly impressed on me from that moment on, was my motherhood. After a difficult pregnancy struggling with anemia and fatigue, and a birth I perceived as traumatic, an illspent maidenhood of dissipation and wandering, my brain had pruned and refined itself. From that moment on I would buckle my seat belt, keep the house immaculately, and refrain from bickering. The next week I would pee through diapers, suffer from a brief period of postpartum melancholy, but one thing was for damned sure, I would stand guard over my most precious, darling treasure.

As the clouds receeded from my mind, and the cobwebs blew out, and I slowly recovered my body, I was treated to new pleasures daily. I looked forward to the morning, to my mug of coffee and smoothie while the baby slept. I had never been a morning person and lived in dread of waking up, and now I bolted out of bed with newfound energy.

It's a new mom mistake to crow too loudly, but as I passed through a week of witching hour, into a phase of full blown colic, and back again to a baby with the new skill of soothing herself by chewing on her hand- out of a phase of diapers and tears, with each day different from the last, every day was elevated by a quiet joy. At church, with family, even attending a wedding, or just spending one of many quiet days of home, held a sense of quiet sweetness. The baby brought a new light into the world, and both of our families were warmed by it continuously, surprisingly even, and nobody more blessed than me.

I'm a pessimist and fully anticipated the possible worst, postpartum depression, sleepless nights, and was even open to the possibility of everything falling apart as I failed to live up to the calling of motherhood.

But every passing day found me more productive healthy, and happy than before. Starting with some pilates and moving up to 12000 steps a day, I found my rhythm. I cooked every meal at home. I spent less, “forgave” my husband for the perceived “betrayal” of the hospital stint. I looked at my phone less for fear of giving my daughter autism from not peering into her eyes while she ate. We slept through the night more or less almost immediately too, in a bubble of mother-daughter serenity.

Pregnancy had been hard, birth a nightmare, but my baby changed me.

Matrescence is like pubescence, altering who you were before and how you think. What you want. And while the loss of control via pregnancy and the terror of a second birth still haunt me, I feel strangely empowered to be the mother and wife I've been called to be, a strange and new sense of verdant confidence.

I even wonder how good things can really get as him and I both get better, stronger. Because we've welcomed more love into our life. And love is the fire that warms and fuels our lives.

And even after my visions of Mary abandoning me, still we named her Mary. Confident that after leaving me to pass through the piercing of the veil, like a mother sending her child to the first day of school, she has returned to us. She let's her children suffer for love.