First time

May 13th, 2007
Mothering, Spirituality

I was twenty years old the first time I saw a newborn baby.

Reed and I were living in a student four-plex adjacent to Brigham Young University, happy to have taken the basement apartment next to our friends, Luis and Eva. Eva was nearly due with their firstborn. Pink-cheeked, with long honey-brown hair and straight white teeth and gentle curves everywhere, she exuded life and health. I had never before kept company with a pregnant woman. When the four of us gathered in the late-lit summer evenings, I studied her bulging middle with fascination, wondering how she could withstand transformation so gracefully. I doubted I ever could.

I did want children, someday. Motherhood, as a concept, held a sense of destiny for me, although vague. And the Mormon culture I belonged to revolved around family life, promising spiritual progression and social acceptance to those who married and multiplied at young age. Young adult women were assumed to desire children above all else. Baby hungry—the knowing tease echoed from my community as soon as I became engaged, making me all the more determined to choose a different path: graduate school, a college-level teaching position, a ladder of publication and promotion that led to university tenure. Children would come later—two, or three at the most; perhaps in my far-distant thirties. Maybe by that time I’d like kids. As a teenaged babysitter I had ordered my charges to bed as soon as their parents pulled out of the driveway, no matter how early the hour.

Yet as distant as I felt from my own maternity, I felt drawn to Eva’s. When she brought her daughter home one morning in the dry burn of August, I fidgeted behind the wall that separated our living rooms, waiting for the right moment to pay a visit. In mid-afternoon I finally took the small step from my doormat to hers, and raised my fist for the knock. The door opened to Eva’s face. Fatigue had bleached her cheeks and shadowed her eyes; her hair was limp, her curves sagged. But she smiled, quick and sure, as she glanced backwards, over her shoulder. Behind her, I saw a pink blanket smoothed over the worn brown carpet, and on the blanket, a child, asleep. My legs moved forward as my eyes took in the sight: flesh and blood and bone, impossibly small, impossibly alive.

Chelsey, Eva said.

I knelt at the edge of the blanket. Eva followed, gingerly, still sore from the rigors of creation. Time slowed as we watched the gentle rise and fall of Chelsey’s chest, the short jerks of her limbs as she startled in her sleep. Dressed lightly for the summer heat, her pink skin glowed with a sheen that filled the room, washing the dullness from the worn furniture and yellowed linoleum and dark-paneled doors. The light touched me and sent me spinning.

I don’t remember how long I sat on that brown carpet, transfixed, as Eva lifted her waking daughter, cradled her, brought her to breast. But as the afternoon sun slanted into evening, something gently broke open within me. I knew, more than I had known anything before, that I wanted a child. More than that—I needed one, like I needed food and water. Baby hungry. I didn’t know why I had changed, or how. All I knew was that when I returned to my apartment, I felt strangely bereft. And when Eva’s door opened the next day, and the next day, and the next, I felt like I was coming home.

***

One year later.

I was lazing in half-sleep, my lower half cocooned in tingling warmth, when the squeezing began, deep and strong. It spread across my abdomen and wrapped around my back, then clamped hard like a tourniquet, forcing my belly upward in a tight swell of muscle and nerve and tissue. The anesthesia had sunken my pelvis into a circle of dark, blessed numbness. But now, bright pain flared around the edges, like the crown of a solar eclipse.

I rang for the nurse. “I think my epidural is wearing off,” I said.

She appeared quickly, pulled on a glove and reached in. After a few seconds, she looked at me with a knowing smile. “You’re complete,” she said. “Ten centimeters. You can start pushing now.”

The words crackled with positive charge. Positive—the word spoken on the long-ago morning of my pregnancy test. The word that ushered in nine months of changing. Nine months of swelling and stretching, of tasting bile and stomach acid. My blood flow doubled, darkening the network of veins across my chest. Sharp little elbows jabbed my bladder and ribs. Red streaks ribboned my stomach skin, like claw marks. Nine months of savage blessings. All along, the force that had shaped Eva into a mother, the grace that had formed her daughter and given her breath, ran through me like a current, carrying me to this moment.

The nurse helped me roll from my side to my back, raised the head of the bed, removed the towels from between my legs. “Hold your knees,” she said. Reed stepped close to help, looking dazed. The supercharged air must have drugged him. He cracked stupid jokes, the kind that are funny only at the very end of a long night, or a long pregnancy. As my stomach muscles shook with laughter, the pressure began to build again, gathering and rising and arching to a keen crest, splitting me in two. One of me hunched forward on the bed, straining with the push, and the hold, and the push. The other bobbed along the pockmarked ceiling tiles, ready to slip through their tiny holes like a sprite.

The nurse’s words tugged me back, grounding me again. “Look—there’s her head! Look at all that hair!”
Still pushing outward, I pushed myself upward with my elbows and peered at the wall mirror, needing to see. Flesh red and pink—mine—split by a thin oval of blackness. A scalp, slick with damp dark hair. Hers.

My muscles relaxed into smoothness, releasing me back onto the bed, releasing her back into the womb. I was weak with surprise. There was a person inside of me, pushing through my curtain-body, ready to claim the stage.

The squeezing began again. I moved with it, moved in and out of time and sanity until the parting was complete. Emptied, I stared at my daughter as she wriggled on the sterile blue sheeting, her skin bright and fresh and full of light, the same pink light that had filled Eva’s apartment, only much stronger. The naked force of a life.

This was not the soft, hearts-and-flowers love scene that I had expected. None of the birth stories I’d heard prepared me for the truth: this baby was alive. Without batteries, without wires or plugs. The shock grabbed me by the hair, slapped my face, then set me back on the bed, reeling.

In the meantime the nurse was wiping the waxy white vernix off my daughter’s chest and wrapping her in a striped flannel receiving blanket. She was ready to be held. I fit her capped head into the crook of my elbow and tucked her covering a bit tighter across her chest. I didn’t know what to do next. I had figured that when the baby came I would know how to feed and clothe and clean her; the fabled maternal instinct would take care of that. It didn’t.

But instinct did tell me this: If anyone tried to harm this child, I would, without hesitation, rip out the offender’s throat with my teeth, spit his blood, and go about my business.

And this: The light in my daughter was a compass to follow, a key to life.

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