Labor and Pancakes

Is pain wrong, or meaningful, or meaningless?

Content Warning: Graphic description of routine childbirth. Maybe don’t read if you’re about to give birth. Please read if you’re never planning to.

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Step One

Add 200 grams dried fruit (a mix of cherries, cranberries, currants, citrus peel) to a bowl and mix with 40 grams rum. Remove sourdough starter from the fridge and give it a fresh feeding. Pack your suitcase for the hospital.

Step Two

December 23rd is normal to the point of banality. You go to Sam’s Club (which has almost nothing you’re looking for because it’s not a Costco) and buy a rubber boot mat. You make baked spinach and chicken/chickpeas with tomato sauce and mozzarella in anticipation of your brother’s arrival. You put the toddler to sleep at 7:30. Your brother arrives late, around 9, Newark was slow and there was traffic. You get into bed at 11:30.

At 11:55, a flood of warm liquid gushes out of your vagina. You go sit on the toilet. It’s cold out of bed, but not enough to justify the shivering that suddenly takes your whole body. You can’t control your teeth. It makes you cross because it seems like an anxiety response, but you feel very clear and very calm. You’re going to have the baby.

Step Three

At 12:30 when you finally get through to the midwife, she tells you the shaking is normal. It’s hormones (everything is hormones). Try to rest, she says, and call back when the contractions are five minutes apart. After you hang up, you begin tracking the waves of pain, each of which feels like the edge of the worst bowel movement of your life. Four minutes and thirty seconds, consistently. Still, you lie in bed with your partner and try to breathe and it’s almost nice. 

Around 2, something changes. In the middle of a contraction there is a sharp spasm and then it doesn’t end. It’s like a flip is switched and your belly is locked into pain. When you call the midwife again, you are hanging on the edge of the bed and can’t speak for stretches. She says you could “probably” come in, which is funny because of course you are. If you can. Standing up with a belly full of pain is impossible. Putting on your leggings and socks and sweatshirt and boots and coat and hat, making it outside and into the car is impossible. Everything is impossible until it happens.

Step Four

At the birth center, you expect everyone to recognize your obvious state of emergency, but they want you to sign paperwork. They are saying words at you and they are showing you your room and your partner keeps saying everything is “nice” and you want to strangle him because nothing is nice about this, it is probably the least nice you’ve ever felt. The midwife puts you on an IV to space out the contractions. People begin to leave the room, which is confusing because you’re about to have a baby. But apparently you’re just 3cm dilated. Maybe you aren’t about to have a baby. Eventually you let someone turn down the lights. Your partner starts your birth playlist. You ask him to talk to you and he tells you about the snow falling outside the window. You lie back on the bed and will your legs to relax. You wouldn’t describe what you’re feeling as calm but you’re able to hear again. Beth Gibbons floats by on a moment.

Step Five

How to describe the contractions? Breathing does not help. Meditation is not a concept that is relevant. The pain comes in waves, like they said it would, but waves that break over your head one after another with no time to come up for air. You turn into the bed and try to claw apart the sheets. You ask for nitrous oxide. The machine takes a very long time to retrieve and get set up, but waiting for it gives you something to do. You love nitrous (who wouldn’t? It feels the kind of good they warn you about in DARE) and remember getting your wisdom teeth removed, it was like dreaming and being awake all at once. It turns out giving birth is worse than having your teeth removed. When the machine is finally ready, you slam your face into the mouthpiece and suck greedily and while it doesn’t make you feel good, somehow it becomes endurable. Each time a contraction comes, you begin counting breaths. You only have to make it to ten, over and over and over.

Step Six

The midwife is back around 7:30 and she’s saying that when you can’t help but push, then you should push. Even in your blurry state, this seems too obvious to state out loud. She says your cervix still has a tiny bit of effacement, but your body is pushing and therefore you are pushing. When she tells you to give it everything, you do. It’s like the last 10 feet of a sprint or breaking a board in Tae Kwon Do or an orgasm. Everything you have.

Before this time, what would you have considered to be the longest hour and a half of your life? It doesn’t matter now. Apparently this is a normal amount of time to push, or even a short amount of time for a first-time vaginal birth. But inside, it is endless. You push and push and you do not feel brave or strong or powerful. You feel trapped. You don’t scream because there is no breath for it. A nurse says, They all come out eventually (did you say something to her?) and logically you know this to be true, but it is equally true that you will always be trapped here in this space, with no one but yourself who can release you. It feels wrong to suffer like this. You should be angry, but not right now.

The midwife is holding your vagina open with her fingers, which is uncomfortable, but uncomfortable in a way you can use. You push into that feeling. When they say they could use a vacuum to help pull, you’re nodding before they can finish describing the procedure, and when they say they will have to do an episiotomy, you are not scared because you want anything, anything that can make you bigger. 

And then, during one of the climaxes that has become anticlimactic for its regularity, she comes out. They put her on your chest. You don’t feel relief or love, only shock. She is gooey and warm. You give birth to a huge gray veiny sea monster and hardly notice. The doctor is hand-sewing what you learn is a third-degree tear of your vagina. Eventually the room empties out and the baby is still on your chest.

Step Seven

The next morning is Christmas. The nurses wear bells on their scrubs and sound like reindeer coming down the hallway. They serve you overcooked oatmeal and Lipton black tea. You’re able to walk slowly around the room and look out the window at the snow-covered parking lot. You pee and pee and pee. They discharge you and you go home. Refresh your sourdough starter.

People talk about the fog of childbirth, but you remember everything. Maybe no one actually forgets, but their brain doesn’t know where to file the memories. Alongside your grocery list or when the library books are due? The discordance is too great.

That night, mix together 1 cup whole wheat flour, ½ cup buckwheat flour, and ½ cup teff flour with a spice mix of 2 teaspoons ground ginger, 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon, 1 teaspoon ground allspice and 1 teaspoon sea salt. Mix in 2 tablespoons 100% hydration sourdough starter and 1¼ cups milk. Cover with a plate and leave at cool room temperature overnight. Doze off and startle awake with the baby attached to your breast. Try to get her to suck for more than a few minutes at a time. When light makes the edges of the curtains glow, sleep with her warm body tucked under your arm.

In the morning, use a stand mixer to whip roughly equal parts room temperature cream cheese and yogurt. Add a dollop of vanilla extract, a pinch of salt, and confectioner’s sugar to taste. To the bowl with the batter, add 4 eggs, 2 tablespoons molasses, 2 tablespoons granulated sugar, and 1 teaspoon baking soda. Mix well.

Heat an electric griddle or your favorite pancake skillet with enough butter to cover it. Use a ladle to drop spoonfuls of batter onto the hot surface. Once you’ve dropped the first round, immediately sprinkle the surfaces with the soaked fruit. Flip the pancakes when they are mostly cooked through and cook for about 30 seconds on the other side. Serve immediately (while you are still cooking the second batch) with butter, maple syrup, the whipped yogurt topping, and roasted quince if you happen to have made it several weeks before. 

Step Eight

Continue to feed your sourdough starter once a day and the baby every 45 minutes. Eat the bread that you baked just before the baby was born. It may surprise you that it’s still good, but 1) it’s a sourdough with a hard crust, and 2) you were only gone for 36 hours. How the time in the hospital could be the same as the time that stales bread doesn’t make sense. Much of the last two days still doesn’t make sense.

What if childbirth is not transformative but merely violent? And if you go into an experience expecting it to transform you, would you be able to admit to yourself if it did not? Is suffering wrong, or meaningful, or meaningless?

You search for answers in your body but nothing feels true. You don’t think that the suffering you experienced was traumatic, but neither was it enlightening. It was an initiation into nothing but the fact that extreme pain can coexist with breakfast the next day.

After breakfast, you open Christmas presents. The snow turns to rain outside. The new baby is always with you and already it feels like she was always here. You wonder at her existence, but the wonder is swallowed up by fatigue and doctor’s appointments and toddler demands in the jumble of days between Christmas and New Years. Wonder and pain, pee and milk and blood stack together like the stratifications in a limestone cliff, more scenery than story.