Suddenly, Everything

Feeling like you need to take the most gigantic shit but not being able to shit is, in fact, not quite the spiritual experience I imagined from the outside. My water broke on a Citibike on Bedford Ave, right after leaving the Met Pool where I’d been trying once more to initiate a flip. I took off on the bike and left Anthony behind, beating him back to the house by several minutes. The need-to-shit feeling set in by the time I kicked off my soaked sweatpants. I still wasn’t completely sure what was happening, or at least whether IT was happening, but the midwife I called cut me off at “a lot of liquid” and “breech baby” and told us to get to the hospital immediately. Pretty soon we were in a Lyft bouncing through the side streets of Long Island City and I understood what contractions were. Every pothole on New York’s shitty streets made me scorchingly furious and if Anthony had been driving I probably would’ve leaned on the horn at every asshole driver who cut us off.

I was 2cm dilated when the midwife checked me in triage, not much more than an hour after leaving the pool. The contractions were coming hard without much of a break in between. I managed to turn myself on the bed amidst all the wires already sticking out of me so that I could lean my forearms against its back and sort of cat-cow my way through the feeling, which was a tiring position to hold but felt better than lying back. I suppose you could call them painful, but it was closer to a sense of extreme urgency, like something needed to happen soon or I would break into pieces. The thought occurred to me then, “I have a lot of ways to practice spirituality that aren’t all about coming to terms with the biggest shit of my life.” When the midwife announced that I was already 3cm and we were going to accelerate the C-section, the relief flooding my mind washed away any shadows of delivery-method disappointment that may have lurked there.

We listened to The Knife in the OR but I think the humor was lost on the surgeons. (It wasn’t really for the joke anyway, Silent Shout just has the perfect haunted energy for bringing a being across the chasm of the non-world to the world.) All I can say about surgery is that it was exceptionally weird. After the spinal, I was numb but not as numb as you’d expect to be. I felt the hands rummaging in my body and that just didn’t make any sense. Everything still had the sheen of unreality, though, from happening too fast and differently from every narrative I had imagined. Now that the contractions had stopped, I was placid, if somewhat numb. After just a few songs, the surgeons lifted a red and purple thing up above the tarp in front of my face and into the bright light and still there were no feelings, exactly, except for strangeness and incomprehension and maybe a little bit of fear as some part of my mind told me, Yep, this is all real. Then I wanted to hold him, but that wasn’t really possible, with a tarp in my face and both arms full of wires and people still rummaging in my abdomen. Anthony got to go to him and a whole crowd of people got to pick him up while I lay on the table with increasing frustration. Finally, they brought him over and though I still couldn’t hold him, a cheek was placed next to my cheek, and it was so soft and so warm in the bright, cold room.

Our little boy just took the first shit of his life and it is like no shit I have ever seen. Something like the texture of hoisin sauce but a dark green, like when the bottle of green food coloring exploded in Archestratus’ basement and stained the floor. I am in awe of this shit. As for the person who made it, there’s not much I can say. Cute isn’t the right word or even love. It’s just that when I sit with him in the crook of my arm I can’t see anything but his face and I can’t remember ever having looked at anything so fascinating in my life. That’s some real shit, right there.

— April 28th, 2022