Let's Pretend This Never Happened (21 page)

When I was seven months along, my coworkers decided to throw me a shower. I’d vehemently insisted against it, because I knew it would interfere with all of my secret little rituals, but they were adamant and decided to throw me an involuntary surprise shower. One that just happened to be on the unluckily numbered floor. I got into the elevator, expecting to go to a budget meeting, but I couldn’t bring myself to press the unlucky-numbered button, so I did what I always did, which was to ride the elevator until someone else got on and pressed that unlucky button for me. Except that no one was getting in the elevator to go to that floor. Because they were all already in the conference room waiting to surprise me. Twenty minutes later someone came looking for me and found me sitting helplessly in the corner of the elevator. I told them I was just dizzy and resting, but I think it was probably pretty obvious I was more than slightly unhinged.

By the eighth month my stomach was huge and tight, and I didn’t have any extra folds of fat to pinch away that I could stick the syringes into. My doctor insisted that although the needles were quite long, they were not
long enough to actually reach the baby, but I was terrified that I would end up injecting blood thinners into her head, and so I would yell, “MOVE, BABY. GO TO YOUR LEFT OR YOU’RE GOING TO GET STABBED.” Then Victor would point out that most fetuses don’t speak English, but I’d been talking to her a lot and I felt sure she’d picked up a few basic phrases. I
did
worry, though, that she didn’t know which direction “left” was, and so I’d yell, “
My
left. Not
your
left. Unless you’re facing my belly button. Then it’s your left too. If you can see my liver you’ve gone too far.” Then Victor looked at me worriedly and I was all, “You know, you
could
help,” and he was like,
“What the fuck can I do? You have obviously lost your mind.”
Then I glared at him until he finally sighed resignedly, walked around me, leaned down, and shouted at the left side of my stomach, “THIS WAY, BABY. MOVE TOWARD MY VOICE!” And I smiled at him gratefully, but after I finished the shot Victor muttered, “If this doesn’t work out we’re just getting a puppy,” which was kind of a crazy thing to say, because we already had a puppy. Clearly Victor was losing his mind and it was up to me to keep our family together. Me and the cats, who were granting me luck only when I specifically asked for it, that is. So, yeah . . . there was a lot riding on me.

One of hundreds of injections. Ah, the simplicities of motherhood.

Time crept by until it was finally time to induce. We went to the hospital maternity ward, and Victor quickly turned the television up to drown out the woman across the hall who was enthusiastically screaming, “JESUSGODKILLMENOW.”

“She’s praying,” Victor said unconvincingly.

In a twisted sort of serendipity, the TV screen buzzed on to reveal the bloody-stomach scene from
Alien
, which should probably be banned from
all labor rooms. Victor attempted to switch it, but I asked him to leave it on because it seemed to fit the theme.

A nurse came in to start my IVs and told us that she was sorry about the woman screaming next door, and that she’d told her that she needed to keep it down. I wondered what the nurse would do if the woman refused to keep quiet. The nurse was a petite black woman, but you got the feeling that she could easily drag a screaming pregnant woman out into the street if she needed to, and she struck me as being someone who should not be tested. “It’s because she’s black,” explained the nurse matter-of-factly.

“Um . . .
what
?” I asked, certain I’d misheard her.

“The lady yelling in the other room. She’s black,” the nurse continued. “Black women are
always
the loudest when they have babies. Screaming to Jesus, usually. White women are much quieter, right up until the baby starts to crown. Then you can’t tell a white woman from a black woman. Asian women make no sound at all.
Quiet as church mice
. We have to keep an extra-careful eye on them, because if we don’t keep checking their hootchies they’ll give birth without even letting us know.”

“Oh,” I mumbled, as I found myself near speechless . . . less from the racial profiling and more from hearing a medical professional use the word “hootchies.” Mostly because I’m pretty sure that the word she was looking for was “coochies.” She must have noticed my look of concern, because she patted my hand and said, “It’s okay. I’m black, so I can totally say that out loud. The other nurses on the floor just have to think it. And,” she added proudly, “I’ve just distracted you so much that you didn’t even notice that I put all your IVs in.” And she was right. I had totally been distracted by Asian hootchies.
And not for the first time.

Victor knew I was scared, but I wasn’t so nervous about the pain. I was terrified because the risk of stillbirth is so much higher with antiphospholipid syndrome. I was so focused on getting my daughter out of my body (which I still viewed as a veritable deathtrap) that I hardly noticed the pain. Victor murmured sweet, supportive things in my ear, but they sounded so unnatural coming from his mouth that I couldn’t stop giggling hysterically,
and everyone looked at me like I was the crazy one, and so I told Victor he wasn’t allowed to speak anymore. Then one more push, and there was silence. And then the beautiful sound of crying. It was me crying. And then it was Hailey crying. My sweet, beautiful daughter. And it was amazing.

It wasn’t until that very moment that I actually let myself believe that I really might be able to be someone’s mother. As I held her in my arms, Victor cried, and I was filled with so much wonderment and awe that it felt as if my chest would explode. Then the epidural started to wear off and I remember thinking that it would be nice if this baby’s mother would come and take her so that I could get some sleep. And then I remembered that
I
was that baby’s mother. Then I felt a little scared for both of us.

A few minutes later Hailey was whisked away by the staff, and I prodded Victor out of the room to follow her, because I was certain that the doctor would somehow switch her with another baby who would grow up to be a sociopath, because I’d been watching too much of the Lifetime channel.

And that’s how I found myself half naked, completely alone, covered in my own blood, and still strapped into the stirrups of the labor table, in what was possibly the most unflattering position imaginable, as I added a frightened, confused janitor to the long list of people who had seen my vagina that day.

Totally worth it.

Me and Hailey—2004. We both needed a bottle at that point.

My Vagina Is Fine. Thanks for Asking

If you are not a parent you are going to get here and assume this is a potty-training chapter (since almost every mom-penned book follows the labor-and-delivery chapter with the potty-training chapter), and you’ll start gagging and you’ll want to skip it. But you shouldn’t. Because this chapter will make you feel very superior about using birth control and/or infertility.

If you
are
a parent, you’re probably going to think that you should skip this chapter, because you’ve already heard it all. But I guarantee you haven’t. And also? The nonparents reading this are totally going to read it and smirk at you later, and you should at least be prepared. This is the same reason I listen to a lot of über-conservative Republican radio. Because I want to know what is on the minds of my enemies. Also because I live in Texas, and there aren’t a lot of alternatives. And besides, this chapter isn’t even
about
potty training. I don’t even know where you got that idea. Potty training is not a fun subject to reminisce about. It’s more like a horrible death march through a haunted forest, and the trees are made of angry bears that you’re allergic to. And you have to look at pictures of dead people at the same time. Like, it’s so awful you want to just make your kid go live outside for the rest of their life, but you can’t do that because the dog’s
out there. And that’s why I’m not going to write about potty training, and instead I’m going to write about perspective.

THE FIRST YEAR
after having a kid felt sort of foreign to me, and I keep stumbling across it in my head, much like when someone you know dies and an hour later you’re laughing at
Hee Haw
, and then you think to yourself, “Oh, fuck, I just remembered that Grampa died,” and you get sad again, but then your head goes somewhere else and you’re all, “I wonder why you never see elderly biracial couples?” And then a minute later your mind yells, “
Shit
. I forgot Grampa died again.” And you keep crying and getting distracted, and you consider that you should probably just turn off
Hee Haw
, because obviously that’s not helping, but then you think to yourself, “But Grampa loved
Hee Haw
,” and you convince yourself it’s an homage to him, even though, really, you just kind of want to watch
Hee Haw.
It’s probably also some sort of self-preservation thing to help you deal with grief,
so back off already and stop judging me.

And this is exactly what being a mom is like. You’re just going about your day, thinking about how awesome it would be to make nachos, and suddenly you’re all, “Holy shit,
I have a baby
. I should, like, feed it or something.” And you do, but then a half-hour later you forget again, and you hear her giggling in the other room and you think,
“WTF? Whose baby is that?”
and then you remember, “Oh, yeah. It’s mine.
Weird.
” And then you come up with these great ideas to turn the spare room into a bar, so you can charge your friends for all of the alcohol of yours that they’re already drinking anyway, and then you draw up the plans and bring over a contractor, and then you’re all, “Fuck.
Wait a minute
. This isn’t a spare room. This is the room the baby lives in.” Right?

Wrong.
I was with you up until that last one. If you agreed with the last one then you need to put down this book and go find your baby, because she’s probably out drunk on some tree limb somewhere.
You are a terrible parent
.

Special note to people who are childless and are smugly smiling right now: Stop judging. It’s entirely possible that you aren’t really childless and that you’ve just forgotten you had a baby. Because that shit totally happens. Check your vagina. Does it look kind of broken? If so, you probably had a baby. Seriously, mine was all Franken-gina for a good year before it was presentable again. But not “presentable” like I’d lay it out at the Thanksgiving dinner table. I wouldn’t have done that even
before
it got destroyed. I mean,
not that it wasn’t a good trade-off
, because it totally was. And it’s fine now.
Great
, actually.
My vagina is great.
Slimming, even. Thanks for asking. It was just fucked up when Hailey was born, but I didn’t really care so much at the time, because I was so relieved that she was alive, and so I lay there on the hospital table thinking that is the only time in life when you’re too blissfully happy to notice that people are stitching up your vagina.

Also, I just want to say that I think when the doctor is stitching your vagina back up (for real, child-free people:
Stitching. Your. Vagina. Up
), I don’t know why they don’t throw in some cosmetic surgery while they’re down there, to make it look cuter. Like, when my gynecologist told me that she’d probably have to cut my vagina, I was all, “YOU ARE A FUCKING PSYCHOPATH,” and she was like, “
Not for fun
[unspoken:
“dumb-ass”
]. To get the baby out.” And I said, “Oh. Well, if you’re going to have to scar me, could you do it in some kind of kick-ass shape? Like, how about a lightning bolt?” And she just stared at me, so I explained, “You know . . . like Harry Potter’s?” Then she just looked at me like I shit on the floor, and I thought maybe it was because the sentence structure kind of implied I was referring to Harry Potter’s vagina, and so I clarified: “But not on my forehead like his was.” And she still didn’t respond, so I pointed down and said,
“On my vagina.”
Then she shook her head like she’d known all along that I wasn’t referring to Harry Potter’s vagina, and said, “Uh, we don’t really do that. In fact, we prefer for you to tear naturally, because it heals better,” and I’m all, “MOTHER. FUCKER. Are you fucking serious?” And I
kind of suspected she was just making that up because she didn’t want me to have a nicer vagina than hers, because she’d never had a kid and so hers was probably all perfect and cheerful, and she probably didn’t want me rubbing my vagina in her face when it was all lightning-bolt awesome.
Like I would even do that, Dr. Ryder.
I would never rub my vagina in someone’s face, even though it would be the most badass vagina in the world. And whenever I have menstrual cramps I could just pretend that Voldemort was close.