Bulletproof (6 page)

At about four in the morning, I snapped awake. It was pain that had woken me up, but by the time I came to, it was already just an echo in my mind. It wasn’t even hard to fall back asleep. But not long after, I woke up again in the exact same way. Once again I could feel the pain fading just as fast as it woke me up. It was late, and I was sleepy, so I was completely without a clue. But the next time it happened, I hadn’t quite drifted back to sleep yet. That was when I realized I was having a contraction.

I got out of bed without waking Ryan and went down the hall with my phone. Obviously, I called my mom.

“I think I’m having contractions,” I told her. “What should I do?” She asked me what it felt like, and I described them and told her I thought they were about ten or fifteen minutes apart.

“Go and walk around,” she said. “Take a shower and see if the same amount of time is happening between them, then call me back.”

I went and did what she said, and the next ones were still between ten and fifteen minutes apart.

“Okay,” she said. “When they get to be five minutes apart, call the doctor and then call me, and I’ll come and take you there.”

For the next forty minutes or so, I wandered around the house and felt the time between the contractions get shorter and shorter. Finally, when they were five minutes apart, I sighed and went back into the bedroom to wake up Ryan.

“I’m ready to go to the hospital,” I said when he cracked his eyes open.

“Shit.” Bless his heart, but he was hung over. Like, the dying kind. I couldn’t help feeling bad waking him up that way at five in the morning, but it couldn’t exactly be helped. “What?”

“I have to go to the hospital,” I said again.

“Right now?” He blinked up at me like he was wondering if it was a nightmare. “Seriously?”

Somehow, we made it to the doctor, checked me in, and headed upstairs. When they came in to check my cervix, I thought things were well underway. But we weren’t even close to getting started. Before being admitted to a room, my cervix had to be dilated to three centimeters. The pushing part of labor starts at ten centimeters. I was at two.

It didn’t seem like a big deal at first. Nothing a good stroll around the hospital wouldn’t fix. But after I’d walked around for awhile, it seemed I hadn’t dilated any more. So to my complete and utter shock, they sent me home. I was not expecting that twist! Why was I going home when I was having contractions?

“Just go home,” they told me. “Come back when the pain is so unbearable you can’t even take it anymore. When you get there, we’ll be ready.”

“I am there!” I said. But it was no use. They wouldn’t get started until my body said it was ready to go. So I got in my mom’s car and went to my parents’ house to wait it out.

The contractions kept coming, every few minutes, for the rest of the day. And the rest of the night. I didn’t sleep. It was insanity. I was in labor for twenty-four hours before I broke down and said, “We have to go back. I can’t take any more.” When I got back to the hospital, I was still only two and a half centimeters dilated. I thought I’d lose my mind if the show didn’t get on the road. I walked a whole lap around the entire hospital, and then finally I hit the three centimeter mark and they let me get into a room. After that, things sped up. By the time the doctor came in to check me, I was at six centimeters.

“If you want an epidural, this is your chance,” she said.

I had never planned to get an epidural. But I had been in labor for so long at that point, I was completely exhausted and over it. So I said, “Give me that.”

The catch, of course, is that the epidural slowed things down. It was another four or five hours before the nurses came back in to find I was at ten centimeters. That was when the doctor said, “Okay, it’s time to get everyone out. It’s time to start pushing.”

Whoosh. It was like all the air went out of the room for a second. My head started swimming. I looked at her like she had five heads and then just went blank, internally freaking out.

At that point I’d been in labor for over thirty hours, but it wasn’t until she said it was time to push that I had a moment of flat out panic. It was almost like every scrap of uncertainty and fear I’d been holding back for the last seven months exploded like fireworks in my mind. “Hold on,” I thought. “I need two more weeks. I’m not prepared for this. I don’t know what I was thinking. This is not okay!” I don’t think anyone knew, but inside I was freaking out.

It didn’t matter, though. Things were happening fast, and it was time for me to push whether I was in a full-blown panic or not. I was so young and unprepared! When they said push, I went, “What do you mean, push? I don’t know how to push!” That was when I just prayed my body would take over. I’d gone with the flow trusting my body to know what to do when the time came. And now I thought, “Okay, body, take over. Do it. I’m totally lost here.” For a few moments I felt absolutely clueless, overwhelmed, and terrified. And then, thank God, it started to make sense. I started pushing.

When you’ve had an epidural you’re still having contractions, but you can’t feel them anymore. A machine beside you tracks when they’re happening, and that’s when everyone tells you to push. My contractions were just thirty or forty-five seconds apart. I had Ryan on one side and my mom on the other, and I started giving it my all. I pushed and pushed, every time another contraction took over, every half a minute. Contraction after contraction, minute after minute, until a half hour had gone by without any sense of progress whatsoever. At that point I felt like I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t know how it was going anymore, and in a mix of exhaustion and my usual stubbornness, I wasn’t about to ask.

But at the thirty-five minute mark, I was losing steam. I was so tired and drained that I started to drift off in the thirty seconds between contractions. Each time it was time to push, they had to wake me up. And I was so exhausted. Dead exhausted. It got to a point where I thought, “I can’t do this anymore.” I didn’t feel it was physically possible for me to have this baby. There just wouldn’t be enough left in me to pull it off. I had no idea what I was supposed to do, but it just wasn’t working.

And then something weird happened. One of the monitors started beeping in an urgent way, and I heard a nurse say something about our temperatures rising. Bentley and I were getting a fever very suddenly, apparently. It wasn’t clear, but the mood in the room shifted so plainly I could feel it even in my half-dead, delirious, exhausted state.

The doctor looked at me and said, “Okay. You get one more shot. One more chance to get him out, and that’s it.”

I didn’t know what that meant, but I didn’t even bother panicking. I saw her seriousness and told myself, “Okay. You can do it this time.” And I just pushed. I poured everything into that last effort. I remember it took every ounce of will and strength I could find in me.

And then we had Bentley.

I never asked what happened or why things got tense, and no one ever brought it up with me. I knew they were worried, because as soon as Bentley came out, they took him over to the table to check him without even letting Ryan cut the cord. They were very impatient to make sure he was okay. But it all turned out fine. Bentley was healthy and crying, and everything was normal. They cleaned him off and measured him, and then, finally, they brought him over and put him in my arms.

“Oh my God,” I said. “I actually had a really cute newborn.”

It was the most teenager thing I could have possibly said at that moment, but at least it came from the heart. And he wasn’t just cute. He was absolutely perfect.

***

The best word to describe my first days of motherhood is “surreal.” The hospital experience became a blur in my memory. It was a hectic event. There were sixty people in the waiting room, plus camera crews from MTV. I’d been in labor for thirty-seven hours. I’d barely slept. Plus, I was still completely clueless as to how to care for a child. And yet somehow in the midst of all that chaos, I felt completely at peace. I’m talking Zen-like bliss. Maybe it was just my psychological reaction to the chaos, my way of not succumbing to how overwhelmed I really felt, but I felt like I just had a little oasis of calm in the middle of everything. Like I said, it was surreal. Nothing in the world could ever compare to the way it felt. There’s no experience that will ever measure up to that.

The euphoria caught me completely off guard. When people talk about being new parents, they always seem to jump right to the difficult parts. It’s always jokes about forgetting what sleep is, or what free time is, or what peace and quiet is. I was braced for all of that. And when I was pregnant, I wasn’t really the type to sing lullabies to my belly. Some women seem to have a kind of mystical experience during pregnancy where they feel intensely bonded with the child growing inside of them. I was more perplexed by the experience. In the later months when I could lie in bed and watch my belly move, I’d just laugh. I always joked, “Until it comes out and it’s a human baby, it’s just a cute little alien.” I didn’t have a special, glowing feeling about pregnancy. More like my back hurt.

So with that attitude going in, I was totally unprepared for the sudden, enormous, completely pure love that consumed me when I held Bentley in my arms for the first time. It was just instant, automatic, life-changing love. And it was a mind-blowing feeling, especially considering that all newborns really do is cry, poop, spill things, and take all of your energy. But I felt that bond strongly and immediately. It made the entire experience so enjoyable.

Everyone warned me that parenting was exhausting and hard, and it’s true that all babies really do is cry, poop, spill things, and take all of your energy. Everyone told me that it’s exhausting and draining and very difficult and a lot of work. But no one told me that I would want to do it. I didn’t know it would give me so much pleasure to get up out of bed when he was crying and pick him up and make him feel better.

Those first weeks played like one happy scene in my head. Waking up in the middle of the night I would hear him fussing in his bassinet and even though I could hardly hold my eyes open, I would get up and go straight to him. It was so rewarding to be the person who could make him feel better, or fix what he wanted. I would lie in bed with him, dozing off but resisting at the same time, just appreciating the moments, even when I was absolutely exhausted. Times during the day when my mom would be doing chores and my dad would be around doing something, and I’d lie on the couch feeding Bentley, feeling like it was just me and him and feeling very complete.

Ryan was really proud and overwhelmed at the birth. At the same time, I could tell he was shocked by the reality of the responsibility that came with it. When that excitement and shock wore off, he just looked completely lost.

I was lost, too, but I was too happy to mind. The haze of contentment and love I was drifting in for the weeks after Bentley’s birth seemed to prove I had managed to adapt, after all. It’s so interesting how smart our bodies are, and their ability to do what they need to do when they need to do it. That became clear to me during labor, delivery, and the first weeks of Bentley being home. I hadn’t prepared. I didn’t know what I was doing. My only points of reference were movies and TV. But even though my mind had no idea, my body and instincts took over without me having to reason anything out. That was amazing to me, and I loved it because it gave my mind a level of freedom I hadn’t expected. By letting my maternal instincts take over, I could let my mind soak up the amazing experience I was having.

The first night in the hospital, when he would cry, I didn’t know what to do or what he was crying for. At first I was freaking out. But I learned quickly that I could understand what he was crying for. It was as if, because I was his mom, I could communicate with him almost intuitively. When others were in the room and he started to cry, I watched them go through the checklist: “He just ate, so he can’t be hungry. He just had his diaper changed, so that’s not why.” But for me, his cry told me exactly what he needed. I would know immediately.

In some ways, the experience of motherhood left me in awe. In a weird way, it helped me to understand the basic nature of human beings, how strong our instincts are, and the fact that we’re animals. Intellectually I would expect to struggle with things, but when my baby needed me to do something, my body and instincts just obeyed. It amazed me to witness that within myself.

I don’t know if fathers have the same innate tendencies that moms do when babies are born. My only experience was as half of a very young couple. I don’t know if it’s different for fathers who are older and more grown up inside and out. They say women mature younger than men. Maybe men develop nurturing instincts later in life. But I don’t think it’s common for young fathers to feel the same automatic, intense attachment to a newborn child as it is for young mothers.

The first flicker of warning was in the hospital that first night. I didn’t let the nurses take Bentley to the nursery. That was stubborn of me! I went on to share that lesson with future parents: Let them take the baby! Get as much sleep as you can! But at the time, I didn’t want to let him out of my sight. And that night, as I was drifting off to sleep, I realized I’d made a terrible mistake. Bentley was crying, and I didn’t know what to do.

I’d been in labor for thirty-seven hours. Thirty-seven hours of pain and fatigue with no break, no sleep. I’d been talking to all of these people at the hospital. I was exhausted beyond anything I’d ever imagined.

Ryan was sleeping across the room. And as I lay there kind of freaking out, I expected, or hoped, he’d get up to do something to help. But he was just sleeping through it and not at all worried about anything but continuing to sleep. And there was a moment when I thought, “What in the world? I need you to get up and help me, what are you doing?”

But being me, I said nothing. God forbid anyone should know I was struggling a bit. My mind and body were so wiped out I couldn’t even imagine feeling rested again, but the baby was crying and his father, somehow, was going to sleep right through it. I didn’t know if it was that motherhood instinct that kept me from passing out cold or if it was just sheer force of will, but either way, I handled it.