TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 78

[Tobie Shapiro]

December 3, 200000000000000000000000006


Dear Every Single One,

	The power went out in the middle of the 
night.  It woke me up.  Suddenly the house was 
quiet, and the resounding lack of noise stunned 
me awake.  I usually have a fan going in the 
room.  It creates a background noise that helps 
me sleep.  And then, I have one of those sound 
makers in the room.  It's a good one.  Has a 
choice of basic noise: creek, forest, railroad, 
surf, rain, thunder storm.  I choose surf.  Then 
you can add details: crickets, owls, hawks, buoy, 
songbirds, frogs, railroad signals, seagulls, 
loons.   I have this whole symphony going when I 
hit the hay.  So it all stopped, and I woke up. 
Couldn't get back to sleep.  I need the noise. 
Imagine me camping with my battery run noise 
maker.  There I am in the forest with the surf 
sounds emanating from a little black box.  It's 
ludicrous.  The power came back on at around 
7:00, and I went around fixing the clocks.  The 
microwave was saying, "Welcome to Panasonic". 
Indeed.  Welcome to the morning.  Welcome to the 
electricity.  Welcome home.


 
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Has the milk come in yet?

	Back in the days when my mother was 
having her offspring, the philosophies about 
giving birth and raising children were very 
different.  The professional opinions were that 
midwives were held in some disrespect, and babies 
were all to be born in hospitals.  Natural 
childbirth was what women were trying to get away 
from.  There was no La Maze.  Fathers sat out in 
the waiting rooms, or stayed at home playing 
cards with their buddies until word came, "You're 
a father.  Mother and daughter are both fine. 
Visiting hours are from noon to seven."

	For all three of us, my mother was put 
under before the pain of contractions had gotten 
too bad.  And the doctors more or less dragged us 
out of our mother while she was temporarily under 
anesthesia.  Then we were cleaned up, inspected 
and handed to the sleepy new mommy.  It was all 
men's advice, because almost all doctors were 
men.  There, of course, were exceptions, but the 
people writing books entitled things like, 
"Painless Childbirth", spouting that the pain of 
childbirth was all in a woman's head, were men. 
It was a male obstetrician/gynecologist who told 
my mother that her nipples were too small to 
breast feed.  But bottle fed babies were more the 
norm, then.  This was in the United States just 
after World War II.  Decades later, with the 
women's movement, things changed dramatically. 
So my mother never even tried to breast feed us. 
She just let the milk dry up and fed us with 
formula.  She held us close; I've seen the 
photographs.  But there was no mother's milk.

	By the time I was pregnant with my twins, 
La Maze classes were de rigeur, and fathers 
attended these classes with their partners, 
learning how to breathe and hold back, push or 
relax.  Fathers were expected in the delivery 
room and were sometimes the first to see the 
babies.  Since my pregnancy was high risk, we 
didn't expect natural childbirth.  Well, what's 
unnatural childbirth?  I suppose that's when the 
mother is in the next room.  I was frankly 
petrified of childbirth with twins.  Twice the 
pain, and maybe four times the duration, many 
times more the risk of complications.  I dreaded 
the thought.  When they told me that it was a 
high risk pregnancy, I didn't really believe it 
in a visceral way.  It registered, but failed to 
stop me in my tracks.  Now, I look back on it, 
and I see why they told me that I should get a 
chorionic villus biopsy instead of waiting twenty 
one weeks for an amniocentesis.  The idea was 
that if something were discovered to have been 
wrong with the fetuses at that late date, 
terminating the pregnancy and starting all over 
again could be life threatening.

	Life threatening, PAH!  It didn't even 
phase me.  I knew myself to be strong as an ox. 
Maybe on the small side, but durable.  But as the 
pregnancy wore on, those words began to make 
sense.  I was thirty nine.  It was my first 
pregnancy.  I was very small.  I weighed ninety 
eight pounds when I got pregnant, and one hundred 
fifty three when I gave birth.  I started having 
contractions according to the technological 
miracle monitor they attached to me, whenever I 
got up and moved around, so they put me in a 
wheelchair for long distances.  I walked, when I 
walked, with a cane.  There was stress on the 
urinary tract and I came down with one of my 
famous kidney infections in the fifth month, 
necessitating hospitalization for a week.

	In the hospital on the maternity ward 
were all sorts of mothers-to-be.  All in various 
stages of hugeness.  There we all were, expecting 
at some time to issue forth new lives.  All of us 
a little scared, all of us very hungry.  And what 
did the hospital's kitchen put on our plates? 
Tiny little servings of oval chicken, a 
tablespoon of string beans (frozen), a miniature 
roll with one thin pat of butter, a tablespoon of 
baked potato, dry.  For dessert, tapioca in a wee 
little bowl.  We were all outraged.  We are 
eating for two or in my case, three.  Bring us 
real food!  Bring it in wheel barrows!  Bring it 
in troughs!  Bring it in bulk!  We will down it 
and ask for more.  I shared my room with a 
sixteen year old girl.  This was her second 
pregnancy, and the one before, she had 
miscarried.  Sixteen, and on her second 
pregnancy.  Her family came to visit her.  Her 
mother was abusive, shouting at her derisively 
that she was worthless, that her boyfriend was 
worthless, that she would make a lousy mother, 
that she wasn't worth the social security she was 
collecting.  And when her family was all around 
her, the talk was all of who was in prison, who 
was going to go get the social security checks, 
who had knocked whom up, and who got into a 
fight.  It sounded like a life no newborn should 
enter into.  And here we were all in the 
maternity ward doing everything we could to save 
that baby.  And that's as it should be.  I found 
the conversations around the next bed, riveting 
and awful.  Once, the girl's mother came over to 
my side of the room and approached me, as I lay 
there writing.

	"Could I ask you a question?"

	"Of course.  As long as I can tell you I 
don't want to answer once you've asked it."

	"That's fair," she said.  "I was 
wondering.  You're thirty nine.  Why did you wait 
so long to have children?"

	I was reeling with commentary.  But I 
couldn't be completely honest, not candid anyway.

	"Because I was waiting to find the right 
man to have children with, and because I wanted 
to wait until I thought I'd be a good mother.  I 
would have been an awful mother when I was 
younger."

	This answer seemed to satisfy her, but 
she looked a little confused, as if any sort of 
consideration when planning children was 
impossible.  You didn't plan, you just had.  And 
I felt sympathy for the baby in the next woman's 
belly, and relief for mine.  I wanted to provide 
the warmest, most loving home for my twins, no 
matter how scared I was of becoming a mother.

	The twins were late.  Twins are expected 
to be born at thirty six weeks rather than the 
thirty nine weeks for singletons.  But it was 
past thirty nine weeks, and I was still pregnant. 
Huge.  Gigantic.  I looked like a beach ball with 
little twigs for legs and arms, a nubbin for a 
head.  What a trophy!  When I showed up for my 
weekly sonogram, there was money passed 
underneath the table.

	"Still pregnant?"

	"What does it look like?  A little gas?"

	That was what my mother's mother 
suggested it could be when my mother told her she 
was pregnant.  I suppose she just didn't want to 
imagine that my mother was in that family way. 
"Maybe it's just a little cold."  "Maybe it's 
just a little gas."  By the time my brother came 
along seven years after me, she finally accepted 
the diagnosis.

	On my last exam before the twins were 
born, they discovered that one of the fetuses had 
turned sideways, the head on my right side, the 
feet on my left.  The two were facing each other 
in there, their arms and legs in a tangle.  So 
the decision was made for a scheduled C-section. 
This was a Wednesday, and they asked me when I 
wanted to do it.

	"Today.  Now,"  I answered, tired of 
pregnancy and looking forward to being able to 
get up out of a chair again without two strong 
men to help me, one on each arm.

	"It can't be today.  But it can be either Friday or Monday."

	"Friday!"

	"Does it matter to you that it's going to 
be Friday the thirteenth?  It might bother some 
people."

	"No.  Good luck.  Friday.  Do it."

	So for a couple of days, when people 
asked me when I was due, I could say, "Friday 
morning at eight o'clock."  Feyna was born at 
precisely 8:00 a.m., on Friday, March 13th, 1987. 
Meyshe was born at 8:01 a.m.  Tell that to your 
astrologer.

	When I was trundled off to my room, they 
brought in the babies.  Baby girl A and Baby Boy 
B.  I named them instantly.  The names were 
waiting.  And then a curious thing happened.  The 
nurse kept asking me if the milk had, "come in". 
"Has your milk come in?" she'd say, and lean 
forward to prod my huge breasts.

	"I don't know what you mean." I told her, curling my eyebrows.

	"You'll know," she responded, and she 
seemed to know what she was talking about.

	I examined two little infants, every inch 
of them.  I am convinced this is biological.  We 
examine.  We are driven.  It is instinct.  There 
is so much that is instinct.  But we humans don't 
like to think we're susceptible to it.  We are. 
I can't tell you how much.  Just don't leave me 
alone with the afterbirth.

	"Has the milk come in yet?" and she 
reached over and poked my breasts again.  This 
was the second morning.

	"I don't know," I replied.

	"You'll know," she said.

	Their ears were all crinkled up.  They 
calmed when I held them.  I tried to nurse them, 
but they weren't too enthusiastic.  Maybe they 
were full of mother blood nutrients, placenta 
stew.  The third morning, the nurse sat herself 
down in front of me.

	"Has the milk come in?"  She reached 
forward and knocked on my right breast.  "KLANK" 
"Yup.  It came in."

	Then Feyna and Meyshe nursed heartily, 
and I was the proud owner of two humongous 
breasts that could shoot five little streams of 
milk any direction I aimed them.  I shot David in 
the chest.  I shot my foot.  I had fun with my 
new toys.  I was a mother.  Something I swore I'd 
never be.


 
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Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net