Birth

I went into labor two weeks late after taking a double shot of castor oil out of my dead Grandmother’s sterling silver Tiffany tumbler to induce myself. It tasted like motor oil and clung to my throat like semen. I blacked out the next twenty four hours but assume they were spent bent over tables and ottomans. Somewhere between the midwife’s first and second visit my husband made curry. At one point I pulled down a shelf in the bathroom, shattering perfume bottles against tiled floor. Tiny shards of glass and the smell of coriander make me think of birth.

I came to on the floor of my bedroom while pushing. I was naked, but I do not remember undressing. It was dark outside. The room was lit by candles. I was laying on my back. The midwife said she could see the outline of the baby’s fist against my perineum. This explained why he wasn’t coming out. I felt all around me and inside me the vigilant anticipation of death. With each push I pulled a scream from deep in my bowels, a sound that sits forever on ice in my memory. I’ve tried to find words to describe the pain but I can’t. When he finally came out, my clitoris split up the middle.

The midwife said she could hear him crying as he came down the birth canal, that he was crying before his body had been birthed. In all her births, she said, she had never seen this before. She said it was a good thing, a healthy thing. I thought it must be a very bad thing. I pictured my insides smothering his virgin voice.

– Here is your boy, Sarah said, handing him to me. Congratulations mama. 

Sarah was in her sixties with a year-round tan, pretty in a many lives lived kind of way. She always seemed to be double booking births and she’d wrap ours up quickly to get to another in the valley just as the baby was crowning.

– A second time mom, she may not even need me, Sarah explained, which made me intensely aware of my own need. The baby landed on my chest, warm and wet. His arm was bent upwards like a broken wing in a way that looked like it would never come undone, and my heart broke in a new way for the first of a million times. I touched him cautiously with my fingers. His screams sounded prerecorded, the same raw cry of protest playing on a loop. I rubbed the vernix into his skin like I read you were supposed to. I whispered sweet words to him like I thought you were supposed to. I adjusted his head so it rested between my breasts and I thought but didn’t say out loud, you will always belong here with me.

The bathroom floor was stained with blood for weeks after he was born. The tile was black, so it wasn’t obvious, but I could tell. There were scrunchies looped around the shower head, which means someone had been in the shower with me. Someone had pulled back my hair. The bedsheets had been changed. A mixing bowl and a metal baking tray were left drying on the dish rack. Receptacles for the remnants of birth. I looked around for my placenta. Someone had left a mason jar filled with pink delilahs on the dining table. It was silent in our house. Motionless. The cats hadn’t moved from under the couch where they had fled, my laboring sounds an assault to their animal senses.

A song played on repeat in my head for a week after he was born. I’d walk around and check the speakers to see if they were playing by accident. It was a choral song. Child of sea, it sang, time to end your voyage. It played in my sleep. It played while I spoke. While I showered. It was constant. It had come on while I was in labor, my husband finally told me when I asked. A playlist had been made.

Outside the fires were raging. Neighborhoods were evacuating. We locked our doors and windows, and watched as ash fluttered down like grey glitter in the backyard. My husband tracked the fires on his phone while we lay in bed, the baby and I.

I had been awake for many days and something grave had happened down on that floor that only I and the baby seemed to understand. Breastmilk and sweat soaked our linen sheets. I sat on thick cotton pads that stuck to my back with dried blood. Whenever I laid supine, tears involuntarily spilled down my cheeks. The baby slept across me. A soft pulpy pillow of flesh had replaced my round belly. There was an endlessness where only hours ago there had been firmness, a container with a beginning and an end. I will hold him right now, I thought somewhere beyond my thoughts, but surely this will end. Someone will come rescue me. He will go back. Surely it can’t go on like this.

The above is an excerpt from the short story Welcome Home.