I am at the precipice at 37 weeks, and from now considered full term. My gynae gives me the all clear for a home birth at my 36 week appointment, noting vernix in the amniotic fluid, which suggests I won’t stay pregnant for a full 40 weeks. He thinks I might go into labour at 39 weeks, the one between Christmas and New Year. My midwife thinks it’ll be sooner based on my uterine activity. I have Braxton Hicks contractions sometimes as often as every five minutes. They fill me with heat and breathlessness lying on the couch and moaning softly while Ricky eyes me nervously.
The pain in my body blooms into full flourish. It is a garden gone mad with rain; purple and green tendrils consume furniture; interlopers appear with black shining berries; a spike-leaved stalk throws out an acrid smell; beans abound. Some mornings I can barely stand. The pressure on my pelvis sends a vine down my back, hips and groin. I cannot lift my legs from the floor to the couch, nor get up once I’m down. I cannot stand for longer than five minutes before my feet feel as though I’ve walked on poison ivy.
Consequently, I cannot do any of the million things I feel I need to do to prepare for this baby. I cannot get the room ready by painting it or moving the furniture around, or packing stuff away in high cupboards. I cannot hang the washed curtains. I cannot carry away the box of my books I’ve packed up. I do what I can, sewing custom fitted sheets and cloth wipes, washing all the second-hand baby clothes and ordering them. The preparation feels ritualistic and necessary, something almost primal. I must make space, I must clean, I must harness order and calm. But I can’t, because I’m not able bodied anymore. This sends me into a kind of frenzy. Ricky, as timing would have it, begins finding things to do that have nothing to do with preparing for the baby, and is convinced of the validity and urgency of his tasks with the same level of fervour as I hold for mine. We argue. I sob on the toilet. I tell myself this story: I am alone. I must do it alone. But I cannot. I simply need help. And I must ask for that help.
I have been feeling this for weeks now, though it has sharpened as I’ve become more decrepit. At the baby shower my mother and friend refuse to allow me to help. I must sit and tell people where I want things. This is not the role I play. I am the one who helps, who jumps to, who fixes and makes right, orders and cleans, cooks, is efficient and in control. The house hums and shines. I whirl through, scooping up socks and feeding the chickens, making a cake, making a chutney, making a plan. There is great power in this. I use my heft to make what I want appear. Now I have no strength to make anything happen. I must rely on others, who have different ideas. It would seem the other way, that sitting and ordering people around would give me power, but it brings me only weakness and frustration. Ricky takes no orders, leaves on this errand and that. He still has his life, which makes me seethe. I feel totally consumed and overtaken.
My life is gone. I have no work but to prepare. I cannot exercise. I am told to rest, but rest hurts, and besides, I am driven up and out of bed by the demon of demand: make space for the baby. If I can just get the baby room painted a light blue, if I can just get the rocking chair arranged on the carpet, if I can just work out the sleeping set-up in the bedroom, then I can hold back this impending death – because that is how it feels. I feel I will die. Perhaps not in childbirth – though I’ve read too many Arthurian tales not to follow in my head the thread, “she died in childbed” – but certainly when the girl is born. I will have to give up. No more of anything that was mine. No more reading or thinking or writing. No more long baths and listening to podcasts, gardening, sleeping in or through. It’s over. I’m over. My body is not mine. My huge and dark areolas bleed out brown till most of my boob is tinted. Skin tags appear everywhere. Sleep is already scarce and weird (the other night I woke at 2.19am, lay till 2.40am, started to read, then got hungry and ate a bowl of corn flakes while listening to the first birds). All my books and altars and art are packed away. It is as though I were entering a monastery, my head all but shaved. I weep as I take my vows.
I try to tell Ricky: I need this. I need you to do this – fill the gas because the loadshedding will mean the geyser won’t warm and then the birth pool will go cold; make sure the geyser timer is off so the water is hot all the time and not only twice a day; study routes to the hospital in case; get a hot water bottle ready to heat the baby clothes; remember my affirmations, I will need you to speak them to me; put this away; that goes to charity; buy your mother a Christmas gift or so help me God. I try to explain the ache of all of this. But over and over I fall into command and hysteria. He does not do it well, or right, or fast enough. He puts the wet curtains on the floor; he disagrees with the furniture as I want it. And I find I have no art for asking, for negotiating. I cannot plead my case. I can only demand or intimate he’s an idiot for wanting to do things other than what I command, then weep in frustration when I am refused. A jet of fury begins to pipe out whenever this happens, and it happens more and more as time passes and I am closer to the birth. Everything is ending for me, but not for him. He keeps asking what the problem is. We can do it afterwards. The baby won’t know the difference. He looks at me long and hard. I’ve gone strange.
I had all these ideas: I would find flowers that represented the different openness of my cervix as it moved towards full dilation, and I would look at those flowers for inspiration during labour – no sterile centimetre measurements for me. I would sing each day to prepare for the birth and for the baby. Everything would be clean and ready. I would be a solid and confident mother, soothing, available. There would be candles. I would be crystalline and clear, liquid as a stream, limpid with affirmations and breath and meditations that made me a kind of fantastic goddess able to love my baby without complication and ride waves of surges I described only as “some pressure”. Maybe I’d even orgasm – but lightly, demurely, more like a polite hiccup of pleasure than a dark horse passing through me.
All of this falls through my hands. The birth pool takes up most of the dining room. Sticking out from under it you can see the Kellogg’s and Rainbow Chicken boxes we’ve used for insulation. We’re charged per day for the pool; it drips like a leak in our bank account. My doula is away and my gynae is away and my midwife is shared with a woman also speculated to go early. We’re neck and neck. I fight with the medical aid for the tiny amounts it reimburses us for the now-weekly midwife visits. I buy lube, condoms and salt, as per my midwife’s instructions for a home birth kit. I fill the condoms with water and freeze them to be inserted if I tear. I decline to buy the recommended KY Jelly and buy a house brand instead, unwilling to pay the R30 difference. I buy disposable underpants and try to gather newspapers to sop up the blood that will trail through the house as I move from the birth pool to the bathroom to birth the placenta. None of this is shown on the scores of home birth videos I’ve watched (the “money shot” is always most viewed: the baby coming out, everyone happy, the sobbing and somehow still-neat now-mother, make-up unsmudged, is grateful, full of awe).
I buy a belly belt to hold up the weight and debate getting a plaster cast done of my boobs and stomach. I want to capture this fleetingness, this swell, but don’t want to spend more money or be left with a cement cast of my belly that I don’t know what to do with but feel too bad to throw out. I know I should just take a picture and be happy, but a photo will not capture the viscerality of the experience. Everything is passing. I want to clutch on; I want to literally concretise and cast in stone this time – and I don’t know why. I remember reading somewhere that all of Buddhist thought can be summed up in two words: don’t cling. I cling.
Something else begins to happen. My parents ask if they can visit, but say it is entirely up to me whether they come or not. I know what the correct answer is: come, of course. But I want to be alone. It is difficult to know this and to know the desire of my parents, to hold both, and then to choose. At the very same time as I am demanding about what I want, I am also totally primed to serve the needs of others; I scan for them, can feel them like heatwaves coming off certain people. With them, my own needs are always less important; I can survive if they are not met. Or, oftentimes my desires seem to align with the needs of others because I want so much to please people – that becomes primary: above all else, be pleasing to others. I am at once demanding and full of need, and then smothering with resentment when that need – whether articulated or not – is unmet, and, simultaneously, scanning for the needs of others over my own. Fulfilling those needs gives me a bump of dopamine, a squirt of power. I get to be self-sacrificing, Jesus like, and then I get to hold my own victimhood like a well-thumbed coin at night, slipping it under my pillow, putting it in my pocket: I am the bigger person. I’m nice. I’m kind. Selflessness, help: church words to disguise power, control.
Do I really want to be alone – more than I want my parent’s love and approval? I feel pathetic for thinking this, for needing this, old as I am. Then I get furious, which makes me weep with frustration. I know I’m generating all of this; it comes from no one but me. I know how to be good. I don’t know how to be true, truthful, authentic. I tell my parents no. Nothing happens. No one except me is particularly unhappy.
My therapist says part of the gift of motherhood is being finally swept under to such a degree by the fullness and pain in the body and then by the fullness and demand of a baby, that you have to lean on others. You are forced to locate your need and articulate it. Your womanly power is eroded right down, and while you’re on your knees, your face bent to the earth, you get a glimpse of something beyond your ego, a shape of yourself outside your muscle and strength. What am I without my might? What do I need? Without being needy or expecting others to bring you happiness, there is an art to having needs and asking to have them met, or else, discerning both your needs – and feeling they’re legitimate – and the needs of others, knowing your automatic reactions and then slowing down enough to weigh these sets of needs and to decide where to focus and where to let go.
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