017. With the Breaking of the Waters
Another humdrum Friday night in the Women’s Centre
I’ve been wanting to write about the birth of my daughter but time keeps slipping away and the things I want to say keep changing.
Where does a birth story begin, anyhow? With the breaking of the waters, perhaps, or with the onset of labour: these are often the places where we see ‘a birth’ beginning on screen(s) and in literature, the places where antenatal classes and midwives tell us to focus our attention. ‘What kind of birth do you want to have?’ often means: what do you want your labour to look like? Where do you want it to take place? Who do you want in the room when your baby emerges, what position do you want your body in, what state? What story do you want to tell about it?
With the breaking of the waters, then:
Exactly a year before my daughter was born, to the day, we were in California. The hills were green and the shoreline raw from the pounding of winter waves. That day, exactly a year before my daughter was born, I went out on my bodyboard in a swell that was not big by the standards of seasoned surfers but was objectively too big for me to handle. I knew it the whole way out, kicking with my fins alongside my father on his surfboard, my arms already aching from the paddle. I caught one wave – sheer luck – and then I caught another. I knew as soon as I’d caught it that my position was wrong, that I was going over, going under, and then I did. No up, no down, nothing to do but blindly kick your feet and wait to emerge from the churning water. It was probably only a few seconds that I was held under but it seemed much longer, almost too long – by the time I broke the membrane of water on the surface and gasped in a lungful air I had begun to panic, a feeling I’d grown unfamiliar with in all my years living away from the sea. I’d forgotten how big the water is, how wild, and the schooling I’d got was gentler than perhaps I deserved.
I caught my breath, more or less, I ducked under another breaking wave, and then I swam sideways, dragging my board on its leash behind me, out of the path of the set. Eventually I righted myself on my board, caught some breakwater into the shore, tried to look casual as I walked back along the beach and found my son, who was playing in the stream that we’d all played in as kids, standing on a bodyboard and damming up the flow of water. I had a shower and a beer, let my hair dry and my skin warm in the late afternoon sun, tried not to think too much about my own foolishness, turned the day into a funny anecdote.
But in the months that followed I kept returning, almost perversely, to that moment – my body suspended for an instant and then the wave breaking, holding me under, the relief of resurfacing. I wondered why I felt compelled to revisit it, why I seemed hellbent on making something out of nothing, twisting a funny anecdote into a metaphor.
Only it wasn’t a metaphor, it was just the beginning, or a beginning, anyway.
Exactly a year later she was born, my little girl. There was no labour; it was a complicated pregnancy and there were risks I was not willing to take associated with going into labour. I walked into the operating theatre on my own two steady feet, completely compos mentis, recited my name and date of birth, which someone checked against the paper bands on my wrists. I submitted to the spinal block, lay back, felt my body being manipulated without having any sense of what the manipulations actually entailed. The anaesthetist sprayed my legs with cold air until the answer to the incantation was finally no: can you feel this, can you feel this, can you feel this? No. Bright lights, pop music playing softly in the background – the surgeon’s choice? I made a note of what the song was, thought it might be significant later, when recounting my daughter’s birth story, promptly forgot what it was. It was all very calm, very clinical; the wildest thing was the way my whole body shook, something entirely outside my control and ostensibly at odds with my mental state, though perhaps it was a truer tell than I was willing to admit. I’m sorry, I’m really not nervous! I kept saying, slightly hysterically, as if nervousness in the face of childbirth might be seen as a flaw rather than a natural – indeed advisable – reaction. Everyone kept reassuring me that it was fine, it was a normal and common response to the anaesthetic. Meanwhile the anaesthetist stood steady at my left shoulder, making benign small talk – what kind of work did I do? where was I from? – while two obstetricians sliced and tugged behind a screen dividing my upper and lower halves, the before and after of my life.
At some point someone asked: did I want the screen removed when they pulled the baby out – at the moment of birth? Did I, in other words, want to see her enter this world? No thank you. I was too squeamish about the blood, the strangeness of seeing myself split open, or perhaps I was too afraid of what it would mean to bear witness to something going wrong: the fear that had kept me company throughout this pregnancy, and all the ones that came before, the fear of something going wrong, so alive in my body that even now I can still feel the reverberations of its constant hum. But I also felt I had in a sense seen her enter this world already, nine months earlier, an embryo launched into my womb via a pipette, viewed on an ultrasound screen as a tiny spot of light. They’d asked, then, if I wanted an image of that spot of light. No thank you, I said then, too, mostly because I desperately had to pee, and wanted the procedure to be over as quickly as possible, but also because I was afraid of recording the moment, in case the moment turned out not to be momentous.
Impossible, then, isn’t it, to write of the joy of her birth without writing of the fear of it, the fear that took up residence in my bones years before she was launched via pipette into my body, years before the embryo that would become her was even made?
The record shows her birth as occurring at half past midnight. For dinner earlier I’d had sausages and mash, with extra mash, because I was thirty-seven weeks pregnant and hungry; it was the most pregnant I’d ever been, my son having been delivered at thirty-six weeks exactly. Earlier that afternoon I’d sat in a big yellow armchair with my four-and-a-half-year-old boy on my lap, reading him a story about a robot who has to journey across the sea to root out a poison that is seeping into the water and sickening the animals. That morning I’d sneezed and noticed a trickle of liquid that might have been nothing, or anything – if you’ve ever been pregnant you’ll know how porous your body becomes – or something: the breaking of the waters, the beginning of the story, if that were where you wanted to begin it.
*
But maybe you’d rather begin it somewhere else. Ten years earlier, the first time you ever saw a positive line on a pregnancy test, or a few weeks after that, when the pregnancy ended and something else, a very long journey, began. I have been thinking about the birth of my daughter as in some senses the end of that journey, or the culmination of it: seven pregnancies, five losses, two live births, in the parlance of the fertility clinic. Five cycles of IVF, and she our last: the decision we never had to make, whether to start over again or call it quits.
I’ve wanted to write about what it’s like to be free, finally, from the yoke of trying, what it’s like to know you’re done having babies when having babies has been the most consistent preoccupation of the last decade of your life. What it’s like after five pregnancy losses to know that you will probably never have to endure another. (Looking at myself in the mirror, twenty-four weeks pregnant, thinking, well, whatever happens from here on out, I’ve probably had my last miscarriage now.) The euphoria, but also the disorientation, of finding yourself in new territory. But what I’d underestimated – throughout my pregnancy with my daughter, and now, too, in her infancy – was the degree to which I’ve internalised the old territory.
‘A history of miscarriage is treated as largely irrelevant when it comes to giving birth,’ writes the author and health journalist Jennie Agg in her book Life, Almost. ‘And yet it transforms the entire inner landscape of pregnancy and how you make every, infinitesimal decision.’ In other words with every pregnancy we carry the others, too, whatever the outcome; with every birth – and all that leads up to it – something of that past experience makes itself known.
What I find myself asking, then, is this: where does a birth story begin if there was no labour, as traditionally understood; if it happened suddenly and quickly, in an operating theatre, with pop music playing softly in the background and an anaesthetist making small talk by your shoulder? If conception occurred in a lab over five years before the birth itself? Where does a birth story begin when the birth itself is preceded by numerous losses, by years of trying, over a decade of trying to broker peace with the idea of a life lived either way?
At what point do you let yourself walk firmly in one direction, knowing how easily it could have been the other?
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If a birth story’s origins are ambiguous, isn’t its ending just as much so? Isn’t she still in a sense being born – nearly four months in, isn’t she only just beginning to become herself? In the grand scheme of things what does it matter, really, what the technical moment of her birth looked like – how gory or glorious it was or wasn’t, how heroic or stoic I was or wasn’t, how frightening or empowering or both the whole thing was – compared to all the moments running away from that one?
But I will say this: for a few days, after her birth, as with my son, I felt a thinness in the veil between here and there, now and then, out and in, life and death. For a few days after her birth, as with my son, I lived in the timeless space of the hospital, on a ward kept deliberately hot for the comfort of the newborns, so hot that I often felt I was in a fever-dream. Call bells beeped, women sobbed quietly behind beige paper curtains, midwives bustled, their rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the floor. My baby slept in the eerie blue glow of the jaundice lights and I gazed out of the window at a car park I had walked through a hundred times before, the same car park I’d gazed at after my son was born, in another season, in a time which felt somehow more remote than ever and also just there, on the other side of the curtain, the other side of the wall, if I could only reach through; I felt the nearness of myself, and also the knowledge that I would never be her again, the particular homesickness of birth. The homesickness I hadn’t expected, I don’t know why: for my son’s early days, his sunny infancy; for my body as it was after his birth, almost five years younger and far more resilient; for our life before our daughter, even while we were yearning for her; for the time when she had lived inside me, even though I had found that time almost unbearably tense.
And then, finally, we were released. We were giddy. We drove home, to our new life. We became immersed in the ordinary struggles of early parenthood: sleepless nights, days without structure, an infection of the uterus, a shallow latch, a logistical challenge: how to get a small boy whose world had been turned upside down ready for school on time while also looking after a newborn who wanted to be held round the clock?
*
I know I shouldn’t but I can’t help it: late at night, feeding my daughter, I scroll Instagram, letting the glow of other people’s lives illuminate my own in the dark of our cramped bedroom. The algorithm seems to think that I am particularly interested in watching women with lots of children – four, five, six, seven, eight – doing things while also looking after these children: moisturising their face, putting on makeup, working out, getting dressed, cooking healthy breakfasts for everyone. Having two children has been the work, for me, of over a decade, of thousands of pounds and invasive investigations and absolutely shitloads of hormones, as well as innumerable hours of therapy, and now that I’m doing it, looking after two children, the exhaustion – physical and mental – is so all-encompassing I cannot even contemplate what it takes to have four, five, six, seven, eight. And yet I think often of what Lucy Jones writes in Matrescence about the birth of her first child, ‘how close to death I had felt’, the extremity of it, and find I can, in fact, begin to understand the compulsion to have more. As I move further and further away from the moment of my daughter’s beginning, the desire to touch the void again, to feel the thinness of the veil between here and now, in and out, life and death, becomes understandable. It’s not that I want to do it all over again, it’s that a part of me wants to find that moment again, interrogate it further, inhabit it, or let it inhabit me: yes, that compulsion I do understand.
*
The moment of her birth itself, then, unremarkable except for its remarkable significance: they pulled her out, she cried, a doctor looked her over, she was weighed. Small, but we knew she would be. She looked, the first time I glimpsed her, so like my son at his birth that it took my breath away, but then just as suddenly she was her. After a few minutes she was placed on my chest, wearing a small woollen hat that someone – not us – had chosen for the occasion. There she remained for the rest of the operation, while the surgeons, the most nerve-wracking part of their work over, chatted about who was going on holiday where while they put me back together, more or less. It was a miracle, an obliteration, a homecoming. Another humdrum Friday night in the Women’s Centre. A birth.
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What I’m reading
It’s not very original, but I’ve been enjoying immersing myself in writing about motherhood: Matrescence by Lucy Jones, Mother Animal by Helen Jukes and Cry When the Baby Cries by Becky Barnicoat have all recently kept me company, largely while sitting on the couch under a sleeping baby. (I particularly appreciated reading accounts of C-section births in Jukes’ and Barnicoat’s books which more closely resembled my own recent experience than many I’ve encountered.)
A perk of owning a bookshop is sometimes getting to read quite exciting books before they come out, and I’ve also been sinking with great joy into Robert Macfarlane’s forthcoming Is a River Alive?. I’ve been building my friendship with the river in Oxford over the course of many years; we’ve been uneasy companions sometimes but there’s no question in my mind – in spite of the best efforts of the water companies in recent years – that the resounding answer to Macfarlane’s question is yes.
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My memoir Adrift: Fieldnotes from Almost-Motherhood is out now. You can buy it from your favourite independent bookshop, or via any of the links below: