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May 08, 2005

the story of moo

I was driving to work on a gloriously sunny morning in early spring in northern California, in the far left lane of the 101, when I suddenly broke out into a sweat and everything around me--including all the other traffic--seemed to shudder. My hands on the steering wheel looked very far away and tiny. The edges of my vision went dim. I had enough presence of mind to realize that I was probably about to pass out, and I managed to get my car across the lanes of traffic to the shoulder, where I sat for a while until I felt normal again. What was that all about?

When I was certain that I could drive I continued on my way to work, continued on with my life, ignoring all the (other) obvious signs: the constant nausea, tender breasts, cramps but no blood. The only thing I did pay attention to was the crying. I cried all the time, and I mean all the time. Weeks went by, I kept on crying. The Husband (not The Husband yet) knew what was up after a while, though. "You're pregnant," he pronounced, and then every day when I got home from work he'd say "get your period yet?" and I'd reply, lovingly, "fuck you." And then I'd cry some more.

Finally, on Mother's Day 1990, I broke down and let him buy me a pregnancy test. Wait five minutes for a response, the instructions said, but it took about five seconds for the white stick to turn a lovely blue. I stalked to the bed. "What does that look like?" I said to The Husband. "It looks like you're having a baby," he replied, and smiled.

Having a baby? No. No. No. No. No. It wasn't that I did not want to have a baby, it was that with all my heart and soul and every fiber of my being I did not want to have a baby. Ever. Ever. I didn't want to get married again. I didn't want to be anybody's mother. I couldn't be. I wasn't up to the task. No.

I went to an obstetrician, hoping he'd laugh me out of his office. "You're about eight weeks," he told me instead, and had me set up a series of appointments. Panic set in. I prayed for a miscarriage, prayed for the strength to get an abortion. Neither occurred. The weeks went by. I was going to have a baby. The Husband and I got married in Tahoe, in the very small window of the day when I didn't want to vomit on something, and then he really was The Husband.

"Gosh," somebody at work said to me, "most pregnant women have this ... kind of glow ... but you don't have that." Right. I hated feeling sick all the time; hated not being able to sleep on my stomach; hated The Husband, who had wanted this all along; hated that at 34 I still wasn't ready to stop being selfish.

I had amniocentesis and found out I that the baby was a boy. The months went by. I just pretended that he was never going to arrive, even when I went into labor three days after Christmas. While I lay on the table fighting every contraction as if my life depended on it a nurse asked me "would you like a mirror so you can see him being born?" Was she kidding?

Then Moo was out, and that awful driving pain lessened, and the nurse said "do you want to hold your baby?" "No," I snarled back, shivering, "I want a blanket and a shot." The nurse got a Look on her face but immediately I was given a warmed blanket and a needle in the butt of some blessed drug that made me woozy. The Husband--who had been on a flight from Los Angeles while I was delivering Moo--rushed in. "You didn't wait?" he said.

We took him home and I waited to love him. He cried a lot, nursed a lot, cried some more. I cried, too. I was exhausted and overwhelmed. The Gulf War began; the Husband went back to Los Angeles; and it was just me and Moo, together. When I wasn't in the room with him I couldn't even remember what he looked like. He was a baby; he could have been anybody. Anybody's baby.

And then when he was about two weeks old and I was nursing Moo one morning, I looked at him. And Moo looked back at me, and saw me. And oh, my God, I was somebody's mother. And as easy as that, I fell in love, right that second. I still remember the surprise of it, the letting go. I fell in love, right into it and head first. Fell in love and joined the human race.

Sometimes miracles do happen.

Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)