Maggie Nelson: The Argonauts

They think my bladder is too full, that it’s in the way. I can’t stand up to pee anymore in the slow-dancing position. They put in a catheter. It stings. Then the doctor comes in, says he’d like to break the water, says it’s enormously full. OK but how. He brandishes what appears to be a bamboo back scratcher. OK. The waters are broken. It feels tremendously good. I am lying in a warm ocean.

Suddenly, the urge to push. Everyone is thrilled. Push, they say. They teach me. Hold it in, hold in the air, bear down wildly, don’t waste the end of the push. The midwife puts her hand in to see if I need help pushing. She says I am a good pusher and don’t need any help. I am happy I am a good pusher. I want to try.

On the fourth or so contraction, he starts to come. I don’t know for sure if it’s him, but I can feel the change. I push hard. One push turns into another kind of push — I feel it outside.

Commotion. I am gone but happy, something is happening. The doctor rushes in, I can see him throwing on his gear: a visor, an apron. He seems agitated but who cares. New lights come on, yellow, directed lights. People around me are moving quickly. My baby is being born.

Everyone is watching down there intently, in a kind of happy panic. Someone asks if I want to feel the baby’s head, and I don’t, I don’t know why. Then a minute later, I do. Here he comes. It feels big but I feel big enough.

Then suddenly they tell me to stop pushing. I don’t know why. Harry tells me that the doctor is stretching my perineum in circles around the baby’s head, trying to keep the skin from tearing. Hold, they say, don’t push, but “puff.” Puff puff puff.

Then they say I can push. I push. I feel him come out, all of him, all at once. I also feel the shit that had been bedeviling me all through pregnancy and labor come out too. My first feeling is that I could run a thousand miles, I feel amazing, total and complete relief, like everything that was wrong is now right.

And then, suddenly, Iggy. Here he comes onto me, rising. He is perfect, he is right. I notice he has my mouth, incredible. He is my gentle friend. He is on me, screaming.

Push again, they say a few moments later. You’ve got to be kidding — aren’t I done yet? But this one’s easy; the placenta has no bones. I had always imagined the placenta like a rare fifteen-ounce steak. Instead it’s utterly indecent and colossal — a bloody yellow sac filled with purple-black organs, a bag of whale hearts. Harry stretches its hood and photographs its insides, awed by this most mysterious and gory of apartments.

When his first son was born, Harry cried. Now he holds Iggy close, laughing sweetly into his little face. I look at the clock; it is 3:45 A.M.

I spent another 5 hours with her body, alone, with the light on. she was so incredibly beautiful. she looked 19. i took about a hundred pictures of her. i sat with her for a long long time holding her hand. i prepared a meal and ate in the other room and returned. i kept talking to her. i felt like i lived a hundred years, a lifetime with her silent, peaceful body. i turned off the AC unit. the ceiling fan above her was whipping air, holding the space of cycle, where her breath had been. i could’ve stayed another hundred years right there — kissing her and visiting with her. it would have been fine with me. important .

You don’t do labor , I was counseled several times before the baby came. Labor does you .

This sounded good — I like physical experiences that involve surrender. I didn’t know, however, very much about experiences that demand surrender — that run over you like a truck, with no safe word to stop it. I was ready to scream, but labor turned out to be the quietest experience of my life.

If all goes well, the baby will make it out alive, and so will you. Nonetheless, you will have touched death along the way. You will have realized that death will do you too, without fail and without mercy. It will do you even if you don’t believe it will do you, and it will do you in its own way. There’s never been a human that it didn’t. I guess I’m just waiting to die , your mother said, bemused and incredulous, the last time we saw her, her skin so thin in her borrowed bed.

People say women forget about the pain of labor, due to some kind of God-given amnesia that keeps the species reproducing. But that isn’t quite right — after all, what does it mean for pain to be “memorable”? You’re either in pain or you’re not. And it isn’t the pain that one forgets. It’s the touching death part.

As the baby might say to its mother, we might say to death: I forget you, but you remember me .

I wonder if I’ll recognize it, when I see it again.

We wanted a longer name for Iggy, but Ignatius seemed too Catholic, and other “Ign” names too-close cognates of undesirable concepts ( ignorant, ignoble ). Then one day I stumbled upon Igasho, a Native American name, meaning “he who wanders,” tribe unknown. That’s it, I instantly thought. To my surprise, you concurred. And so Iggy became Igasho.

The spectacle of two white Americans choosing a Native American name made me uneasy. But I remembered that, when we first met, you told me you were part Cherokee. This fact buoyed me along. When I mentioned this to you in the hospital, as we were filling out Iggy’s birth certificate, you looked at me like I was crazy. Part Cherokee?

A few hours later, a lactation consultant came to visit us. She talked to us for a long time, told us all about her family. She was a member of the Pima tribe from Arizona and had married into an African American family, raised her six kids in Watts. She nursed them all. One of her sons was named Eagle Feather, Eagle for short. Her mother had insisted on a ceremony at which Eagle learned to say his name in his tribal language, as Eagle was the white man’s language. I don’t know why I’m telling you guys so much about my family , she kept saying. You were probably passing, but I like to think she had an intuition that something about identity was loose and hot in our house, as, perhaps, it was in hers. At some point we told her about wanting to name Igasho Igasho. She listened, while giving me tips on how to nurse him. Let your boobs be the guide, not the clock , she said. Whenever they feel full, bam! you pull that baby onto your chest . On her way out, she turned and said, If anyone ever gives you trouble about your baby’s name, you tell them that a full tribe member, from Tucson and Watts, gave you her blessing .

Later I learn that Pima was the name given to the Othama tribe by the Spaniards. It is a corruption, or misunderstanding, of the phrase pi ‘añi mac or pi mac , meaning “I don’t know”—a phrase tribe members supposedly said often in response to the invading Europeans.

A few months after your mother died, we got all her papers in the mail. One afternoon I sat on a milk crate outside our storage shed to give them a cursory look, trying to decide where to file them. Amid the mountains of medical bills and threatening collections statements, a certain set of papers stood out — papers with smiley faces and flowery mastheads, exclamation points and carefully handwritten signatures. Your adoption paperwork.

When you were born, you were Wendy Malone. Perhaps you were Wendy Malone for but minutes, or hours. We don’t know. Your adoption had been arranged prior to your birth, and at three weeks old, you were delivered to your parents, whereupon you became Rebecca Priscilla Bard. Which is who you were for the next twenty-odd years. Becky. In college, you made a loose stab at renaming yourself Butch, though, hilariously, you didn’t really know what it meant. It had just been a nickname for you, used by your father. After you knew, you could tell who was gay by introducing yourself. “I’m Butch,” you’d say, swinging your long blond hair. “No you’re not,” those in the know would chuckle. Then, after dropping out of college and moving to San Francisco, in a Judy Chicago — style rebirth, you renamed yourself Harriet Dodge. After you had a child, you inched toward the state and made the change official: you placed an ad in the paper, filed the paperwork at the courthouse. (Until then, you’d kept your distance from “affairs of the state”: no one had your correct Social Security number until you were thirty-six; you’d never had a bank account.) Over time you became Harriet “Harry” Dodge: an attempt to conjure the feeling of and , or but . Now you are simply Harry, the Harriet a distasteful but sometimes indicative appendage.