Joanna Kavenna - The Birth of Love

*

Breathe breathe breathe, she thought, and the gas made her dizzy. After a while she felt as if she was very drunk and in a room full of sober people, trying desperately to conceal her state.

*

‘How are you feeling now?’ said the midwife, and Brigid muttered something. ‘I feel as if I am at a cocktail party and I just want to take my clothes off,’ she said, or something like that. ‘Are you too hot, darling?’ said Patrick, not really understanding her, and Brigid said, ‘No no, not too hot. A bit cold, in a way.’

*

He went to get her some socks. She was still wearing her tracksuit and her T-shirt. Perhaps she was still wet from the rain, or was it sweat? She wasn’t sure. Then she remembered Patrick had changed her clothes. So she had sweated her clothes damp. ‘My son is called Calumn,’ she was saying to the midwife. ‘How lovely,’ said Gina.

‘You know, he’s just upstairs. It’s so strange he’s just upstairs. Asleep through all of this,’ and then the pain began again so she became disciplined, serious, her lips tight around the gas pipe, breathing in hard, trying to draw down gas.

*

Rock rock rock, breathe breathe breathe, and her head was swirling and the rocking was making her sick, or was it the gas, certainly she felt nauseous to a degree, and when Patrick came back with the socks she found she couldn’t bear him fiddling with her feet, though she had to submit because she was cold. ‘Breathe,’ he said to her, though that was all she could do anyway. She had her head down, because she was trying to turn the dial on the TENS machine and hold the gas pipe. She had them both constantly in view, she moved her eyes from one to the other, in case anything happened to them. Without both of them, she thought, she wouldn’t survive. She would be consumed by pain and fear. And beyond her, beyond her oversized form, rocking insanely and puffing and breathing, were two people who felt no pain at all, lived in a parallel world in which they could move freely and without agony.

*

‘Just keep breathing, darling,’ said Patrick. ‘You’re doing wonderfully well,’ and she thought how odd it was, that he felt this urge to keep talking, to fill in the silence of her pain. When he wasn’t talking to her he was aiming words at the midwife, making awkward small talk, as if they really were at a cocktail party and Brigid had been taken ill, and he was obliged to chat away to someone while he looked after her. Brigid wondered if it would help if she thought of herself as someone who had become drunk and disorderly, who had been confined to a room upstairs, with her husband and someone else looking after her. And that’s what they call visualisation, she thought — but she decided it wouldn’t help her much. Her imagination was not forceful enough to counter the insistent agony of her body. Always it was insisting. It was terrible how shrill her body was, how it sought to overwhelm her spirit, or mind, or whatever she possessed that wasn’t her body — and she wasn’t sure if there was much left; her body had taken everything over. Now she tried to think of Calumn, and wondered what this second child would be like. She pictured her son peacefully asleep, she knew precisely how he liked to sleep, curled on his side, one arm flung across the other, and he would be holding his elephant, and perhaps Patrick had given him a dummy, because although they were trying to wean him off such things they had failed entirely. She thought of him breathing in his soft way, making his sweet little moans, and all the time she was trying to birth this other, this child she had no sense of at all, no real love for yet. It was undergoing its own unknowable process, a relentless tightening of the walls around it, something which might seem as bewildering as labour on the outside, labour in the world. She hoped this baby wasn’t too uncomfortable, too frightened, in this dark womb with the walls tightening around it.

*

There was some more pain and then Brigid found she was lying on her back on the sofa, the midwife’s fingers deep inside her. ‘Dilation,’ the midwife was saying, and Brigid clung to the word while she endured a vicious contraction, one which tore at her, and she said ‘Oh no, oh no.’ She wanted to push the midwife away, but then she wanted to know how much longer she had to endure, so she submitted and tensed her muscles and tried not to cry out, and the midwife finished what she was doing and said that the labour was progressing. ‘You’re five centimetres dilated, so you’ve done very well.’ But Brigid wanted to cry. Only five centimetres! She wanted to rage at someone, though she couldn’t think who was responsible for her state. She had been too inert. She had been sitting down for hours. She should have moved around more, but then it hurt to move. ‘But that’s only halfway,’ she said to Gina.

‘Yes, well the later stages should go a bit faster than the earlier stages did. If we can just move things along then we’ll see some progress. You will have to climb the stairs, for example. And a few other tricks of the trade. But I’ll be here all the time and so will Patrick.’

‘I don’t want to climb the stairs.’

‘Just one at a time. If it will make things go faster,’ said the midwife.

‘Will it really make a difference?’

‘It certainly will. Come on you brave girl. Let’s get you climbing those stairs.’

*

She saw Patrick nodding reluctantly, and he put out his arms and lifted her from the chair.

*

Slowly, she gained the length of the hall. There were the stairs before her. This was a vile pain. Perhaps the worst she had ever known. She had been forced to relinquish the gas pipe, so now all she had was her TENS machine, the pads curling away from her sweaty skin. When she put a foot down, she felt as if a spike had been rammed up her leg. With each movement she demolished herself. And within her, she could hardly imagine what it was within her, what made the pain so horrible.

‘One step at a time. Just think you have one step to do, and focus on that single step,’ said Gina. Patrick was behind her, and Brigid knew he would be hating it all. She couldn’t see him, but she knew he would be anxious and wanting it to end. So she raised a foot, and placed it on the first step.

‘Good girl.’

Her belly was aflame, it felt as if she was burning inside. There was a fire in her belly, and she had been spiked and held in the flames. The spike had stopped her, she couldn’t lift her leg again, because the spike was holding her down. She stood with one foot on the step and found she couldn’t move the other. It was absurd, at one level she knew it was absurd that she couldn’t move, because she was so afraid of pain. It is only pain, she thought. A bodily sensation. Transient. It was not fatal. She would not die of pain, surely. Not in this century. Anyway the body was designed to endure it. For millions of years, perhaps, humans had given birth without gas, without epidurals; they had given birth screaming and writhing, but they had managed to do it. She had been making these arguments for months, to herself or Patrick, or anyone else who cared to discuss it. The body was meant to withstand the pain of childbirth. It was designed for the trial. So why was she standing there, unable to move? If she lifted her left foot she would run down the spike altogether and hang there, she thought. She would be hanging there as the midwife said, ‘Good girl.’

‘Come on Brigid, the faster you do it, the quicker it will all be over, and then you are all the closer to meeting your lovely baby,’ said the midwife.

So Brigid moved her left foot. That rearranged the pain, drove it further inside her. Trying to gain momentum, she forced herself onto the next step. Two steps, she thought. And there were — she counted them quickly — ten more. A sixth of the way. How she was trying to calibrate her agony, to make it scientific and thereby acceptable.