Elisa Albert - After Birth

I don’t think it’s too look at me I’m so Hebrew-y.

What’s wrong with Hebrew-y? Bryan wants to know, but doesn’t look up from his machine.

She just needs us to sit with her. Process. Not so terrifically much to ask. Not so big a thing.

We’re supposed to have mothers , I say. We’re supposed to have sisters. But what if you don’t have a mother? What if you don’t have a sister?

Or a crappy mother , Mina mutters, massaging a huge, tender tit. Or a crappy sister .

All fixed , Will says, clomping back up the basement stairs with the guy from the superstore behind him.

JIM, says the embroidered name tag. Jim tells us his wife just had a baby, too. Our sixth , he says. Mina looks horrified and Jim says something about blessings of Jesus.

At which point I gather up my own little blessing, ’cause it’s getting late and you should always leave before people want you to.

Call me , I order her. I can be over whenever.

She nods solemnly.

The worst part of the Erica wedding fiasco was that she was marrying Steve , for the love of antiperspirant! Steve was the culmination of her greatest ambition. Not a bad guy but Steve is nothing to get excited about, unless it’s excited you don’t have to hang out with him too often. He talks a lot about the fancy cocktail bars he can get you into, the epic hotel upgrade he got last time in Vegas, a case of the “meat sweats” he got in some very special restaurant in Argentina once.

I was given a swatch of pale violet fabric, instructed to have a dress made. She was insanely giddy. She was out of her freaking mind.

And so we left the three-month-old to a bottle with a stranger, and I put on the hideous dress, still packing an extra thirty pounds. No metaphor required to describe how awful I looked. No, I’m not one of those women who’s figured out how to transcend vanity. Not one of those extraordinarily beautiful women who’ve figured out how to transcend vanity.

I could have opted out. I could have said no.

Have you ever been to a wedding? Then you’ve been to every wedding. The bridesmaids like Stages of a Woman’s Life dolls. The skinny, working-it single girl, trying hard to not despair her singleness. She looks “good.” She sprang for a spray tan. Her lotion has glitter in it. She tries more and more of the magazine tips as she gets older. She’s starting to go a little hard around the jaw, there’s some sun damage on her hands, and her feet crammed into those stilettos look like a couple of veiny shar-peis, but hey, she’s working it. She’ll have a few drinks too many. It will become clear she thinks she’s in a romantic comedy about bridesmaids. She will fuck one of the groomsmen. Which will it be?

Then there’s the pregnant one, smug as hell, all like, looooook, I’m pregnant! I’m so fulfilled and glowy! I’ve really done it! The single girl and the pregnant girl assiduously avoid each other unless it’s to simultaneously, speciously condescend. They feel so sorry for each other.

Then the one who’s just recently had a baby or two. [Curtsy.] She has that edgy, shell-shocked look, like she’s been ripped apart and put awkwardly back together, which, well, she has. But she’s still trying, in her sad, half-assed way, despite the fact that the working-it/fabulous phase of her life has ground to a definitive (oh-ho-ho so definitive) halt. She’ll never be the same again, she knows. Never, ever. She can barely look at the working-it single girl, who treats her — again with the condescension — like an elder . It’s precisely when the working-it single girl fails to compete with her that she knows for sure: she is gone. She feels invisible because, in fact, she is! Big animal stuffed into the same dumb dress — maybe it’s aqua, maybe it’s lime, maybe it’s mauve. The pregnant one doesn’t want much to do with her but eyes her carefully: she’ll certainly not let her self go that way.

And then there’s the one who’s got a couple of bigger kids, school age, pubescents maybe even. She’s folded, and it’s been a while since. To her these others are sort of cute, embroiled in their struggles. She’s done. She could be forty, she could be seventy, makes no difference at all. She is done with her changes. She digs in her heels, ticks off years as they roll on by. She does not sweat the philosophical shit. She does not retread her choices. Worst-case scenario, she is unaware of having made choices. It is what it is. It’s done. Nothing left but to rely on prescription drugs for this and that and the other until it’s all over for good.

There they are, pretty maids in a row, highlighting one another’s failure and ridiculousness, gathered around the lodestar puff-pastry bride. Ushering the bride into her next set of shitty options. Grinning plastic grins in the photos uploaded immediately.

We sat at one of those painfully boring couples tables, at which everyone already knew everyone and felt no need to introduce themselves or include us in their conversation, which was inaudible anyhow, given the amplification of the ten-piece band. Fuck you, by the way, couples at couples tables at weddings who don’t go out of your way to engage with that one couple who doesn’t know anyone.

We left early. My tits were on fire. I did not — ALAS! — get fucked up. And by the time we got back to the hotel my tits were like rocks, like explosive hot rocks, like they were about to rocket right off and explode in a tableau of electric blue and orange. I could feel my tits in my elbows. Walker was sleeping in the porta-crib, and I had to wake him to nurse him, which he tolerated, but then he would not go back to sleep. We sat grimly in a chair by a window until dawn.

Mina, warrior queen. She had her baby at Crispin and Jerry’s house . She actually had her baby.

There are hundreds of clips showing people actually giving birth to babies. You can watch. You’ve never seen anything so incredible. I watch them all the time. Each completely different. Individuals. No one was going to knife Mina Morris — she’s not the type.

The surgery movies are fewer in number and harder to watch. Creepy. Impersonal. I could probably perform one by now.

Why do you keep looking at that stuff? Paul asks. It only upsets you .

Maybe I like being upset .

Abdomen cleaned and shaved with an antiseptic solution. Catheter inserted. IV put into arm or hand. General or local anesthetic administered. Patient strapped to the table with arms outstretched, surgical drapes blocking view. Incision across the belly about one to two centimeters above the pre-pregnancy upper border of the bladder. Tissues above the uterus cut and separated. Cut made horizontally into the lower section of the uterus. Amniotic fluid suctioned. Baby pulled out.

Ari. I know it’s not what you wanted. But it’s over, and we can’t change it. So maybe it’s time to—

Babies born by C-section often suffer from neonatal respiratory distress often calling for treatment with oxygen therapy in a neonatal intensive care unit. Babies delivered by C-section often have low Apgar scores, usually because of breathing problems, along with lethargy as a result of the anesthesia administered to the mother. These sedatives can also make it hard to breastfeed.

I really wish I understood why you have to keep doing this .

Postpartum endomyometritis, infection of the uterine tissue, is twenty times more likely. The risk of blood clotting is five times greater. Urinary tract infections are common. These infections, usually a result of the urinary catheter, can be treated with antibiotics. Decreased or absent bowel function is also common, usually as a result of pre- and post-surgery narcotics. Women are four times more likely to die from surgical birth than from vaginal birth. Women who deliver surgically can develop scar tissue around the uterus, which can make it more difficult to achieve normal births in the future.