Elisa Albert - After Birth

When she wasn’t blackout drinking and sucking dick for a better time slot, she biked (sans helmet) all over the city. Her long hair would fly behind her, and you’d think: that girl is amazing. If only that girl had the first clue how amazing she is.

Everything in your life seems to be working out just swell , she said. Like I was the enemy. Like I hadn’t suffered. Slowly then suddenly I saw that she had only liked me because I was as miserable as she was.

She finally did move to LA and we didn’t speak for a year and then she moved back from LA and didn’t call me and then I saw her somewhere and she ignored me and so I ignored her.

Then there was nothing between us anymore.

No us.

Paul kept the mood light waiting around for labor to begin, waiting and waiting and waiting, with our giant old thesaurus. I was not simply huge. I was arched, bellied, biconvex, bloated, bold, bombous, bossed, bosselated, bossy, bowed, bulbiform, bulbous, clavated, corniform, cornute, gibbous, hemispheric, hummocky, in relief, lenticular, lentiform, maniform, nodular, odontoid, papulous, projecting, prominent, protuberant, raised, salient, tuberculous, tuberous, timorous.

He got out his guitar and made up a song. I took issue with bossy , and somewhere between bulbiform and odontoid the whole thing began to sound kind of obnoxious. You get sort of oversensitive toward the end.

My due date passed, and officially we were behind schedule. They ordered a sonogram, looked for problems, told us about possibilities of problems. Made concerned faces and laid out the unacceptable possibilities.

Standard practice.

You hear enough monitor, low-fluid, toxicity, big, proactive, posterior, count kicks, strip membranes , and you think, Jesus, okay, fuck, do whatever you have to do, whatever you people say , just make it okay.

Even though I had told that goddamn OB I wanted to “try” for a normal birth.

Sure , he’d said. Nothing bad was going to happen to me with this guy on duty. G ive it a try. I’m all for that. That’s great. So you’re a tough girl. Gonna muscle through.

I played along, practically batted my lashes.

I’d like to try.

Good for you. He turned to Paul. I like that. Tough cookie.

And fine: I had failed to watch the documentaries. I was superstitious. I didn’t want to jinx things. I was overwhelmed. I never got around to it.

( Lazy , my mother says. Always were. )

Folks. Here’s the husky OB, dude I had once, just one time, early on, imagined bending me over his desk and fucking me graduate school style. (Ode to the pregnant libido.)

It is upon us to get this show on the road. Sexy salt-and-pepper, scrubs, fluorescent rubber gardening clogs. Congenial enough, confidence like a birthright. Baby’s gettin’ pretty big. Looks pretty well cooked. Don’t want him getting much bigger. Lots can start to go wrong. We need to take this show on the road. You ready to meet your baby?

I mean, listen. Historically I got that you had to own your body, that they’d take it from you and tell you not to trouble your pretty little head about it. I’m supposedly on my way to a doctorate in women’s studies, for shit’s sake. I had some awareness that Barbara Ehrenreich had done early work on midwifery, the witch hunts, the medical industry’s treatment of women’s issues. I’d heard Ani DiFranco had given birth at home.

But there I was: huge, disoriented, impatient, scared. Bellied, biconvex, bloated. I handed myself over. Gave them my precious protuberance to deal with as they saw fit.

Yes, I’m ready to have this baby.

No more free lunches for the little one , joked an obese nurse in puppy scrubs while hooking me up to the Pitocin drip, which I’ve since learned is synthesized from cattle pituitary.

Induce: trigger, arouse, wheedle into, set in motion, cajole, encourage, prompt, prod, prevail, spur, generate, instigate, trigger, engender, foster, occasion.

Move by force.

I mean, we use motherfucker in all sorts of contexts. We’re pretty liberal nowadays in our collective use of the word motherfucker . But let’s corral it now, shall we? Reclaim it. If you are an obstetrician or obstetrical nurse and your C-section rate is over, say, 9 percent, you are henceforth an official motherfucker.

I pity you , Mina says, her eyes wet and sincere.

Well, that’s direct. It stings. Pity is so goddamn inescapable, infinitely sadder than scorn.

It’s clear that winter isn’t going anywhere. We can’t simply wait it out inside. We’re getting antsy and there’s supposedly some major storm coming tomorrow.

There’s this place.

I like places.

Road trip. The old mill in a tiny town called Victory. Used to be a textile mill. Opened in 1846. Closed in 1989, and sayonara, town. Goodbye, people. Hello, rot.

The co-op kids are talking about planning yet another benefit this summer to help pay for its conversion to an arts center. Which is so incredibly adorable of them, because from the looks of it Donald Trump would have to take out about seventeen mortgages to salvage this ruin.

They want to call it “the Downriver.”

Why?

Factories were usually built downriver with the town upriver. So the pollution from the factory wouldn’t poison everyone.

Well, eventually poison everyone.

Not for a couple generations, though.

So, no biggie.

This is not a cool town. No espresso, no hand-spun textiles, no vintage shops. This is not one of those secret hipster hideouts. Sweet enclaves where you can find well-dressed arty fuckers with kids named Zenith, Phoenix, Fidel; this is not one of those. This is a murdered corpse of a town. This is a decline-of-the-empire town.

The mill is expansive, room after abandoned room, sprawling. I used to go to the mall to get good and numb. Buy some underwear, eat something synthetic, drive home stupefied as an overfed farm animal on an indefinite course of antibiotics, forcibly separated from my young.

This is way better.

We wear the babies. Zev is asleep on her front and Walker’s asleep on my back. Postindustrial mountaineers, bundled against the cold. We’re on the third floor, probably forty feet from the ground. Ahead, the entire south wall of the place is gone and wood plank floor slopes off into thin air. I want to get closer, to peek over the edge, taste the fear, but Mina has my arm tight.

You’re supposed to take your baby to windowless baby gyms or basement baby music class or whatever the fuck. Not out into the actual grim, broken world, where glass might cut and the floor might collapse and there’s money to be made in fresh ugliness every day.

The whole world is new , she says. It’s an entirely new place. It’s the craziest. I don’t think I’ll ever be bored again.

A dried-out yellow wall calendar from 1989. Time officially stopped.

It’s balls cold.

We head back down the stairwell into a huge open space with floor-to-ceiling windows. Metal columns. Five hundred people probably worked in this room. She points out sheets of ice on the floor below a stretch of missing windows.

Women without sisters are at a marked disadvantage , I say.

And women with crappy sisters! she says.

It seems like the band might have been a kind of sisterhood.

She shrugs. For a little while. Early on. Then it wasn’t. Anyway, we really weren’t that good.

We make our way out, stepping over slippery frozen patches, scattered glass.