Elisa Albert - After Birth

Surgery day , I point out, because I have trouble calling it birth. Anniversary of the great failure.

Ari. Don’t.

Can’t handle a party, none of that circus shit. Baby doesn’t know the difference. We give him his first taste of ice cream after dinner, sing the song, blow out a candle on his behalf, clap, kiss. We forget to take pictures. The joyful chocolate-faced baby, lone candle, flurry of my desperate attempts at good cheer.

Will comes over with a bottle of good scotch.

We made it, babe , Paul says, toasting. Who exactly does he imagine as having made it? And to where? All we’ve done is get used to it.

Clink . I’m surrounded by sweet males. There is that.

I was on happy pills in college, but they messed with my memory and made me fat, so I ditched them. Regularly Paul wonders whether it might be time to check back in with some meds again, maybe “talk to someone.” I bristle. I want to feel things about things. Sad that I don’t have a mother and that the one I had was a total bitch. Mad at my ball-sack OB for gutting me like a fucking fish for no good reason. Surprised and frustrated that even the best man on earth turns out not to cure loneliness. Bored to tears by my own in-depth examination of a subject I once adored. Worn down by the drudgery and isolation of caring for a tiny child.

He was born on a Tuesday after a long day of labor, but I did not “give” birth to him. He was not “given” birth. The great privilege.

Instead, the knife.

He was “late,” they said. Late, late for a purely invented date. So he got evicted, and everything went south, and me too complacent to challenge, too stupid to question. Why so stupid? Why so complacent?

They cut me in half, pulled the baby from my numb, gaping, cauterized center. Merciless hospital lights, curtain in front of my face. Effective disembodiment. Smell of burning flesh. Sewn back up again by a team of people I didn’t know, none of whom bothered to look me in the eye, not even one of them, not even once. Severed from hip to hip, iced, brutalized, catheterized, tethered to a bed, the tiny bird’s heartfelt shrieks as they carted him off somewhere hell itself.

I could barely move for days, let alone entertain rational thoughts about the soft, small bundle of bottomless need they placed in my arms later, when I awoke in the wrong kind of pain entirely.

We were sent home after the requisite, terrible bowel movement. In the shocking days that followed I saw the requisite awfulness: the baby harmed, the baby hurt, the baby suffering, the baby hurled to the ground, the baby’s head crushed against the wall, destroyed. Ongoing fever dream. In the grip of a kind of black magic for which I was entirely unprepared. Woke in a sweat from intermittent sleep to find him still — oh thank God, thank God — breathing.

He’s breathing okay he’s breathing okay he’s breathing okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. I wandered too near the white-hot root of things. Flummoxed. Wedded now to a possibility of loss so extreme I could barely breathe myself.

The baby books said nothing about this. Days became nights became days became nights. The baby books said nothing! I held him tight, held him close. Would not let go. The harm that could come to him! The consequence of just one misstep! Unthinkable. Unbearable. What now? What next?

I’ll take him, babe , Paul would say. Give him to me. Try and get some rest.

My infected incision oozed, tight phony grin of a sadistic monster. The necessary course of antibiotics.

I had died, was dead, only a ghost, not fully gone. Watch him breathe: is he breathing? Hold him close. Move slow, wrap yourself around him. Easy, easy. Don’t hurt him. Careful. Is he alive? The world so hideously perilous and the baby a raw egg, only of its kind.

Paul’s mother in Ohio called every third day.

How are you doing? I don’t want to bother you.

How am I. I don’t really know. I don’t know how people are supposed to do this. I don’t know how to do this .

New babies are a lot of work!

I need help , I told her. I can’t do this . My voice was low. She’s good people. Retired secretary, grew up on a farm, hardcore quilter, loves her some sitcoms.

Don’t be silly. Of course you can.

A woman who’s known her whole life how to grow fruits and vegetables, how to can them in the fall, how to sew a dress from a pattern, how to knit a sweater, how to care for the sick. A master of the womanly arts. She was my best bet. Surely she would hightail it over here immediately, show me how. Demonstrate so I might learn.

This child’s mother needs to come and get him now , I said. Someone needs to come and get him. Everything hurts. I’m so tired.

How’s the weather out there , she wondered. I’d better let you go .

A year later, now — happy birthday, moppet — and still I’m working hard to stand up straight, wearing pajamas all the time, avoiding the scar at all costs, suffering these surprise dunks in the rage tank. And occasionally people I barely know cheerfully wonder: are you going to have another?

We’re not to rest until the raccoon is gone. The ways in which he might destroy our lives and house are many: chew through electrical wiring, piss and shit all over the insides of walls, lead others in. He could die and rot. He could have rabies. He could terrorize the baby. He could have babies with rabies who will terrorize the baby.

Will brings over two enormous wire cage traps and sets them up on opposite walls of the attic. While he’s at it he replaces our screens with storms, eliminates the draft. He stays for couscous and mushrooms, makes the baby giggle, tells us a story about a critter problem in a house a mile downriver. Something about a family of animals in a sealed-off wall, months later a HAZMAT crew.

But nah, don’t worry , he says. He clamps Paul on the shoulder— ’night, bro —offers me a sweet, somber salute from the steps. Will’s a smart guy. Not smart as in advanced degree; smart as in knows how to be.

Another Mina sighting this morning on the way to day care. She was lumbering up Crisp and Jer’s front steps, keys in hand. Couldn’t bring myself to approach her, so instinctively I labeled her a total bitch. That’s my automatic thing with women. They’re guilty until proven innocent.

Her pregnancy is surprising. She’s well north of forty, and the Internet offers nothing on the subject of a man. The Internet offers precious little in general, which of course is the only way you can remotely respect anyone: when you don’t find too much bullshit self-generated virtual PR.

Four days a week, so that I might “work on my dissertation,” I hand the baby over to Nasreen at day care. He wails maaaa-maaaaa all desperate, reaches for me with little clutching hands. Pure awful. Full-body apocalypse.

He puts on good show for you , Nasreen says. She is Pakistani and has seven children, the oldest four of whom still live in Pakistan with her sister. He is fine. You leave, he is fine .

She shoos me out, rolls her eyes. These stupid mothers.

It’s like my heart’s being ripped out of my chest, and I’m supposed to walk away like no biggie. I hide on the other side of the door for two minutes until his wailing abates, then slink off like a criminal. Nausea, regret, darkness, light, relief, freedom, joy, ache, guilt, confusion, elation: all in equal measure, like your first orgasm.

When I am with my precious peanut, I itch to hand him over; when I hand him over, I itch to take him back and never let him go.

My dissertation is not happening.