Getting a papsmear the other day, I started thinking how much medicine involves deliberately not seeing. Not in the way we’re talking about tonight, seeing as a spiritual communion. When a doctor cranks open your hoohaa with that icy, icy duck bill, they aren’t really looking at your vagina. They are observing it—objectively! Impersonally! It is a kind of seeing that is the opposite of communion.
That’s why they leave the room while you get into the paper gown. Because watching you undress would be too real. You have to magically become naked so that the seeing that follows can also be made non-real. Less embarrassing for everybody. Let all that happens beneath the paper gown stay beneath the paper gown!
But sometimes it’s more complicated. With my first baby, I had to be induced, and even though I wanted a natural birth, after twelve hours I gave in and got the epidural, and twelve hours after that, I got the c-section.
If you’ve never been in labor before, it has a heightened quality not unlike being on shrooms. Everything everyone says drips with portent. The walls and patterns on the floor communicate. You are wide open and raw and it makes the professional distance of the medical establishment seem deeply weird.
For instance, when a medical team has been badgering you to have a c-section for thirty minutes, the first thing they do when you finally give in is shave all your pubic hair off. Isn’t that strange! They use buzzing clippers, and they go right to town like they were dying to do it the whole time. Your doctor drinks a Starbucks while he watches you get shaved.
When you are in the OR, you don’t know where your husband is. You haven’t slept or eaten in 24 hours now. “Please, can you describe to me what’s going to happen? I’m scared,” you say to the anesthesiologist. You have to repeat yourself several times before he notices you are talking. He slaps you on the face in a joking way and says, “Don’t worry, you won’t feel a thing.”
When your husband arrives, he doesn’t know what to say, so he holds your hand. When they start to cut, you hear a man’s voice say, “Easy, Jesus, you’re not trying to take out her appendix!” Is a student cutting you open? When they pull the baby out, it lifts your hips off the table. It is very painful, even though you have anesthesia, though when you scream, the anesthesiologist says, “That’s not pain, that’s pressure.” Once your baby is out, they take him away immediately to be bathed and put in that little cap. Your husband goes with them. You can hear them all talking and taking pictures. Later they come over and take pictures of the baby next to your head. You want very badly to die. You hope you will begin bleeding and die.
By the time you get to your room, you cannot stand to look at anyone in the face. Your husband is elated, the baby is safe, you are safe. He has no idea why you are upset. The nurse says you are not allowed to hold the baby for another half hour. You lay in the bed crying and refusing to speak to anyone. The nurse says, “This will make you feel better,” and injects painkillers into your IV. It does make you feel better, and you will hate her for that for years.
It’s much easier to tell the story like it happened to you. When I tell it, it sounds so whiny and impotent-- I can’t even get all the way through it. Nothing that happened to me was wrong. None of it was malpractice. It was all exactly the way it was designed to be.
I fell in love with my baby the moment he was in my arms. But I had a hard time processing that birth. I kept thinking weird things about my doctor. I would think, “His hands were in my body. His hands were inside me.” I felt like my organs had been tainted by his touch and I worried they were rotting inside me. In the most sacred moment of my life, nothing had been sacred. Not the birth of my child, and certainly not my body. I felt like my doctor had turned me into meat by treating me like meat.
This is supposed to be about a time when I felt seen. But I couldn’t tell you that story without this story. Without this story, the way I was seen will seem so small. But it was everything.
The time in my life where I felt most seen was during the birth of my second child. Symmetry! At the time, we were living in the suburbs of Washington DC, and the hospital I’d chosen was a solid hour away, a midwifery practice that would let me try for a VBAC.
My water broke the day before my due date. I was afraid I wasn’t going to go into labor, but I did. I stayed home, I baked cookies, gave my son and husband a haircut, went for a walk, ate a burrito, watched TV until past dark. By 10pm my contractions were two minutes apart and getting strong enough that I worried we wouldn’t get there in time.
Being driven in a car while in active labor is uniquely terrible. It feels like you are sitting on the baby’s head. There was no traffic, the empty streets were dark and beautiful. We got to the hospital. We got to the right floor. They showed us into a room. Holding it together enough to walk and interact with people was crazy! But I did it and I didn’t even scream or yell at anybody.
The midwife on call came in, and right away told the nurse to hold off. “You’re not in active labor yet,” she told me. “You’re in very early labor if that. I’m trying to decide if we should admit you at all.”
She had not examined me yet, so I didn’t know whether to believe her or not, but I’m sure my face fell because inside I was thinking: oh, here it is again. Protocol. The hospital would not be a place that would help me, it would be an obstacle I would need to work around. The thought of the hour car ride home-- I was already wondering if we could hang out in the parking lot for a couple hours. But I was attempting to hide my contractions from these people, I doubt my fleeting expression of displeasure or frustration was obvious.
But this midwife saw something in my face, and she took a giant step so she was right in front of me, put her hands on my shoulders, bent down, she was tall, so that her face was close to me, and she said, “Don’t go away, don’t go away inside! I’m sorry. You did perfect. You came at the perfect time. We’re not gonna kick you out. This is a place you are safe. Everyone is here to help you.” And then she hugged me tight and long. And I thought: this woman is little weird. But I also believed that I was safe there and that she was telling me the truth.
As it happened, I was 7 centimeters and I had my son three hours later.
What can I tell you about those three hours? They let us turn off the overheads and use twinkle lights we’d brought, so it felt like a college dorm. My husband and I slow danced. I kept telling everyone I felt high. I spent most of my time in the shower, and the nurse had to kneel in front of my naked body holding the sensors to my belly because the water made them short out. She knelt in that shower with me for an hour and a half. I’m not kidding. When I went through transition I started throwing up, puking that whole Chipotle burrito into a pink bin over her head. “You’re so nice,” I kept telling her, crying, “you’re so nice for being this nice to me.”
“This is my job,” she said.
“But it’s not!” I cried, “it’s not, that’s the thing.”
“This,” the nurse said, “is what women do for each other.”
The midwife came back and ordered me out of the shower so she could check me. I was fully dilated, but she didn’t tell me to push. Instead, she told them to get me a coke to drink. And then we kind of hung out. I started making weird noises. “Let the energy go down instead of out your mouth,” the midwife said. I did, and suddenly I was bearing down. If you don’t already know, having a baby is like taking a giant shit. Identical. The moment I started bearing down, the midwife let out a triumphant whoop, “Now that is mother led pushing, everybody.”
Five or six pushes and he was out. They plopped his wet, squirmy, red body on my belly. That feeling, that moment, it’s like being on the moon. It is the highest holy that I know of.
I had torn a little on my clitoral hood and she asked if she could teach a male student on me. I said sure. It was interesting listening to how she explained it, what to leave alone and what to stitch. She joked about my vagina never looking the same, and I asked, a little desperate, if it would still work. “You mean peeing?” she asked. “No, I mean coming!” She promised it would, and we all laughed. After that, we ate the cookies I made, and I nursed the baby. Everyone talked to me and looked in my face. I stayed a person the entire time.
Everyone could see me every second.
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Rufi Thorpe received her MFA from the University of Virginia in 2009. She is the author of Dear Fang, with Love and The Girls from Corona del Mar, which was long listed for the 2014 International Dylan Thomas Prize and for the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. Her third novel, The Knockout Queen, is forthcoming from Knopf in April 2020. A native of California, she currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and sons.
Alongside Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, Siel Ju, & Nithya Raman, Rufi shared this essay at our last event at The Wing in Los Angeles, CA.