THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2019 95Around two in the morning—nearly 24
hours after my water broke, following sev-
eral hours of sweet epidural haze—a nurse
I didn’t know came into the room. “What’s
going on?” she said. “Looks like you’re
having problems with the fetal heart rate.”
Her tone sounded accusatory. It was as if
I’d been withholding this information.
“What’s wrong with her heart rate?” I
said. I thought you and I had managed
to bring it up. But when I looked at the
monitor, it was just below 110—and dip-
ping further.
Another nurse came in. “Could you
use another pair of hands?” she asked,
and the first nurse said: “I could definitely
use another pair of hands.”
Why do you need so many hands? I
wanted to ask, but I didn’t want to distract
them from whatever their hands needed
to do. More nurses arrived. They told me
they needed a better measurement of
your heart rate. They stuck a wand inside
me. They had me roll onto one side, then
the other. They stuck the wand inside me
again. They asked me to get on all fours.
“We’re not finding it,” the first nurse
said, her voice more urgent, and I wanted
to ask: It’s not there? Or you can’t hear it? It
was the only question in the world.
Then my doctor was in the room. She
told me they were seeing what they didn’t
want to see. She said, “Your baby’s heart
rate is dropping and it’s not coming up.”
Everything happened very quickly
after that: 10 people in the room, 15, many
of them rolling me onto a gurney, my legs
still paralyzed from the epidural. Your
father grabbed my hand. A voice called
out, “It’s in the 60s!” And another, “It’s in
the 50s!” I knew they were talking about
your heart. Then they were pushing me
down the hallway on the gurney, running.
A nurse fit a surgical cap onto my doctor’s
head as she ran.
In the operating room, a man pinched
my abdomen and asked if I could feel
him pinching. I said I could. He seemed
annoyed. I said they should just go ahead
and cut me open anyway. He put some-
thing else in my IV and the next time he
pinched me I didn’t feel anything. My
doctor said I was going to feel pressure,
not pain. Everything would happen on
the other side of the blue curtain, where
the rest of my body was.
Your father sat on a stool beside the
operating table—worried, in a blue sur-
gical cap—and I watched his face like
a mirror, trying to read your fate. It was
only when I heard the doctor’s voice say,
“Hey there, cutie-pie” that I knew they
had opened me up and found you wait-
ing there, ready to be born.EVERY BIRTH STORY is the story
of two births: The child is born, and the
mother is born, too— constructed by the
story of how she brought her child into the
world, shaped by the birthing and then
again by the telling. My birth plan stayed
folded in my hospital duffel bag. It was the
story of a thing that never happened.
Instead, a team of doctors separated
my mind from my womb with a blue tarp.
The hands of another woman reached
in to pull you out. My body went from
collaborator to enemy. It was no longer
labor ing; it had failed. It needed to be cut
open. The process needed to be saved byother people, because I hadn’t managed
it myself. I’m not saying this is the truth
about C-sections. I’m saying this is the
truth of what I felt. I felt betrayed.
I’d always heard labor described in
terms of triumphant capacity, but giving
birth to you was a lesson in radical humil-
ity. My story was disrupted. My body
was disrupted. You arrived and showed
me that pain had never been my great-
est teacher. You arrived and showed me
I’d never been in control. Giving birth to
you didn’t matter because my body had
been in pain, or because it hadn’t been
in enough pain. It mattered because you
showed up glistening and bewildered and
perfect. You were still part of me. You
were beyond me.
If the work of starvation had been
as small and airless as a closet, then the
work of birth was as wide as the sky. It
expanded with all the unknowns of a life
that would happen in the body that my
body had made possible.
For much of the first hour after you
were born, I was still lying on the gurney,
asking if I could hold you. Your father
reminded me that I was still in surgery.
He was right. My abdomen was still gap-
ing open. My body was still shaking from
all the drugs they’d given me to numb the
things that had gone right, and then the
things that had gone wrong.
I didn’t know I would keep shaking
for hours. I knew only that your father
was pointing to one corner of the room,
where they were carrying a tiny bundle
to the incuba tor. One little leg stuck
out, impossi bly small. My whole body
vibrated with the need to hold you. I
kept saying: “Is she okay? Is she okay?”
The doctors’ hands were in my belly, re-
arranging my organs—pressure, not pain;
pressure, not pain—and then your wailing
filled the room. At your surging voice, I
heard my own crack open. “Oh my God.”
There you were: an arrival, a cry, the
beginning of another world.Leslie Jamison is the author of The Empa-
thy Exams and The Recovering: Intoxi-
cation and Its Aftermath. This essay will
appear in Make It Scream, Make It Burn.The Atlantic (ISSN 1072-7825), recognized as the same publication under The Atlantic Monthly or Atlantic Monthly (The), is published monthly except for a combined issue in January/ February
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Park Dr., Federalsburg, MD 21632 (or call 410-754-8219). Vol. 324, No. 3, September 2019. Copyright © 2019, by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.If the work of starvation had
been as small and airless
as a closet, then the work of
birth was as wide as the sky.
It expanded with all the
unknowns of a life that would
happen in the body that
my body had made possible.