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Co-discovered
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Save 25%1 st Time Buyers94 SEPTEMBER 2019 THE ATLANTIChumble servant, begging with its crud-
est, truest words: Please do this. I want this
more than I’ve ever wanted anything.
After we got to the hospital, I labored
through the early evening and into the
night. A monitor above my bed showed
two lines: my contractions, and your
heartbeat. My doctor started to get wor-
ried, because when the first line spiked,
the second plummeted. That wasn’t sup-
posed to be happening. Your heartbeat
always came back up, my doctor said. But
we needed to stop it from dropping. It was
supposed to stay between 160 and 110.
Don’t drop, I willed the graph. Don’t drop.
I watched the monitor vigilantly. It was as
if I believed I could keep your heart rate
above the danger line through sheer force
of will. Belief in willpower was another
familiar ghost, one of the gospels of my
hungry days.WHEN YOUR HEART RATE sta-
bilized, it felt like we were working
together— you and I—as if you’d heard me
calling out, as if you’d felt my stubborn
insistence that you be okay settle like a
sturdy floor beneath you. The contrac-
tions were an exploded version of the hot,
twisting cramps I’d felt during the nights
following my abortion. But really the pain
was exactly like everyone had described
it: impossible to describe. Someone had
told me to picture myself lying on a sandy
beach, that each contraction would be a
wave washing over me with pain, and in
between those waves my job was to soak
up as much warmth as I could from the
sun. But very little in that delivery room
felt like waves, or sand, or sun. I asked
for an epidural: a helicopter that would
spirit me away from the shore entirely.
Approximately ten thousand minutes
passed between my saying “I’d like an
epidural” and actually getting one.
Early in my pregnancy, your father
told me that his first wife had been deter-
mined to have a natural birth. “With
you,” he said, “I imagine it being more
like, Give me all the drugs you’ve got.” I wa s
indig nant, but couldn’t argue. The story of
the woman determined to have a natural
childbirth felt nobler than the story of the
woman who asked for all the drugs right
away, just as the story of the pregnant
woman felt nobler than the story of the
woman who starved herself. There was
something petty or selfish or cowardly
about insisting on too much control, about
denying the body its size or its discomfort.