Today is a very special day. It is my
son's 48th birthday, for me, it is my belief that the 40th
decade of the human lifespan is the beginning of adulthood. It seems
to me it is the beginning of understanding that people you are
surrounded by grow old and die That your own body is “growing”
old with little twinges of pain occur unexpectedly with certain
movements, where you remember doing cartwheels with longing, but
can't image feeling that light and agile. For my son, it might be
remembering when you wanted to show your mom your bicycle trick,
where you stood with one foot on the bicycle seat and rode atop it
with you hands in the air for a short seconds before going back to
normal bicycle riding. I remember not being the proper mother, not
shouting angrily at you “never do that again!' No I was a child
again at that moment myself and laughed and clapped in delight at so
magical a feat.
I finally woke up this morning with
forgiveness towards his father for stealing my son from me. I
remember so often the day of labor. Back in those days, nothing was
really said about birth itself except horror stories, each mother
vying for a more horrible, long and difficult labor. So as my belly
expanded such that I could not take a breath of air because there was
not enough room for my lungs to fill with a full breath of air where
my stomach continued to bloat, but with relief, though breathless, I
had finally stopped at 7 months the daily morning vomiting, whether I
ate in the morning or not and after I tried all the suggestions
without success, like eating saltine crackers. I enjoyed the hiccups
I could feel my fetus having almost daily or hourly. I also remember
a terrific lioness feeling of protecting you. Sitting in a cafeteria
setting as I was taking courses at college, someone rudely slide back
their chair pinching me between the back of his chair and a arm I had
on the back of another chair. It hurt tremendously, but the feeling
I had was not hurt for myself but the possibility of my fetus not
having a pleasant environment, but one of perhaps pain from my pain.
I was furious and began to be rather awed at my maternal feeling
starting so soon. Recent research has showed that children born of
protected, happy mothers, are born with normal psyche and development
even if their fathers are abusive, whereas abused mothers and
children are more likely to be the sociopaths with serial murdering.
But innocent of everything about
mothering, fathering, pregnancy, and birth, I went to a medical
doctor, not a specialist, as we were poor and he was someone somebody
had recommended. I had the regular visits, but nothing about
anything was never discussed. I just floated it seemed through 9
months of life continuing my pattern of drinking beer in the evenings
since, at that time, there was nothing about alcohol not advised
during pregnancy. We lived in a very low rent apartment duplex above
a garage for the apartment house beside it. It was unbearably hot in
the city and I spent sweating afternoons longingly staring at the
unused swimming pool for the house next door longing for just 15
minutes in it. Our neighbors were a young couple like us and she was
pregnant two, just slightly ahead of me and had labor first. She
didn't talk to me anything about labor just the baby. One evening
around 8 pm, I felt little twinges like the very rare, occasional
menstrual cramps I had felt seemingly eons ago. I asked her about it
and she assured me it was the beginning of labor that I had better
get ready for the hospital. My husband worked the night shift and I
had kept the car that day to take the items that had been given to me
for the baby to the laundromat up the street, but I had unaccountably
just spent the day sleeping as I felt so tired all day. I started
getting cramping, closer together and more intense. I was then
afraid to drive by myself so I knocked on the door of one of the
neighbors in another apartment named Fletcher. Fletcher was watching
a Japanese horror film and said, wait until this movie is over, I
want to see the end of it. I shouted at him that I could not wait,
that we had to go now. He reluctantly got in the car and when he
went to tell my husband, Kurt, I was in labor, Kurt told him it was
a pretty good joke and started back to unload another of Braniff's
jets, but Fletcher finally convinced him he was not kidding. From
that point all I remember is laughing hysterically because I was
drunk with oxygen since the baby seemed to have let go of my lungs.
I had had nothing alcoholic to drink that day.
When we got to the hospital, a Catholic
one where my family doctor practiced, Kurt busied with the intake
desk and I was whisked to a room and told to get into bed where I was
given an enema for some reason and told to get up only to go to the
bathroom right beside the room. I started the runs and found that
when I was standing or sitting the labor pain intensity diminished
and when I lay down, it increased. I also had that weird mother
lioness feeling—that I knew I could do this and I could do it as my
instincts told me to do. Nurse came back, my name for her is Nurse
Ratchett because I don't remember her name. She told me not to be
pacing back and forth in the room as I was to but to “get in there
and don't get out of it.” I explained to her that the pain
diminished and I knew I should be walking and I laid down, but as
soon as she left I started my pacing again. Apparently Nurse
Ratchett had approved my husband to visit me and he asked why I was
not in bed and I explained to him that the pain diminished with
pacing. I told him that I was having a baby with such a stupid woman
around and I was leaving the hospital. Kurt panicked and ran to the
nurse telling me that she was leaving and he knew me well enough that
I would do it. Nurse Ratchett told him not to worry. She came back
and gave me a shot of something I later learned was sodium pentathol.
I was suddenly so whoozy that I had to lie down and was in some sort
of dream world. From that point I can remember only three things. I
remember seeing my doctor in a uniform that looked ridiculous and
thinking I thought that thought where later I understood that I was
actually speaking it. I remember a bead of sweat running down my
forehead and feeling like I had been pushing a 200-pound rock up a
hill and believing I would be totally unable to strain as I seem to
be forced to do to expel the monstrously sized infant from my body I
had no more resources, but once again, the pain would start and I
would push with the exhausted body and the exhausted muscles. The
bead of sweat felt like a gush that would blind and drown me. I
remember the doctor saying why is she trying to break loose of my
hands strapped to the bed rails with a nurse replying, as she gently
wiped my forehead, that she just wanted to wipe her forehead. Then I
experienced what my doctor assured me later I had not felt or
remembered any pain. I remember when my belly suddenly had to expel
a large watermelon from between my legs and it felt like the
watermelon, suddenly a bomb, exploded in my vagina and I was wounded
forever. My months afterwards I would awaken in terror at that
moment of time. Later talking with a mother who had done both a
standard drugged hospital birth and a birth without any pain
medication, said that the natural birth without medication was less
painful than the medicated one. The natural birth is much longer as
nature allows the gradual opening of the birth canal and the pushing
to expel the infant to be in sync whereas the medication seemed to
force the contractions beyond the opening of the birth canal. So the
medication is just for the doctor's convenience to get it over and on
to the next victim, not to mention the pharmaceutical company's
wanting their cut of the escalating human population and on to the
higher priced comforts they allege to offer, and, in my case, getting
back to buying beer as quickly as possible.
My son's head circumference was, as I
remember, 18 inches in circumference and he weighed 8 lb 2 ½ ounces.
My head circumference at my current age is 21 inches in
circumference. After the baby I expelled and did not see was
whisked away, I awakened hours later seemingly having passed out
after the birthing, I was in a room where my roommate told me that I
could see my baby first thing in the morning around 9 a.m. The time
came and went and the day went by. Kurt visited, telling me the baby
was doing fine and had brown eyes. On the third day, my baby at long
last was brought to me and, by then, all I wanted to do was sleep,
but I tried to nurse him as I wanted to, but was unsuccessful.
Thinking what I had experienced was a normal and written in concrete,
way to birth a child, I never wanted to go through any of it ever
again and so I promptly asked the doctor to write a prescription for
birth control pills when he came to check me for discharge.
The breastfeeding was unsuccessful with
me feeding some kind of artificial formula with my baby screaming for
4 hours every midday as if in horrible pain and at the nighttime
feeding. I remember a day of total despair, sitting on a curb in
front of the apartment, hearing that horrible screaming into the
fifth hour, and screamed myself as long and loud as I could, thinking
my baby's screaming would cover my screaming. But it didn't, before
long a city policeman cruised up and stopped, asking me from his car
if I had heard a woman scream as someone had called in a scream. I
told him I hadn't heard anything. As he drove away I laughed so hard
it hurt, realizing that at least I still had a sense of humor.
Suddenly, here I was an unsuccessful
mother and I had lost my husband. The only thing of interest to my
husband other than having his first beer was holding the baby, who
never screamed when he was around, who smiled and gushed with delight
when his dad held him. I felt like I only existed for the two of
them was to change the baby's diapers (and whose father never once
changed one immediately handing him off to me whenever necessary).
One day the baby slept quietly through the afternoon without
screaming and I was so relieved I did not check on him. When I went
in I found that instead of screaming for me to change his diaper, he
had excavated some well-formed feces and had begun finger painting
his crib, one of those old-fashioned kind with lots of crevices and
scrolling whirls on each rib of the crib. That afternoon I spent
crying as I put him in his playpen and began scrubbing.
I don't remember his first steps, but I
do remember his first words as I had begun to believe he was retarded
so delayed was his development milestone except for me seeing him in
the nursery with his head lifted and looking around. The milestones I
got from my one child-rearing book by Dr. Spock. His first word
other than “dadda” was a sentence when we were waiting to pick up
my husband from work. At three years of age , Eric was waiting and
standing in the passenger's seat beside along with me in the MG with
the top down. As we waited, he said, “Look, airplane flying.”
My retarded son was suddenly a genius and I was very glad and happy.
I just recently I learned what happened
to me and my son both nutritionally and emotionally. When pregnant,
I did read a book about pregnancy itself and the nutritional needs of
the mother. I knew that I needed calcium. My mother had told me
that she lost all her teeth due to “milk fever.” I have asked
lots of doctors what milk fever was and none of them knew. I now
know in the 19th century, milk fever during pregnancy was
the lack of enough calcium so the baby gets first call on all the
mother's calcium, including her teeth. So I was very concerned about
getting enough milk. When I became a medical transcriptionist, I
learned that the dreadful, furious crying of infancy, formerly known
as colic was now called gastroesophageal reflux disease. I had it in
my 40s and it was excruciatingly painful as the stomach acid refluxed
into your mouth stinging in excruciating pain as it did so. So I
forgave my son his colic after learning that it was my fault
since learning it was the artificial ingredients of the formula and
baby food jars that caused the acute indigestion and did, as mothers
through the ages have done, chewed up natural foods and given the
just chewed food to the infant there would have been no indigestion
and lots of nutrition if the foods I gave had no artifical
preservatives in them. I cured my own gastroesophageal reflux
disease by eliminating all foods with preservatives listed as an
ingredient because of learning that most digestion is done by
bacteria in the digestive system and, when we swallow a
preservative-laden food the preservative is still killing bacteria
throughout the digestive system and hence our digestive bacteria. If
I had breastfed him, or at least found a source of raw goat's milk,
the cure of many infants known throughout time, then we could have
enjoyed life instead of both of us, each in turn, dreading it. I
believe it was the birth control pills lthat dried up my milk
production and caused the acute soreness of my breasts such that I
wanted to scream when I put him to feeding.
I also learned that nature gave mothers
and infants a biological cocaine so to speak, a hormone that bound
them to each other in a tremendous peace and joy. This hormone
occurs at birth and for 3 hours afterwards in both mother and infant.
Since my infant was taken away and not returned to me, not even the
next morning, that window of bounding was lost forever This morning,
thinking of my son's birthday and what his birth meant in my life, I
suddenly understood in absolute understanding, though not proved in
fact, what must have occurred. My son was born in a Catholic
hospital, the faith most stuck in the image of God the Father and
thus the Father in the family as ruler par excellence. A Catholic
administration of a Catholic hospital would require presentation of
the just-born infant to the human father in the waiting room instead
of to the mother. The bounding for my son with its natural hormone
was for his father forever and lost to me forever. It is a tragedy
so acute in my life that it causes me to cry even now in my 68th
year and my son's 48th. I don't know if he misses a
maternal bonding, but I definitely and will forever miss a son's
bonding. I blamed Kurt for my son's indifference to me, interpreting
all the toys and clothes the father provided after our divorce,
compared to my simple feeding, preparing and washing, my doing
laundry and making the bed, etc. as the cause of it. Today I believe
the reality that the son presented to the father in a Catholic
hospital just after birth reinforced the patriarchal Catholic Church
and relegated mothers permanently to the only function of being a
servant to God the Father, the human father, and the human son. I
don't socialize with Catholic women, but the next one I meet with a
similar age and mother of a son born in a Catholic hospital, I am
going to ask.
This line of thinking leads me to
consider hindsight—the baine of human existence. If only I had
known—is it the flaw of the individual's thinking or research or
eduction or is it God's joke for giving us so-called consciousness
and thus the though that says, “I wish I had....” I abhor the
patriarchal god in the churches of the 21st and their
tomes of God's words, whatever they label themselves, Christian,
Muslim, etc.; but I know there is an essential mystery of life and
the environment we call the earth that is so delightful, mysterious,
wonderful in every sense, interconnected, intelligent, breathtaking,
i.e., all those things that the people pontificating religions
ascribe to God—so where does that leave me? When I was acutely ill
from my second occurrence of tuberculosis and given a 50% chance of
recovery with the new treatments not yet tested, the tuberculosis the
nutrition deficiency that occurs with the final stages of alcoholism,
I did not want to die—I fought with every fiber of my body's
natural defenses along with three experimental antibiotic regimens,
to live so that I could meet the man someday my son would become.
Listening to my instincts during this difficult process of finding my
health and getting the 50% chance of living after my 1 in 10 chance
of recovery from alcoholism, I am now very healthy at 68 with normal
weight and energy, just going blind from cataracts and glaucoma. I
can still hear the birdsong and, with my current prescription of
glasses, see the incredible beauty of sunset.
