The Day My Body Spoke In Bombs
There were days my dreams of motherhood patiently waited in pews, overshadowed by my mother’s shortcomings. Thought it was inevitable to duplicate the recipes that made me.
I found myself mothering anyway.
Mothering, men who once used the little sense they had to trick me into thinking their mother had mothered them properly.
Mothering, my friends whose mothers didn’t have the knowledge they needed as adults.
Mothering, my cat, because boy, don’t loneliness make you think you need to take care of something.
Or it may just be the eldest daughter in me. Forced to mother myself and their children too.
I was home alone when I felt a bowling ball drop in between my legs—curled in a ball on the floor, unable to move. Phone too far to grab or call for Siri. Alexa was plugged up in a room too far to hear my cries. I welped on my bathroom floor. My brain was not connecting to what was actively happening to my body. I thought, “Is this how I die?” If I make it to a phone to call the ambulance, that’s a $500 bill, plus I’m naked, how embarrassing. Only I would be concerned with my embarrassment while my body had taken control.
The next morning, I kneeled on the side of my bed, rocking back and forth while my midwife talked on the other end. Asking me questions about the last time I had sex. It was a Thursday morning. This call made me late for my daily morning work call. I tell her, “Yes, on Monday.” Still uncomfortable talking about sex with an older Black woman as if sex wasn’t the reason I’d hired her. “Was it rough?” forcing out an uncomfortable laugh through cramping pain, I say, “No, I don’t think so.” Monday, I’d been hurting too. But no more than every other Monday for the last 21 weeks. Those questions made me say no more for the rest of the pregnancy if I thought it had caused this pain.
The next morning, the pain intensified. The only relief I felt was sitting wide-legged on my toilet. I shone my flashlight inside the toilet bowl to find light pink colored tissue. Panicked and alarmed, I took pictures and called my midwife again. She tells me she’s out of town for the next few weeks and to call the other midwife in the clinic. I’d traded my traditional care for what was promised to be more intentional care. Only for her to be unavailable in my time of need and push me onto another midwife whom I had no relation to. I hadn’t met her before, but I texted her and sent her photos of what I’d seen in the toilet. She tells me she can see me at 5 p.m. if I could come into the office, or I could go to the ER. I accepted the appointment at 5 and prayed that the pain would ease up. Less than 20 minutes later, I packed my work materials into a tote bag, found my car keys for a car I hadn’t driven in months, and drove myself to the ER.
The line was long at check-in. Security tuned into something on his phone and didn't hear me as I tried to get his attention. I’m standing in line in the same pain as I felt at home. Forcing myself to appear fine. I was mothering there and I hadn’t even known it. Smiling through the pain. Maintaining my composure so well, yet hoping someone would see beyond it. It took over 30 minutes for the people in front of me to get interpreters, looking for insurance information, and not having documentation before I got to the front of the line. All while sending Slack messages to my team, hoping to find coverage for my shift. The woman directly in front of me was escorted off in a wheelchair. She’d told the lady at the desk that she hadn’t felt her baby move today and needed to be seen. The same woman urgently called for them to bring me a wheelchair as well, and she took a double-take at my face as if she’d known me. Saw a glimpse of herself, perhaps. There wasn’t pity in her eyes. It felt more like she was trying to recall a memory her brain had tucked deep in the back of her mind.
“I have a 23-year-old female, intense cramping and bleeding. I need a wheelchair and for her to be taken to the labor and delivery floor.”
And that was it. The last moments before my world had come crashing down around me. The ringing in my ears felt I imagine feels similar to when bombs are dropped nearby.
I was 4cm dilated at 21 weeks pregnant.
This day continues slowly. A woman comes to take my information down and tells me that we are going to get my information into the system, get an IV placed, and then have a very real conversation. I respected her directness. I didn’t need gentle handling. I needed to remain in the mindset of being informed. The words of death and delivery never entered my brain together until that moment. I nodded in understanding.
Not understanding at all.
I make it through the night after doctors come in to tell me “Don’t be alarmed if you deliver and do not know”. The thought of my baby sitting in between my legs without me knowing was saddening to think about. I spent the night in Trendelenburg, peeing in bed pans with aching ribs. By midnight, I was officially 22 weeks by at least one of the estimated due dates I’d been given and now qualified to be transferred to another hospital if their Level IV NICU had a bedspace available.
My contractions stopped, but soon started up again as they drove me lowered into the ambulance. The EMT in training tried to take my mind off things. And I tried not to wince from the amount of pain I was in as I talked back to him about the history degree he was pursuing and how his family was all in medicine in some form, and how he and his girlfriend had just gotten a house out in the country. 40 minutes felt so much longer than it normally had, but that’s morning rush hour traffic and an ambulance that wasn’t in a rush at all.
Upon my arrival at the hospital, I’m swarmed by medical professionals. Examined before I’m sure they’ve seen my face. A woman with no smile or warmth removed her gloves and confirmed I was 4cm dilated.
The devastation hadn’t worn off. It hadn’t dismissed me from its presence. But I was hungry. My ribs hurt, and I still had more people to listen to telling me about my child's mortality rate.
That night, I advanced in dilation to 5-6 centimeters. The doctor pulled the white sheet back down over my knees and slid back on her rolling chair.
I’m so sorry, she whispers to me.
She whispers something to my nurse for the night. I let out the scariest shriek I’d heard myself make.
A shriek reserved for death.
A shriek that forced the plate of realization in my lap and told me to eat, bitch.
There was no consoling me. I was ashamed to be comforted by women who’d carried babies to term. I was embarrassed to be hurt the way I was in front of my future mother-in-law, who hadn’t known me past my name and relation to her son. The birth plan that didn’t include her presence had already been ripped up and blown in my face like birthday confetti, so why not add this to the plate? How could my body be doing such big things but feel so small? So undeserving of so much pain.
I stabilized enough to be taken off active labor the next morning.
It was no longer the weekend, so there was a full day of examination, interventionist, end-of-life planning, consent forms, and education.
I was stable for a full week.
Having declined all internal exams, we were unsure of my dilation, but I felt the little feet pitter-pattering on my butt. Every day my goal on the board was to keep my baby inside. I laughed at that thought. Like that hadn’t been my goal before all of this. What I should have written on the board so I wouldn’t have to keep reminding this overly white staff was to keep ME alive. Save me if there is a choice to be made. I always knew that was the choice. I’d said it before I got pregnant. I made sure my mom and fiancé knew. I felt guilty at that moment, telling my fiancé that I could make another baby. But I knew I wasn't prepared to die either.
The second week of my being admitted, I moved back and forth between the active labor side of labor and delivery and the antepartum side. Spending every other day hooked up to a magnesium drip for neuroprotection for the baby. Which meant my body met hell every other day and was fed nothing but blue raspberry Hershey popsicles.
3 hours shy of making it into my 24th week of pregnancy, viability, I delivered a spirited baby boy vaginally with no complications. I’m told he came out arms swinging and attempting to cry. Moments I didn’t get to see doubled over in my relief at the ending of my contractions. They swiftly gave him to the NICU team on standby. There was no bonding for us.
When you give birth to a child, you are simultaneously birthing a mother. Your breast swells with milk and awaits a latch. My body had been leaking milk since week 16, but still no baby to latch. You are hazily alert but ready to jump to baby needs, but there was a floor of women tending to my baby for needs I couldn’t fulfil.
The sadness that I felt those 2 weeks didn’t compare to the utter heartbreak of not being able to see my baby on his birthday. Not being allowed to hold him, hug him, kiss him. Only being able to look at him through a humidified, sanitized isolette.
The NICU would consume my entire world for 193 days.
Family never visited but claimed they loved us and cared. Friends falling off the face of the earth. Jobs not extending leave policies. So our days looked like bedside meetings with the cameras off and trying not to speak above a whisper, eating in the cafeteria 6.5 days out of the week, and rushing back upstairs to make it to care times.
These are the experiences no one but the nurses saw. People tend to think that a crisis beyond its inception date becomes contained. But our lives looked like ashes waiting to reignite at any moment. Our footsteps numbered as we entered into the same hall we had for weeks, hoping my passion, my advocacy, and my anger didn’t get me banned from my baby’s bedside. Tip-toeing around like we’re remembering photos in their place on the mantel.
This fire ripped through my home as we tried to carry on. But my fiancé’s eyes carried a heaviness I couldn’t lift. The time that we were supposed to be picking out rugs and cribs was replaced by stepping over boxes that carried the life we were attempting to build and bubbling resentment. People say that hardships bring you closer, but the reality is that sometimes it tears you to shreds and make you question if it is even worth repairing.
The NICU was like an elementary school hallway. Filled with pregnant women everywhere you turn. Just big and round. A visual I never got of myself. A reminder, it was a visual I never got of myself. Just a complication of the NICU, empathy can only extend so far when our eyes lock and we have a moment of shared guilt before my eyes drift away. Guilty for wishing they weren’t here, and guilty for being there.
Guilty became my primary emotion.
My body’s failure labeled every obstacle my baby faced.
“Complicated by prematurity”
Guilty that my baby had to fight every single day, much longer than my 2-week stay. Depression crept its way into my pocketbook. Infected every smile I had to offer. But some days it would give me a break. My increased dosage of Sertraline made it possible to feel nothing, and on my hardest days, that was the least it could do. Remind me to shower in between my disrupted sleep. Pumping every 2-3 hours, making enough milk to feed an entire NICU. What should’ve made me feel powerful and plentiful made me feel drained. The rage that comes from sitting hooked up to a pump when your body needs a latch to level out the oversupply. The rage that comes from declining additives to my milk and my baby getting a life-threatening infection that would complicate the rest of our stay. The rage of knowing how scenarios will play out and watching them go against what I had shared. Mother’s intuition is only held in respect by the women whose bodies hadn’t caught an infection and spontaneously delivered their child. Rage consumed me. It wrapped itself in every fiber of my being. Then tugged and labeled me undone.
This NICU creates a zombie of you. A monster left in place of what used to be. It makes you cut your idea and dreams of family short, not wanting to put anyone through that again. My body be hell for any man’s fruitful dreams, and that is now my cross to carry. I, be fertile land unplanted because I birth crossbreeds of flowers the world isn’t ready to discover. A sight to behold and a danger to hold would be how they describe it. Because I held life in my body and death in my hands. Because I’ve screamed into voids most people never meet.
And still—I return to myself.
Every morning, I mother the ashes.
Until something grows again.
Written By Alexis Lawson