Zikora
All through the night, her mother sat near her but never touched her. In the airless hospital room, they were mostly silent. When screamed, a sudden sound as if torn from her, her mother said calmly in Igbo, “This is what labor is like.”
said, “No shit,”
but only in her mind, because even in her agony she dared not be disrespectful to her mother. She had prepared for pain, but this was not mere pain. It was something like pain and different from pain, spreading from her back to her thighs and then splitting her apart—vicious, crushing, refusing remorse. It felt like the Old Testament. A plague. Her body forsaken, a primitive storm raging at will. And yet they said she wasn’t progressing. Each time Dr. K examined her, an invasion of his gloved fingers, he announced, “You’re not progressing,”
as if it were her fault. What did “progressing”
mean anyway? How could she not be “progressing”
when this torment remained at its highest pitch, hour after hour, a saw wildly hacking away inside her, at her intestines and her spine, bent only on destruction.
Her vision blurred.
What is he talking about and what am I doing here? She wasn’t ready, of course she wasn’t ready, her due date was two weeks away.
Chia was not yet back from Bolzano and her New Mom nightshirt hadn’t arrived and her own mother had arrived only the day before.
A sense of monstrous unpreparedness overwhelmed her.
And now a new wave of pain slashing through her back, her stomach tossed about, her body confused as to which to do, vomit or poop.
If only a scrap of respite could come, to make this stop just for long enough to feel like herself again.
But waiting was the only cure.
Helpless, hapless waiting.
She had planned to say the Rosary between contractions, but her chaplet lay crumpled on the table.
Prayer, an unreachable fort.
She often said, “I can’t believe this,” about all kinds of trifles, but only now did those words feel truly apt.
Childbirth transcended imagination; if she were not now trapped in this, she could never have imagined the vulgar helplessness of birthing a child.
So little felt controllable and so much unbearable: this oppressive tiny room, the feel of cloth against her skin.
She yanked off her hospital gown, the flimsy thing with its effete dangling ropes that gaped open at the back, as if designed to humiliate.
Naked, she perched on the edge of the bed and retched.
The room’s lights glared; inflamed with impossibility.
She stood up and sat down, searching in vain for a comfortable position, and then she got on her hands and knees, her taut belly hanging in between.
The nurse was saying, “Breathe,” or something like that.
In her back, clenching cramps came and went like mean-spirited surprises.
She wanted to crawl out of her skin; she wanted to shed herself of it all.
If this was pain, then nothing she had experienced before in her life deserved to be called pain.
“I need it now!”
shouted. “I need the epidural now!”
Blood was rushing to her ears and her head, and the nurse’s lips were moving but she heard no words.
“I need it now!”
shouted again.
“Let’s adjust this, the external uterine monitor, this thing right here on your belly,”
the nurse said.
Thick false lashes sprouted from the nurse’s upper lids like black feathers, and they made her eyes look heavy-lidded, half-closed, as though she were not as alert as she should be for this job.
She moved the pad on ’s belly and tugged the belt that held it in place, her movements edged by impatience; she wanted to be done with this labor already.
bristled.
They were probably talking about her at the nurses’ station, how fussy and ill-tempered she was from the beginning, unable to remain still at triage.
Resentment rose like a tart taste in her throat, toward the nurses and toward all the women who soldiered through childbirth like unwounded warriors.
“I’d like to check you, just to be sure,”
the nurse said.
tensed at the thought of being poked and prodded again. The nurse’s nails must be sharp talons, to match those ridiculous lashes, and who was to say they wouldn’t pierce the gloves and injure her cervix or whatever they were checking?
“Bring your feet up and let your legs fall apart,”
the nurse said.
“What?”
“Bring your feet up and let your legs fall apart.”
Let your legs fall apart. How could legs fall apart? Imagine that! began to laugh. From somewhere outside herself, she heard the frenzied ring of her laughter. The nurse looked at her with the resigned expression of a person who had seen all the forms of madness that overtook birthing women lying on their backs with their bodies open to the world.
—
was tired, so tired, and she was floating in a void away from her body.
Fatigue came in surges, as if she could not be more tired before a new tiredness crashed in.
It felt humid and smothering, the fatigue, but it also promised respite if only she succumbed and let herself go.
It frightened her.
All the stories she knew of birthing gone wrong grew in sharp relief in her mind.
She could die.
She could die here, now, today, like Omelogor’s cousin Chinyere died in the labor ward of a hospital in Lagos while about to birth her third child.
The story was that Chinyere had been walking and breathing through contractions and chatting with the nurses, and then, mid-sentence, she had paused and collapsed and died.
had barely known her but had mourned her.
Now her heart was beating fast.
Dr. K said he would check on her in an hour.
She could be dead in an hour, and she didn’t trust these nurses to know what to do.
But she couldn’t die here, surely, not in America, in a good hospital near Washington, D.C., paid for by her good health insurance.
Chinyere had been in a good hospital—she remembered Chia saying all the rooms had huge flat-screen TVs—but no matter how good the hospital, everyone there was still breathing the mediocrity that was Nigerian air.
Still, she had read somewhere that maternal mortality was higher in America than anywhere else in the Western world—or that it was only higher for Black women in America, she was no longer sure.
She should have paid more attention.
Dying happened here too.
If she died in this hospital room, with its rolling table and picture of faded flowers on the wall, she would become just another tiny nameless dot in the data, one more of the forgotten multitudes of women dead from the blessing of pregnancy.
Dr. K came in, looking unbearably calm.
“Dr. K, I don’t feel right, something is wrong,”
she said, because something had to be wrong; childbirth could not be this malicious, this gratuitously cruel.
“Nothing is wrong, , it’s all normal.”
“I’m so tired.”
“Epidural is almost here. I know it’s uncomfortable, but what you feel is perfectly normal.”
He spoke as if she was being unreasonable and had to be patronized with a pacifying tone.
“You don’t know how it feels!”
she said. Before today, he was the nice Iranian doctor she had chosen for the compassion in his eyes. Today, he was an obtuse man sermonizing opaquely about an experience he would never have. “Uncomfortable,”
indeed; such a mild word, so ill-suited. And what was “normal,”
that Nature traded in superfluous pain? His intestines weren’t aflame; his body wasn’t caged by horrific waves that curled from back to front.
“Hold yourself together,”
her mother said in Igbo, close to a whisper, as if anybody else could understand. Jikota onwe gi. Those words so often hissed or muttered or said with a sigh, whenever did something in a public place where she couldn’t be slapped right away. Hold yourself together. It was a warning and a lament, saying don’t let things spill out, and if they have, then gather back what you have revealed. Weakness and need, but especially need; her mother despised her showing any kind of need, no matter how benign.
She was nine when her father’s second wife, Aunty Nwanneka, had her brother, Ugonna (your half-brother, her mother always said). To visit the baby, her mother put ’s hair in a tight extra-neat bun and asked her to wear a going-out dress, pink and full-skirted, as though for Sunday Mass. Aunty Nwanneka’s house smelled deliciously of frying food. The baby was asleep.
“Will you eat plantain and fish, Zikky?”
Aunty Nwanneka asked.
Before could respond, her mother said politely, “ has eaten, thank you.”
All the while, was breathing and dreaming plantain and fish; she had eaten lunch at home, but that was irrelevant. She could taste the air, and so heady was it, that she almost got up and walked to the kitchen in a trance. She did get up but it was to pee, and as she came back out to the passage she saw Aunty Nwanneka going to check on the baby, and she told Aunty Nwanneka that she was a little hungry, just a little. Aunty Nwanneka brought her a plate, glistening oval pieces of plantain fried golden yellow and a piece of fish, the tail no less, fried crisp.
“You know children,”
Aunty Nwanneka said to ’s mother, with a laugh.
faced the plate and ate without looking at her mother.
“We’re actually on our way to Nike Lake,”
her mother said abruptly, already standing while still had plantain pieces left on her plate. Outside, near the car, felt vertigo, a sensation of surprise rather than pain, as her mother’s palm forcefully landed on her cheek.
“Don’t disgrace me like that again,”
her mother said quietly. Now here she was, disgracing her mother by not facing labor like a wordless stoic. Part of her mother’s philosophy was to endure pain with pride, especially the kind of pain that belonged to women alone. When she had cramps as a teenager, her mother would say, “Bear it, that is what it means to be a woman,”
and it was years before she knew that other girls took Buscopan for period pain.
—
The anesthesiologist was full of false cheer, a freckle-faced man with a reddish mustache. He was talking too much, too fast. He reminded of her associate at work, Brad, also red-haired, chattering nonstop at meetings, his animation a shield for his incompetence.
“I need your help to get this done, okay? I need you to be very still, okay? It’ll only take a minute, okay?”
He did not inspire confidence at all. began to wonder if he was qualified and where he had trained. Didn’t women become paralyzed from epidurals poorly done?
“That’s your mom?”
he asked. “Hi, mom! I’d like you to help us out here, okay? Great. It helps to have family. If you can hold her so she doesn’t move…”
Her mother, still seated on the armchair, said, “She can manage.”
“Oh, okay,”
he said, flustered.
“Okay,”
the nurse repeated, and ’s fury flared, because it was an unnecessary comment, made only to taunt, this nurse saying “Okay”
with an eyebrows-raised look of false surprise.
Why make a face because her mother didn’t want to hold her?
Did other mothers sit still as a coffin with their faces perfectly powdered and their gold-framed glasses perched just so? So why be surprised?
Maybe the nurse was thinking her baby’s father should be here instead of her cold mother, which would show some nerve, because this nurse probably had three children with different absent men, unmannered children she screamed at while she stuck on those lashes in some cramped and overheated apartment in Baltimore. felt ugly and she felt angry, and she welcomed both like a bitter refuge. The middle of her head was pounding. How petty of childbirth to insist on all forms of pain, even headaches, common headaches. The anesthesiologist would not stop talking. “As still as you can, okay? Don’t flinch, okay?”
In stony silence, bent over and hugged the pillow, holding still through the cold smear of liquid and the brief prick of needle on her back. Tears filled her eyes; her anger began to curdle into a darkness close to grief. The medicine was spreading strangeness through her, a phantom sensation, as if half her body were cut off while the other half clung to the memory of that loss. It really should be Kwame here with her, sitting in that chair, finding a way to make a joke about “nutty.”
On an impulse, she reached for her cell phone and sent him a text: I’m in labor at East Memorial. She held on to her phone, checking it again and again, willing Kwame’s reply to appear on the screen, until Dr. K asked her to push.