Seven
pushed out a baby boy. He was wrinkled and silent, scaly-skinned, wet black curls plastered on his head. He came out with poop in his mouth, and the nurse tittered and said, “Not the best first meal,”
while somebody swiftly took him away to suction the meconium.
Now here he was, wrapped like a tidy sausage roll and placed on her chest.
He was warm and small, so very small.
She held him stiffly, suspended in a gap between her self and her feelings, and waiting to feel.
It was as if every emotion had been rubbed out of her, even the ability to have an emotion.
She could not separate this moment from her imagination of this moment—all the films and books about this scene, mother and child, mother meeting child, child in mother’s arms.
It was not transcendental.
She was not flooded by happy hormones.
She looked at her baby, knowing it was her baby, but in the space where her joy should be there was nothing.
A fog blanketed her, a kind of deadness.
She was shaking, her whole body divided in small fragments and each fragment vibrating, and the nurse said it was normal.
Somewhere in her consciousness, a mild triumph hovered, because it was over, finally it was over, and she had pushed out the baby.
So animalistic and violent—the push and pressure, the blood, the cranking and stretching of flesh and organ and bone.
After the final push, she thought that here in this delivery room we are briefly and brutishly reduced to the animals we truly are.
“Beautiful boy, beautiful boy,”
her mother said, smiling down at him. To her mother said, “Congratulations, nwa m, ”
congratulations, my child, and hugged her.
Her mother’s first touch.
eased the baby into her mother’s arms and reached for her phone.
There was no response from Kwame.
She sent another message: It’s a boy.
He would respond, now that he knew it was no longer about her but about another human being whose genes were partly his, a whole person, a new person who might look like him or laugh like him one day.
Or he might appear at the hospital, in the next hour, holding a balloon and flowers, limp flowers from the supermarket because he wouldn’t have had time to go to a florist.
“You’ve had a small tear,”
Dr. K said, needle in hand. Did it never end? This process had become an exaggeration of itself. Nature must not want humans to reproduce, otherwise birthing would be easy: babies would simply slip out, and mothers would remain unmarked and whole, merely blessed by having bestowed precious life. Why make so tortuous something that needn’t be? At the needle’s pierce of her tender raw skin, she screamed. “The epidural stopped working! Dr. K! How can the epidural stop working?”
Her mother glanced at her with eloquent eyes. Hold yourself together and stop making noise. Then her mother looked away and asked Dr. K a question. “Will it be possible to have his circumcision today?”
“Not until he has urinated,”
Dr. K said. “And I don’t do circumcisions. It’ll be done by another doctor.”
“When can we expect him to urinate?”
her mother asked.
cried out again at the needle, its unjust, unexpected pain. Tears filled her eyes. Of course Kwame was not coming. She knew he wasn’t coming even as she imagined him standing at the hospital-room door wearing jeans and the blue sneaker-like shoes he called his knockabouts. Her mother was asking about circumcision-consent forms. “Can we get them today?”
“Yes, of course,”
Dr. K said. “Almost done, this should heal nicely.”
They were having a mundane conversation while this man slid a needle and thread in and out of her flesh. She didn’t matter to them, just as she didn’t matter to Kwame; she was a threadbare wrung-out rag, a thing without feeling, easy to ignore and discard.
“I won’t circumcise him,” she said.
“Of course you will,”
her mother said.
“I said, I won’t circumcise him!”
She had never raised her voice to her mother in her life. Even Dr. K paused in his movements as if in homage to the import of the moment. But her mother, unaffected, unchanged, coolly asked, “And why won’t you circumcise him?”
“It’s barbarism,”
said, surprising herself.
She remembered a post on the pregnancy website.
You Americans may circumcise but we don’t do barbarism here in Europe.
We don’t cause our babies unnecessary pain.
The only reason it’s tolerated at all here is so we don’t get accused of being Islamophobic.
She had ignored posts about baby boys because she was sure hers was a girl.
Not only did she sense it, but all the mythical girl signs were there: she carried the pregnancy high, she had bad morning sickness and her skin turned greasy.
She remembered this post only because she had paused at it, provoked, thinking it was an unfair attack on Americans by a prejudiced person ignorant of all the peoples in the world who circumcised their males.
Now it was convenient ammunition.
“Circumcision is barbaric,”
she said. “Why should I cause my child pain?”
“Cause your child pain?”
her mother repeated, as if was making no sense.
checked her phone: still nothing from Kwame. She sent another text: Your son. She felt, for a moment, the intense desire to pass out and escape her life. She sent Kwame another text: He weighs 6 pounds 13 ounces. She had already ripped up her dignity and she might as well scatter the shreds, so she called him. His phone rang and went to voicemail, and she called again, and again, and the fourth or fifth time she heard a beep instead of a ringing, and she knew that he had just blocked her number.
“Is that Chiamaka you’re calling?”
her mother asked.
paused. “Yes. She’s rushing back.”
“Where did you say she was?”
“South Tyrol.”
“Oh, yes, where the Italians speak German.”
Her mother knew, while had no idea this place existed until Chia said she was going there. Her mother had been up all night, too, but she didn’t look tired, this woman in her late sixties; her resilience, her excellence, began to feel like an affront to .
“I’ll ask the nurse to bring the forms,”
her mother said.
“I will not circumcise him!”
said, her voice even louder.
Her mother ignored her and picked up a lactation brochure the nurse had left on the table. wanted to fight her mother, fling words at her, scratch at that veneer so perfectly in place.
“I knew I was pregnant because I’ve been pregnant before,”
blurted out.
Her mother looked up, vaguely puzzled, as if she was not sure she had heard correctly, then she turned back to reading the brochure.
“I was so relieved to get an abortion,” said.
Still her mother said nothing.
wanted a response, crackling anger, hissed recriminations, ugliness to match her inside, but her mother was refusing her the satisfaction of a response, any response.
Only moments ago, she would never have believed this scene, telling her mother what she had sworn never to tell anyone, especially her mother.
Why had she said it? She didn’t know, but she had said it and it was out.
She did not feel lighter or better; she felt only that she had let out her secret of many years and her mother had responded with silence.
“Do you want something from the cafeteria?”
her mother asked finally, standing up. “You have to eat more than that applesauce.”
closed and opened her eyes. She felt ragged and hopeless. There was a festering red pain between her legs and a sudden ravenous hunger in her gut.
“French fries?”
her mother asked.
“Yes,” said.