KeebleTalk: Janis Joplin Delivered My Baby: An OG Mother’s Caution

KeebleTalk: Janis Joplin Delivered My Baby: An OG Mother’s Caution

Janis Joplin Delivered My Baby: An OG Mother’s Caution

I begin with a disclaimer:  I birthed two daughters, almost exactly two years apart and I am so glad they’re here.  Given a choice,  I would do it again.  I think I did the world a favor by having them especially since they both have grown into the kind of funny, brilliant, thoughtful and flawed women I enjoy having as friends.

That said, I’m wondering why the world doesn’t thank women more often:  I mean really.  We women, we moms, repeatedly and voluntarily choose through the birth process to traumatize ourselves emotionally and physically in order to propagate our thankless species.  We choose to allow our pepper-tight figures to stretch and swell beyond reason, to bloat, to descend to such a low-bottom level we don’t even recognize ourselves.  We enter into the birthing contract with the understanding that we will never be the same.  (Relinquish vanity).

We commit to stop working (often), to stop smoking, to stop drinking (well, yeah).  We commit ourselves to eating right, staying out of The Club (although we do find exceptions).  We take up lighter exercise routines--I remember the day I earned my first tummy stretch marks at seven months pregnant trying to hit a backhand on Morehouse’s tennis courts.  No more high impact sports; take it easy now, you’re going to be a mom.  (Relinquish self-indulgence). 

The world can never thank women enough.  One lousy day set aside in May could not possibly compensate for womanhood’s beasty commitment to posterity.  How can sunflowers, pancakes, eggs, and fresh squeezed orange juice repay or pay forward the debt the world owes its women?  I think about trumpets sounding each morning as we wake.

The day I realized I would have a second child I thought about my little baby, then I thought about the little me who would miss my figure, my work, my drink.  Forget about The Club.  But wait—what about the pain? (Awesome birth control for the naturalists).  For the next 30 weeks I would pretend someone else would experience the pain for me.  To try to keep calm I would need to pretend someone else was going to go through that stupendous pain:  the due date lingered at the back of my mind like a student loan I'd casually accepted and had to pay off eventually. 

For so long I promoted an infantile sanguinity about childbirth.  But as I age, all the previously seductive images of those three actually soupy hot days I spent in Atlanta hospitals ease further out of my mind.  The delusions are gone.  For me, giving birth was physically brutal and emotionally sacrificial.  I better understand the faces of those older women who saw me out as I walked to the co-op, pregnant with my first child. 

“Is this your first baby?” 

“Yes ma’am.”

“Awww… .” They’d tilt their heads and smile a crooked smile that I didn’t quite understand.  They held something back looking at me, a rookie cop; they were the veteran cops watching me walk, like a complete mark, into a darkened alley.

I wore pink frosty glasses before.  My perception made me say things like, “Oh, I don’t have a doctor.  I have a nurse-midwife.  I want to give birth in a welcoming warm, quiet room.  And the nurse-midwife is going to be right there.  No doctor.”  I had a song in my voice.  That was before labor.

On my due date, July 6, 1991 my oldest daughter announced her coming through intensifying contractions after I’d hung blinds in my bedroom; my mother was coming to town after all.  Her father drove me to the hospital after we passed through a drunk driver checkpoint on Ralph David Abernathy, in Atlanta.  It had just rained and steam mixed with the rubber on our skinny tires concocting an odor that made me sick to my stomach.  After we parked in the stacked up circular garage, I thought only about air conditioning.  Where was the closest air conditioner?  We rode the elevator up to the OB floor, and after the assistants hooked me up to the monitors the nurse midwife told me she wanted to break my water. 

“I don’t want you to do that.”

“Why?”

“Well, because I know that one intervention could easily lead to another intervention

that could eventually lead me to a C-section.  And I don’t want a C-section.”

“Well, you want a live baby don’t you?”  For the first time I noticed the nurse midwife looked a lot like Janis Joplin, her brownish hair wild on her head, her face plain, unremarkable. 

“Yes, I want a live baby.  Go ahead.” She broke my water.

Back up: my naturalist opinions had earlier met with discouragement from birthing magazines to convince me that epidurals might permanently damage my spine and my baby's brain so—you want to talk about ouch?!  My baby would have one of the cutest little  heads in the natal ward but at that moment her head felt like a flaming ball of oversized hostile fire.  I shut out the sounds of Janis Joplin telling me to breath, then push.

“Ye though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death

I will fear no evil, for thou art with me…”

My daughter’s father, “You’re doing greeeaaaat.”

"Thy rod and thy staff comfort me."

My daughter was born distressed.  I was holding her in when I wanted to push because I remembered the nurse midwife telling me not to push until she said push.  So as best I could, I held the baby in when I had those intense contractions. The nurses grabbed my baby and washed her up, gave her an Apgar score—her first among many standardized tests, and handed her to me.  Janis Joplin leaned into me, snatched down my gown, and said,  “Here, now feed her.”   

I went home the next day because I couldn’t eat the hospital food and my mom was coming to town; I had to do laundry.  My first baby is now 21.  I’ll blame my poor assessment of the reality of childbirth on the roots she worked on me with her giddiness, beauty and warmth. 

Don’t misunderstand.  I don’t want to scare young women away from having babies.  I frankly do not believe anything I say could defy biology anyway; something about our hormones, driving our bodies and our thinking at a particular age (for me it was 23, 24, 25) makes us go ahead and take up the challenge of motherhood despite everything that seasoned vets, those OG women mothers, warn against.  Women will continue to have babies and humankind will go on.  Women my age will nod their heads in understanding.  Women my daughter’s age will shake their heads in disagreement, a twinkle still left in their eyes. 

Post Script:

My second labor, ending June 22, 1993 spread itself out over a lovely 48 hours--no epidural, thereby shattering all of my delusions about having children.

KeebleTalk: Starlit Evening: Oakland Prostitution and California Schools

KeebleTalk: Starlit Evening: Oakland Prostitution and California Schools

The Human Cost of Being Human: Don't Leave Me

I left a job I love today.  Before pushing the one-way lock and walking off the campus, I saw a former student, AnnMarie.  She said, "Hi! Ms. Keeble!" her braces sparkling through her frosty lip gloss.   She asked me a question about next year.  I let her finish, then said, "Ohhh, Ann Marie, you know I'm not gonna be here next year."  Her eyes bucked, she opened her mouth wide.

          

"What?  You can't."

"I'm sorry, you didn't know?"

"You should have made an announcement."

"I announced it on facebook.  I thought that would be

 enough."

"But I love you Ms. Keeble.  You're my favorite teacher!"  Now the lump in my throat is messing with my eyes.

"I love you too, Ann Marie."  We hugged.  I snapped back.  "But dang girl, you only had me for about   a month!  How do you think I felt when you left for Fresno?"

I remember the day she abruptly departed.  She dragged in with a white sign out sheet.  I asked her what it was, and she said she had to leave, her mom was sick.  I hugged her, gave her a grade, wished her good luck and turned back to continue with the lesson I was teaching.  I remember the sadness I felt seeing her walk out the door.  This scene repeats all year long, at least five or six times.  Students come, then they go, often with no notice.

"I know I left," she says.  But I came back!"

"I know."

Damn it.  I'd almost gotten away clean.  But not really.  I am stuck.  Nailed.  I haven't a clue what to do with grief.  What to do with guilt, the guilt of causing grief in others?  I am reminded of something a psychiatrist once told me when I asked him how to get through a task I saw as completely impossible.  I guess you just have to do it.  Though battered by fear, apprehension, anxiety, and dread--I guess you/I just have to do it.  When faced with moments that we'd rather avoid altogether, including making decisions that we know may lead to grief, the challenge has always been and continues to be--to stay in it.  Make the best decision and feel the consequences.  Don't run.  At some point the running has to end.

To deny ourselves the splendor of the wide open spaces before us because we prefer our current mitigated comfort over the promise of future unmitigated grief is to deny our own human frailty.  The double-edge is unavoidable.  I cannot sit with what I know doesn't satisfy my internal life because I fear the pain of loss.  But doesn't it hurt?  And isn't the pain inevitable?  Of course.  And accepting that frees me to live with a peace that is also inevitable.  I can't know one without knowing the other.  I forget that most days.  I seek comfort when pain arises.  Comfort in the form of homemade chocolate cake or endless games of chess on the Internet.  My brother Kofi, the Chessmaster, tells me to study to become better.  I say to him, "Kofi, I don't play to get better, I play for entertainment."  I really play to distract myself.  I used to have a drink after work.  Now I play about four or five games of chess.  Guess which one people find more impressive.  A former partner and I often talked about how we both took up compulsions that society tends to reward:  games of intellect and hours of sharply focused work.  Both are admired by society, and both tend to leave those with whom we should be most intimately connected feeling neglected, shut out of our focus zone.  Unfortunately, simply acknowledging our failings doesn't save us from their consequence.  

Some of us are required to monitor our comfort seeking.  We watch for where we turn away from pain.  Where do we turn toward pleasure?  We mark it, for therein lies the nature of avoidance-driven addiction.  We practice sitting with the discomfort we so naturally wish to avoid.  Pema Chodron says "there are so many ways we have dreamt up to avoid the moment, soften its hard edge, deaden its impact so we don't have to feel the full impact of the pain." (When Things Fall Apart)

Yet the pain is unavoidable. It is inevitable.  And in the end, it is moreover, valuable.  

During my daughter's naming ceremony, her father placed on her seven-day old tongue milk, salt, honey, and cayenne.  Each drop was meant to prepare her to be able to handle all that her life would offer:  boredom, difficulty, pleasure, and tragedy.  And considering the woman my daughter has grown into, I can say I would recommend such a ceremony to all the mothers I know.   I have watched her face, without blinking, without running, so very many losses.