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.