Snowdrops

Prologue

I am sharing my birth story because our stories are meant to be shared. My story holds incredible paradox: the infinite genius of the body and natural childbirth–an extraordinarily short labor with spontaneous expulsion, the absolute saving grace of modern medicine two weeks later, and also the hospital’s cold use of reason in approaching mother–child relationships. I am sharing my story, too as a preface to my recovery, which has been made entirely of holistic medicine.

My child’s birth was an initiation into a profound realization of how we can be carried through traumatic experience with the buoyancy of community, and also how our contemporary culture inevitably fails mothers today. I don’t have sweeping solutions, other than that restoring the value of home economics is paramount, and tending to the home ecosystem as a cornerstone of society’s success must be acknowledged.

Women continue to be stigmatized and pathologized for their tender experiences of motherhood in the ecology of the United States. The reality is motherhood is a complex and beautiful unfurling, not without suffering, not without joy, and with the necessity of clear shadow integration and the healing of generational wounds. This is no small task. We cannot overlook the societal context and impact of it. Motherhood requires impossible trust, a learning to rest while enveloping strength, and an oceanic letting go. Motherhood is a rush, stepping into the turbid, muddy, river of life. I hope there is something in the currents of my story for you.

Snowdrops

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know what despair is; then

winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive, earth suppressing me.

I didn't expect to waken again, to feel

in damp earth my body

able to respond again,

remembering after so long

how to open again

in the cold light

of earliest spring—

afraid, yes, but among you again

crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.

–Louise Glück

When I gave birth, I nearly died. This isn’t uncommon. It’s fascinating, really, that in the modern world one of the most primal acts is still one of the most deadly. My labor itself was swift and painful. I remember marveling at the sensation of my cells and my entire form splitting into a million pieces of stars. I felt a knife cut through the liquid night of the universe, and within my womb, the birth of a galaxy, the milky way, my child, Aurelia Delphine slipped out. It was only later that the death came.

12 days into the feverish love of a newborn family, a peculiar thing began to happen. Unannounced, buckets of blood began to pour from my body. I’d be sitting there, right as day, when all of a sudden a whoosh of red would arrive and spill onto the floor. It must be normal, I thought. The entirety of the feminine experience such a novelty to me, I felt this too, must fall into the category of routine experiential initiation into the cult of motherhood.

My partner, luckily, felt otherwise. Call the midwife, he said. That’s a lot of blood he said, after I’d soaked the sheets not once but three times. I did, and he was correct, it wasn’t normal. My midwife arrived, breathless as though she came on a stallion, and stampeded into the room to investigate. She suspected what was later confirmed, a piece of retained placenta.

In her earnest confidence and practical line of sight, she attempted to manually remove the piece from my now, decidedly un–dilated cervix. I gave my verbal consent, though of course my being rejected the insertion of a middle aged woman’s rough hand thrust into the closed doorway of my body. It was more painful than childbirth. She touched the piece, tried to remove it, failed, and I began to hemorrhage.

I felt quite calm, as I often do in such emergency situations. The ambulance was minutes away, thank goodness, as those few minutes were minutes that saved my life. I lay in a pond of blood on the stretcher and made my way to the hospital. The midwife and my partner drove apart from the sirens with my nearly two week old baby, her first venture into the world outside our home, a cold, black night.

I waited in the emergency room while the treatment plan began. Hemostat to stop the blood. Properly shitting myself as a result of the medication. Blood transfusion. Another transfusion. Emergency dilation and curettage. Five blood transfusions in all. The midwife placed Aurelia at my breast before I went into surgery, seeing if she would nurse. She screamed. The fluorescent lights, my state, and the palpable fear of everyone in the room preventing true mother–child bonding. I was comforted by a simple wooden crucifix above the door. I prayed wholly and with all my heart. Please allow me to survive. Please allow me to see my baby again. Dear Jesus.

The surgeons excitedly relayed what was to be done, echoing in sterile, silver–winter walls. I inhaled into a gas mask, and voila. Hours later, I found myself with wires and IVs, incoherent, but alive, in the ICU. The last step in the chain of survival was a Bacheri balloon removal–this would determine whether or not I joined the living or the dead. My partner came to see me. He was there when I awoke. More in touch with the severity of the situation than I was, having spoken with the surgeons, who had told him quite literally, I may not make it, that I had lost even more blood in surgery. May not make it, what a phrase!

He had been up all night with Aurelia, feeding her bottles of donated milk while my own supply wilted sticky white petals on my breasts in the hospital bed. I couldn’t eat for those two days. I was given a sponge bath. I appreciated the experience of being completely helpless, in that it connected me to the infant experience of my daughter. My vulnerability and dependency upon the nurses in my weakened, drugged state, was comparable to being a newborn. The call button my harrowing cry. I watched the date change on the white board. November 24th, November 25th, November 26th.

The chaplain stopped by. Dear god, I thought, they really think I’m going to die. I talked about my daughter. My new baby. How I missed her so. How being separated from her was pain, was death. I didn’t actually care about anything else that was happening. But I cared that I wasn’t with her, nursing her, comforting her, being her mama in those new, bright days. The hospital refused to admit her to the ICU since she was born at home, considered a separate patient. So we were separated.

My partner returned for the Bacheri balloon removal. Miraculously, my uterus continued to staunch, and no more blood came out. In the next 24 hours, I was approved to move to the maternity ward, out of ICU, to be reunited with my family. I was so happy to see my baby. I could barely move from the blood loss, but I could take her in my bruised arms, and miracle again, she began to nurse, after taking the bottle for those three days prior.

The IVs poked deeply into my veins as I held her against my chest but I welcomed that pain, so grateful to have her tiny head close to my heart. One day later, I was formally released from the hospital. I remember I didn’t have shoes. I’d been admitted on a stretcher from my bed at home. I was too breathless to walk, my body too heavy for steps, so bare socks on the wet Portland cement didn’t matter so much anyhow as I pattered from wheelchair to Uber, then home again in the rain.

Entering the threshold of our home, I felt reborn. And also, dead. The blood moving through my body was not my own. I had lost over half of my blood. I opened a book to a poem by Louise Glück, and there found my experience written in a flower.