The Elegant Out by Elizabeth Bartasius

Author:Elizabeth Bartasius
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2019-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Ten

On the morning of Jack’s tenth birthday, I prepped for his party and the neighbor kid, Sam, pulled up on his bike to take the birthday boy for a ride.

“Come on back in about thirty minutes,” I said, without looking up, running a vacuum back and forth over the kitchen floor.

“Yes, ma’am,” Sam replied as his Southern manners dictated.

Jack walked out of the room without turning around, too excited to engage with formalities. His party would start soon; it was his day.

On the way out, I heard him ask his friend, “Why do you think people say ‘eeeww’ when they see people kissing in the movies. I don’t get it. And then they don’t say ‘eeeww’ when they see someone kissing a dog.”

The door slammed behind them, and I continued cleaning. From cobwebbed corners of memory, I revisited my son’s birth. At one-thirty-ish on a cold afternoon in March, nurses in blue shuffled around doing I-have-no-idea-what and became white noise. My midwife asked if I wanted an incision to help him come out.

“No.” I really didn’t. “Let’s keep pushing.”

Daddy Tom barely looked up. He stood to the side, half filming the birth, half watching hockey on the TV, unavailable for comment.

“Give me your hand,” said the midwife. She guided my sweaty fingers down to the opening where a little human being emerged. “Can you feel him?”

Oh my god, I could! I caressed the top of his head, malleable, soft, fuzzy, wet, a ripe peach; I couldn’t believe I actually felt his head coming out of my root chakra. Tom would alternate between holding my hand, filming Jack’s head, and tracking the Red Wings score.

My pushing was rewarded. I earned an A+, the most important one. Eight minutes later, he’d fully arrived through no incision, into the dry, physical world, extending head to toe the length of one of my writing notebooks. His nose came out crooked and bloody from the journey down the birth canal. Dad paid attention at that point, documenting embryonic fluids. I lay still in bed, amazed, glad for the team that had guided me step-by-step on how to push and breathe and deliver a human being. Doctors and nurses disposed of the embryonic sac and wiped up goo while I lay, drugged, detached, disconnected from my birthing power as a woman, yet thanking God that I didn’t have to give birth naturally: squatting and hallucinating from pain.

Oohing and ahhing, the nurses took our baby to a table in the side room and lay him on his back. Jack screamed in staccatos (perhaps foreshadowing a future in the marching band?) and peed in a straight shot to the ceiling. Tom caught that on film, too.

It didn’t take long for the novelty of a newborn to wear off and Tom to invoke his “pass” card. After only a few weeks, he declined to take part in nighttime feedings, demanded he have time to himself, and played a daily rerun of “I’ve worked all day, I need to rest, I shouldn’t have to deal with the baby when I get home.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.