A Little Dose of Reality
2005
I awoke in a dark hospital room at around 5 a.m. I could hear the big round clock on the wall ticking each second past. I remember this kind of clock from high school. I spent all of high school watching seconds pass on similar industrial round clocks. I would listen for the lovely sound of the big black minute hand to click me one minute closer to freedom as if it were music. Fifty-nine pianissimo staccato half notes followed by one forte bang that made my heart a little lighter, over and over and over again until class was over and I shuffled off to the next staccato symphony.



But now the circumstances were all different. Now I’m 30. The soft seconds ticking by were not leading up to a school bell, but were pulsing along to the rhythm of a newborn breathing. My newborn. The wee Scribner was asleep beside me in a Plexiglas bassinette. The senior Scribby was asleep on a pull-out bed just beyond. I wondered if wee Scribby would want to nurse soon, or if I should venture back to sleep. In my dark hospital room at five in the morning, with a tiny stream of harsh light coming in under the door from the hallway, I felt like I was in a cave. A safe cave.



Hours before, I had pushed the wee Scribby out into the world. No pain medication, no regrets, no fear. But between contractions, 30 years of life were swirling around in my head. I turned 30 this year, yes. That in itself seemed real to me suddenly. What did I think my life would look like at 30? Somehow, I don’t think I ever thought I would be 30 for real. This was all a blurry dream.



A nurse entered my cave. I looked at the clock. 5:02 and counting. She wheeled a small cart over to me and took my blood pressure and temperature. I squinted against more harsh light from the hall.



“Can you bring me some more cranberry juice?” I squawked, my voice scratchy from all the shouting just hours before. Nurse looked down at three empty cups on my bedside tray. Then she looked down at my chart, then up at my face.



“You’re Jacuzzi,” she said finally.



I looked down at myself. I had on a super ugly green hospital nightie which was a good part soaked in blood at the moment. My belly, having just hours before contained a baby, was puffy and floppy. I had hospital-issued brown socks on my feet with rubber treads on the bottom. The Fab Five would have run screaming in the other direction.



“Well, not at this precise moment,” I answered.



“I saw your name on the list over a month ago,” she said. “We get a list of incoming patients, and I saw your name, and I said to the other nurses, Jacuzzi is coming! But we all decided you couldn’t be Jacuzzi, because you were listed as expecting your third child. Jacuzzi doesn’t have any kids, I said to the other nurses. It can’t be her.”



I took a deep breath. “It’s me,” I said.



“But I thought you were a swinging single!” she said.



I shrugged my shoulders. She smiled politely. I said finally, “I’m only Jacuzzi when I write, you know.”



She was crestfallen. “Don’t tell me there...” She almost couldn’t finish her sentence. “Don’t tell me there isn’t really a Ben.”



I grinned. “Don’t worry. There really is a Ben.”



She looked relieved. “Don’t forget my cranberry juice,” I added.



I was thirsty beyond thirsty. And the only thing I wanted was cranberry juice. Big tall cups of cranberry juice on ice, like my friend Darlene told me to drink after childbirth.



The nurse appeared a minute later with more juice.



“I really miss your column in The Berkshire Eagle,” she said. “Why did you stop writing it for them?”



“I didn’t stop writing it,” I answered. “They stopped running it.”



“But WHY?” she continued. “Everybody liked it.”



A page-long response swirled around in my head. I can only guess at the reasons why The Eagle stopped running my column. The truth is, they just stopped running it. Nobody even called to tell me. It just didn’t show up in the paper one week, and I actually had to call to ask if I’d been canned or not.



The nurse was now busy pushing on my belly and assessing the size of my uterus, known apparently as a “fundus.” Somebody’s gotta think up a better name. I really don’t like anything on my body being referred to as a “fundus.” Yuck.



Then the nurse checked the baby, smiled, and left. The seconds continued to tick past. I drifted off.



A year ago I wrote about childbirth. That time I was an onlooker. The column was about birth, and life, and getting forced into a state of awakeness. (See below: “Apostolic Baby”) I, like many Americans, have to try hard to feel awake in my life. I mean, really awake. Consciously, physically, and psychically awake in the midst of so much artifice. I’ve been through childbirth three times now, and one thing I love about it is how awake I feel. How alive. How human I am in those moments. Childbirth is not pleasant by any stretch of the imagination. It is torturous and barbaric and slimy and messy and a little gross. And for those reasons, it is so alive. All at once, life is swirling around you. There is no escape. There are not many moments in life like it. You are in the grip, the clutch of life and death, and something in between. There is no reality so real.



I awoke again at 7:30. The baby was crying. He was hungry. The sun was up and my room no longer seemed like a cave, but like a room at a Holiday Inn. A woman with bleached blond hair and carefully applied eyeliner and lipstick came in a few minutes later with a tray of eggs and corn flakes on plastic plates and bowls. “Good morning, I’ve got your tray,” she said.



“Good morning, I’ve got my new son Isaac,” I thought to myself.



Another nurse came in soon after. She helped me out of my blood-stained green frock and coyly asked if I was “The Jacuzzi.” I told her to dig into my black computer case (which I brought with me to the hospital while in labor, believe it or not – carried it in myself doubled over in pain) and help herself to a Bimbopolitics.com bumper sticker. She grabbed a few, then returned a minute later for more because she said the other nurses at the nurses’ station cleaned her out. “Why on earth did The Eagle stop running Jacuzzi?” she asked.



“I wrote about menstruation and masturbation, and apparently management doesn’t menstruate or masturbate,” I said. But she wasn’t listening, really. She was busy pushing on my floppy belly again, telling me what a hard uterus I had as if she were impressed.



“Well”, I said, “I’m Jacuzzi. Of course I have a hard uterus.”



What I said made no sense, and she was completely puzzled, but smiled and giggled and grabbed another bumper sticker. Bimbopolitics.com, for the seriously confused, it said. “My husband would never let me put this on our car,” she said. “But I can put it on my clipboard.”



She was on her way out of the room. “If Ben stops by,” I said, “Send him right in.”



Her jaw dropped open. “Ben is coming here?” she asked.



I nodded. She ran her fingers through her hair and smoothed the jacket of her uniform. Then she bolted out into the hall. I giggled to myself. Scribby was just waking up.



“What was that all about?” he asked. His hair was standing up on end in all directions. Just like always. I grinned.



“The Eagle. Jacuzzi. Nothing real.” I said. “Come look at our son. He’s smiling.”



The Apostolic Baby

(Originally printed in 2004 in The Berkshire Eagle, The Los Angeles Daily News, and affiliates)





There I sat, legs folded in a lotus position, arms pushing with all their force against a tortured sacrum through each contraction, listening to the rain beat down harder and harder outside.



Two midwives breathed, chanted, coached through the pain. Ommmmmmmmmmm . . . flower open . . . low . . . om. Their voices were in complete synchronicity; the mother-to-be mimicked them the best she could through ghastly and exotic pain; stifling high register screams of torment into low, breathy, incantations of despair. Soft and tranquil flute music played on a nearby cd player. Quite gongs and the sound of swishing water intoned from a Buddhist fountain. Mommy-to-be was floating in a small inflatable plastic kiddie pool decorated with colorful fishies. Daddy-to-be stroked her head and an amaryllis that he bought for her to look at during labor was nearby.



This was about a week ago. I wanted to be at the birth for so many reasons. Mostly, to lend support to the mommy. But also to witness something that is so absolutely not numbing to the soul. Jacuzzi using the word “spiritual”? Well, yes, I suppose so. Somewhere amid the blood and the gore and the sadistic pain-racked bliss is an amazing amount of joie; an awakening; a vitality that is so often missing from my own semi-comfortable middle American life.



She wanted to do it au naturale, at home, no drugs; just woman vs. nature. The astrological charts of everyone present were on site, the moon was full, the coyotes were howling outside. The heavens awaited the newborn.



I had many jobs during the birth. One was to be in charge of the boiling pots of water on the stove, so that the water in the pool could be instantly warmed. Another was to fill mommy’s cup with a mixture of raspberry tea and room-temperature juice. Another was to push like bloody hell on her low back whenever she asked me to. Another was to offer just the right words of encouragement at just the right moment; the one that I found she met with the most warmth was simply “this won’t last forever”. It reassured her more than anything else.



“Ommmmmmmmmmmm . . . flower open . . . low . . . om”. The midwives appeared completely relaxed and in their element. One was always busy scribbling away on a chart, times, heart rates, whatnot; the other systematically coaching on when and how to push. All I could think about was how real everything seemed.



It reminded me of Douglas Spaulding in “Dandelion Wine” realizing the feeling of his aliveness through the pain of carrying heavy buckets of berries from the woods; the way the handles ripped angry red creases into his palms, was vitalizing.



I started thinking about all the things in my life that take away pain. Or more generally, all the things we in middle America do to insulate ourselves from feeling . . . anything. Television is a big one. It’s what I turn to whenever things in life get too oogie -- anything with a laugh track will often do. I was once in a horrible fight with a boyfriend and my only coping mechanism was to completely give over my consciousness to television. When he walked into the room and began speaking about his feelings, I accidentally tried to click him off with the remote. “Ooops, darling”.



There are all the other brain-numbers we subscribe to; chocolate, booze, shopping, mood elevators, sleeping pills, after hours programming on the Showtime channel; whatever.



Childbirth is one of those events in life that, even if you use whatever coping mechanisms the medical world can provide, it is a huge deal. It is in-your-face big, it is bloody in all circumstances, it is physically a whopper-doozer and there’s no way around it. There’s no antidote to the profundity of it or the reality of it.



At a certain point during the labor, the serenity of the flute music on the cd became incredibly annoying to mommy, and daddy was instructed to turn it down (obscenities were unspoken but implicit). Mommy was now begging the heavens to please get the Little One out of her as soon as it was convenient. Each contraction and each push ended in her matriarchical cry “Is it out yet?” The midwives still remained cool and composed. Daddy followed mommy around the house as she searched for a position or a place that would ease something . . . anything. Everywhere she landed; bed, floor, tub, he placed the amaryllis nearby, whether she noticed or not.



I contemplated my life and the Tao of numbness. I saw this mommy in front of me experiencing the most poignant moment of womanness or indeed homo-sapien-ismo and I realized how little of the human condition I am really in touch with on a day-to-day basis. Amid the coffee, the hot shower, the laugh tracks, the Baby Ruth’s; I have rare opportunities to feel deeply or to think deeply. My political and social views; the decisions I make about my life and the perception I have about the world, are these real or are they born out of wanting to be comfortably numb at the end of the day? If I forced myself to wander in the desert alone for 40 days and 40 nights without television and fast food would my perceptions change?



Mommy’s face was now contorted by the exasperation of day to night, night to day, and day to night long labor. No music now, no serenity, no words that could come close to easing her mind . . . but it all turned to glory in an instant when out came a head, out came a body, and out came a child. Little fish lay on big mommy fish, both shuttering with life and love and beginnings and endings. There was no announcement of boy or girl, there was only a soft whisper from mommy, “I love you, my darling”. Not a single person in the room at that moment was numb.



Tell me what YOU think! Tawk to me at jacooz@bimbopolitics.com.