I blame this expectation on the expert storytelling abilities of Bill Cosby.
"You did this to me!" Cosby would scream during his stand-up routine, twisting his face into the raging visage of a woman who would never allow her husband to touch her again. "Get away from me!" his wife would scream at the would-be coach, in a moment sealing up years of intimacy with the hot brand of anger. So I thought that the nurses at Lourdes would witness the sworn end of our marriage right.
I was wrong. The dominant emotion that I experienced at the bedside during Sara's labor was not anger. It was fear.
As the contractions got worse, I saw in Sara's eyes no blame, no rage, no threat to grind up the family jewels. I saw fear: fear of the contraction that was about to start, fear of the indescribable pain that was erupting from inside her body, and worst of all the fear that perhaps the pain was going to be too much.
I think I could have taken the anger. I can take it, and I can give it back (all in the name of coaching, you understand). But to see the face I have loved for seven years contorted with pain and agonizing fear, I felt myself begin to break. Fear was too much. I began to weep with her.
It's hard to coach someone through labor when you can't see through the tears. So I had to turn away from the bed long enough to wipe my eyes and blow my nose. What good would it do for Sara to see me crying when she needed to get through her own pain?
Our "plan" for the birth was to go drug-free. The downsides of using drugs seemed to outweigh the benefits, so our intent was to tough it out. When the terrifying pain got to be so much that Sara herself doubted if she could make it through, I finally understood the allure of an epidural. If she had asked for it, I don't know if I could have coached her not to do so--I don't know if I could have endured her fear enough to coach her without the painkiller.
When the nursing staff offered pain killers, I reached a real threshold. I was pushed to the limit of my experience, into a dark and cold corner of the universe: the place of gut-wrenching pain and the attraction of release. In that place, where I saw the real terrible fear of my wife in the hardest work of her life, I found a place where people like us--so resolute in theory--would do anything to stop the pain.
My first thought was that this is not fair. I know that birthpangs are the inheritance of women through all generations of humanity (Genesis 3--not to mention most human experience). But it doesn't seem fair. This thought didn't last long, however.
In its quest to make sense of experience, to be able to describe, use, and categorize the world, my mind went to another place, another idea. As strange as it seems now to write about it, while my body stood at that bedside and my voice urged Sara through the transition toward birth, my mind went to an intellectual refuge. It started with my internal observation as I watched Sara and held her hand: this is like watching . . . torture.
Torture, as I understand it, is the process of inflicting indescribable pain, while offering the relief of that pain, in order to coerce. For a moment, the nurses coming into the room, offering phentanol and statin and epidurals, appeared to me like a dispassionate Jack Bauer from 24, offering an opportunity to end the pain. All one has to do is say Yes.
Indescribable pain is inhuman. Part of human experience is to be able to tell stories about our ordeals. But pain that defies words cannot be told of in story. It is so consuming and mind-altering that we cannot describe it. I have yet to meet a mother who can (or will?) describe the pain of childbirth. Childbirth, however, comes with a resultant child, whose appearance makes all the pain worth it.
Torture is different.
Torture is inflicting pain on someone else--pain which will be so extreme that they cannot describe it later--without any resultant benefit to the sufferer. All that exists is the hope for an end to the pain, dangled paradoxically by the the one who inflicted the pain in the first place. Why would someone inflict, willingly, that kind of pain on another human being, then withold the solution? That someone must have placed something in a higher rank of importance than humanity; or determined that the victim of torture is no longer classified as human.
Either way, the use of torture must, on some level, destroy the humanity of those involved.
That's where my mind went during the transition phase. Perhaps the mental rabbit trail kept me from breaking up; perhaps the small refuge of terrible reflection gave me just enough stamina to hold my wife's hand through the worst part of labor. But I came back--back to witness the excruciation that visited her between phentanol-induced slumbers--and held back my own tears so that we could get to the final stage: pushing.
Her pushing stretched the limits of her endurance, just like mine had been pushed as a witness to the pain and fear. But her pushing had a greater human goal, something more than just the relief of pain that, by itself, seems unfair and senseless. She birthed into the world a new life, a new promise, a new hope: our little Gwendolyn Hope.
I hope it's a while before we have to go through that again. And maybe next time she'll threaten some part of my anatomy--I think it would be easier that way (thanks, Bill). Or perhaps this experience, now told in story, will prepare me for the next time. Until then, we're going to enjoy the fruit of labor: abundant life.
~emrys
1 comment:
Congratulations again, and thanks for the always-insightful ruminations.
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