Half Dozen

For some of us, our mothering soul is incepted as our babies cross the magical threshold of fetal to human life. Our souls come alive and awaken to the long enduring rites of motherhood. We learn to love our new little beings and we revel in the masterpiece that they are. Still others of us awaken our mothering souls at that very moment of our baby's conception. When they are still a cluster of cells, hardly different from the embryo of a sheep or grasshopper, for some of us the spark that lights up our mothering souls begins there . . . at the mere glimmer of life.

Anna, when I first met her, was one of the women who became a mother when she first learned of her baby-to-be at the end of her first trimester of pregnancy. Her story is far more complicated than most wracked with incredible hardship that would destroy many individuals.

Anna delivered her baby last night. Her little boy's head emerged into my hands in the dim quiet of dusk on the brink of black night. His head was full of long black hair, his eyes startlingly blue and his cheeks bright red -- each capillary swollen and bulging with blood. Anna came to the hospital on Wednesday night, but her story starts before that.

Anna is from a town near St. Petersburg, Russia. She traveled to the US on a student visa that she used to learn English and find legal employment as a well-paid waitress in the half-barrio half-upscale town that my hospital is situated in. It's a timeless story in which the young foreigner falls for a young Mexican-American man, they relate to each other on their foreignness, their sense of alienation in this country, their desire for better opportunities. They fall for each other. But, her visa is about to expire so she returns to Russia leaving Guillermo behind in Barrio Town. Upon her return to Russia, Anna learns she is pregnant. She contacts Guillermo, he tells her that she should return to the US where they can marry and raise the baby together with his family's support. She debates this in her mind, she loves her family and being away from them is hard. She determines her child would have better opportunities in the US, so she packs up again and returns to her new home where she'll become an American with a visa sponsored by her husband and teach her baby about the American way in an English-Spanish-Russian creole.

Each day of her pregnancy, she grew more connected to the little boy growing inside of her. She imagined him as a newborn, lazily reaching his hand up to her chin while breastfeeding in her arms. She pictured herself teaching him the art of making Russian Easter eggs. She pictured him playing soccer with the other little round faced, brown skinned Mexican boys in the dusty ally behind her garage. Most of all she planned on him and believed in him and cherished the memories that she would have of the boy he was to become.

Last night, as her baby crowned, the top of his head glistening on the brink of birth she pleaded to me, "I can't!" She wailed over and over. In my work, we hear "I can't" and "no puedo" shrieked and yelled and whispered and grunted. But Anna lamented it. She begged me for permission to stop the birth, to hold on to her baby inside of her just a little bit longer. She cried and cried, her chest heaving as she sucked back air in futile attempts to fight one of the most powerful natural forces that exists on this planet. Her body fought hard, winning the battle over her heart's demand for more time. As her baby emerged, first the black hair, the beautiful eyes, the blood filled cheeks, his precious dimpled chin, his ghastly pale neck, and then his lifeless heart Anna succumbed to the inevitable. Moments later she held in her hands the dead body of her beautiful and perfect 7-pound 9-ounce baby. Limp and dead and surreally perfect. But dead.

Oh God please help him, she cried over and over. Though she had known since yesterday that he had passed, she couldn't accept it. She bargained with God, I'll do anything. Please, she begged.

She scratched at her body, trembling with grief. Her beautiful baby was dead. He would never nurse with his perfect mouth at her breast. She would never hold his sweaty, milk-drunk body to her skin and breathe in his glorious molecules. He would never play soccer in the ally. So many nevers.

Her pain is immeasurable. Hours after the birth, as I was sitting on the edge of her bed in the silver peaceful light of the darkness, she held her baby in her arms. Little gasps of breath were all that sustained her, betraying her deepest desires to die with her baby, to let go of the Earth and join her son. She looked at me with her swollen face, now the face of a childless mother and said "I can't let him go."
It's okay, I told her, you don't have to.
She replied, my arms, they won't let go of him. My brain wants my arms to rest, but they won't let go.
His tiny, pale hand stuck out from the blanket that swaddled him. She was absent mindedly placing her index finger in his palm waiting for that heart-meltingly sweet reflex, for the baby to reciprocate the stroke by tightening his fingers around her offering. Instead, that perfectly dimpled hand drooped onto the blanket, cold.

When I lost some of my own pregnancies, far earlier in the game than Anna, I was consumed with desperation. It was as though someone had hollowed out my insides with sharp blades. The pain was monstrous and uncontrollable. My body, my heart, they compressed and pushed me out of myself. The grief is unbearable, unbelievable and shocking. Your brain is filled with clatter, an unfocused cacophony of horridness that is infinitely deep. In time, the clatter carves out a sharp and pungent space in the back of your mind but it is there consuming a part of the innocence you once had. Those moments when death takes over you are the blackest moments life puts you in. Losing that life, even a life that by definition never was and to others seems impossibly little and inconsequential, is the death of all those moments that would have been. Moments and gloriousness that you knew could have existed if it weren't for the untimely intervention of the inevitable dark force of death.

At the end of my night, I rushed home to put my palms on the beating hearts of my children. I am the fortunate one. This morning, I placed my hand on the warm golden-bronze head of my beautiful Annike and felt her kinetic energy rush through to my mothering soul. I held hungry Baby Tova to my breast, her hot skin pouring rays of sustenance into my starving, aching heart. My eyes drifted to the small nests in my eldest two children's beds where they were sleeping only hours before and now are listening intently to their elementary school teachers as they sit for circle time and spelling tests. Learning and growing and expanding. Living molecules shooting around their bodies, beams of life exuding from their cores.

The circle of childless mothers is broken and disjointed. Only the common ground of despair to unite them. It is a sad and mournful circle with little love and little hope. Anna's suffering is immeasurable, it is endless and expansive. It will haunt me forever, but like the other undertaking experiences I've collected in my career it will join the other deaths in that remote place in my midwife soul where they sleep quietly waking only every now again. Anna, however, will move forward after much time has passed with only the most fervent determination and persistence. Always with the memory of Baby Alexy Diego at the front of her thoughts in the center of her bleeding heart.