Published on September 27th, 2023 | by Christina Yovovich
2Breathing Through (Part II)
I became a professional pregnant person. I called the college I taught at soon after that early ultrasound and let them know I wouldn’t be returning to adjunct the next fall. I spent my days trying to do things that were good for the baby. I tried to eat well. I exercised. I read books about pregnancy. I napped, a lot. I felt I was storing up sleep in the cellar of my mind for the long winter of infanthood ahead.
Because, I was scared. I was scared my bipolar medication would hurt the baby. I was scared something else would hurt the baby. I had known more than one woman who lost a baby and I knew that this pregnancy did not guarantee that I’d get to meet my living healthy son at the end of nine months. And I was scared about what would happen if I did get to meet my son. How would I deal with childbirth and the loss of sleep having a newborn meant? Would I become manic? Would my mind break free from my medications and shoot me off into psychosis? I was also terrified that stress might hurt my baby, so I tried hard to wrap all these fears up in a thick blanket and keep them shoved over in a corner of my head. To this end, I stopped writing, other than emails to friends. If anyone asked how my writing was going, I told them that I could only handle one act of creation at a time.
Though I tried to keep all my worries under wraps, I did make plans. The most important plan was made with my psychiatrist. I had become manic and then psychotic once shortly after moving away from my hometown for the first time and then once the day of my wedding. It seemed to me that big life events triggered this mania and psychosis. What could be bigger than having a child? I was terrified of becoming psychotic during labor, of giving birth in a swirl of delusions, and then what? My doctor was soothing. But she didn’t dismiss my fears either. Instead, we made a plan together. She sat on her chair, her computer in her lap. I sat on one of her sofas, a pillow always in my lap. She typed as I talked, and answered my questions, and eventually she drafted up a set of instructions for any doctors there for my birth. In it, she gave directions about what medications in what dose to give me if I showed signs of psychosis. She had Eric come in with me for one session so that we could discuss the plan with him too. We sat facing each other, on separate sofas. I was more upfront with my fears there than I ever had been at home. He promised to be there always to help. We also made plans for me to come see her soon after childbirth, so that she could see how I was doing for herself. She wanted to see me every week for a while after I had the baby. She’d be looking for signs of postpartum depression in addition to postpartum psychosis.
As I grew larger and my due date grew closer, Eric and I met with a doula service.
The boss doula was a white woman with long gray hippie hair. She looked at my large belly, then advised me to sit leaning forward in my chair. “That is the best way for you to sit,” she told me. “If you lean back, or put up your feet, it encourages the baby to get into the wrong position.” I leaned forward in my chair, repressed the urge to cry. Lying down was uncomfortable these days late in my pregnancy. I often got out of bed partway through the night and finished sleeping propped up on the sofa. My most comfortable position was leaning back in a chair with my feet propped up. I leaned forward as we spoke with her, but knew I would not be spending the rest of my pregnancy leaning forward in chairs. No, I would lean back and put my feet up. But now I would do so with a large dose of guilt. Fuck doulas.
The doula got out a large packet of papers and we started to work on our birth plan with her. I knew I wanted to avoid an epidural. Not because of any noble impulses but because I was afraid of paralysis. Then she started talking about guided meditation, and I told her if somebody tried to get me to picture a serene beach during labor, I was sure I would lose it on her. And I didn’t want any essential oils. She tolerated, barely, my rejection of her beach visions, but couldn’t abide my rejection of oils. She had me smell a bunch until finally, to appease her, I said I might be willing to tolerate a whiff of peppermint oil during the throes of labor.
I gained a lot of weight during pregnancy. Like, a lot. By the end of my pregnancy I was well over 300 pounds again. I dreaded my visits to my OB because her nurse always gasped in horror when she weighed me and found out how much I’d gained since the last visit. In addition to the weight gain, my blood pressure became an issue and I was put on medication. My OB had me tested not once but twice for gestational diabetes, the second time because she couldn’t believe the negative result could be real. I wasn’t diabetic, but I was large, and my blood pressure was high. My OB decided she didn’t want me going past my due date. She scheduled me for an induction.
At first, I wasn’t concerned about the induction. I was certain I would be having the baby early. But February came and went with no baby (though I did have another birthday), and March came and we got closer and closer to my due date and it seemed an induction was likely after all. Friends around me had a lot to say about inductions. About how much I didn’t want one, how much more painful it would make childbirth and how I’d probably end up with a C-section anyway. I found this less than helpful. As my due date approached, I found myself retreating. If I called a friend, they were likely to ask breathlessly if I was in labor yet, and if I said no, to bemoan my approaching induction. So I didn’t call friends.
My instructions were to check into the hospital the night before my due date so that doctors could give me something to “ripen my cervix.” So that night, Eric and I met our close friends, both poets who understood when to speak and when to keep silence, as poets do, at a favorite restaurant and I had Thai steak salad and an eclair the size of my head while we all chatted happily. It was a celebration, which was what I needed. Then Eric and I drove to the hospital.
At the hospital, things moved quickly. Monitors said I was already having contractions, though I couldn’t feel them, and the doctor on duty said my cervix was already ripe, so they started me on Pitocin to induce labor at 9:00 that night. We panicked a bit at this. We had been expecting a night’s sleep before I began my labor. Eric called the doulas and asked that someone be sent right away. A woman came, I remember nothing about her except that her hands were warm and strong, and she rubbed my feet (with essential oils), then had me walk the halls, pausing to lean on the wall and breath with each contraction. Eric stayed by my side.
Eventually in the night the doula left us alone. Eric slept on a padded bench in the delivery room. I lay on the bed and tried to rest too. True sleep was impossible, as contractions were coming often and hard. I’d drift, and then be woken by a contraction, drift again, wake. I tried to keep my mind blank. There were so many things to worry about. Would the baby be okay? Would I be okay? Would we have to use my psychiatric birth plan? Would this sleepless night be the start of a mania that peaked in psychosis right as I cried out and pushed out my son?
The night was long. The morning moved quickly. A new doula came in and introduced herself. I remember she was small, Latina, and she made me feel safe. A new nurse came in too, with sandy short hair and a confident aura. They woke Eric, told him to go get some breakfast. Then the nurse checked me and said “You’re not dilated enough considering you’ve been in labor all night. How do you feel about doing some squats?” Squats? Sure. I’d exercised all through pregnancy and was no stranger to squats. The nurse adjusted the bed so that I could use its foot rests to steady myself. As she did, the new doula whispered, “You have a really good nurse.” The nurse had me stand between the footrests, my hands on them to keep myself upright. She said when my next contraction came, to squat down into it, and hold the squat all through the contraction. I did. It intensified the pressure enormously but I didn’t make any noise beyond the puffing of my breath. I contracted and squatted, contracted and squatted.
At some point in all these squats, Eric returned from breakfast. He tells me it was a truly startling sight, me squatting and breathing hard in the middle of the room, two women surrounding me. When he’d left, I’d been reclined in bed, sucking on a lollipop and sipping coconut water. Finally, the nurse told me I could rest. I lay down and then felt the next contraction move in a wave through my body in a way which, for the first time in all of this, I found terrifying. These new powerful contractions made it hard to keep control of myself. I was afraid I might cry out, scream, my mind gone. And I knew I couldn’t let my mind go. Above all, I had to stay calm. Between these new powerful contractions, I gasped that I wanted to push. The nurse said, “I just checked you half an hour ago. Do you want me to check again so soon?” I gasped yes, and she looked inside me, and when she stood up, she immediately started getting all the birthing equipment together. I was right, in the space of half an hour I’d gone from not dilated enough to ready to push.
During the pushing, Eric stood on one side of me and the doula stood on the other, holding my legs. I closed my eyes, concentrating solely on the act of pushing. The nurse told me to push three times for each contraction, so I did. The pushing was less frightening than those full body contractions had been. I never cried out while pushing. I was convinced that if I did not stay perfectly calm throughout the delivery, I would end up in a psychiatric ward again. I was convinced that if I let my mind fly out into panic or simply into the red veil of pain, that it would keep flying, that I would lose my mind yet again to madness. So I pushed silently, breathed through the searing pain, and on the third contraction, out came my son‑the burning pop of his head and then the slither of his body.
At first my son didn’t cry out either. I had to ask, “Is he okay?” But he was okay. He eventually cried. Eric cut the umbilical cord. He was laid on my chest, and I looked down at his small blue self, and I thought how I was the only mother he had. There wasn’t another one. So I had better keep it together. I had more chances to keep it together right then, as the doctor had a lot of stitching to do. He’d arrived right as I was about to push, assumed from my silence that I’d had an epidural, so he sewed me up with no numbing agents. It never occurred to me that I could say something. I gritted my teeth, breathed through the pain, and tried to stay with my son on my chest. At one point the doctor said, “I’m not being mean. I have to do this.” If you had asked me then, I might have told you what I really felt, which was that the pain was my penance for my mental illness, for all the sorrow it had brought to others and might bring again in the future. Now, I wish I’d thought to ask for something to give me relief.
I looked down at my son, surprised. A part of me had never thought at the end of all this we would have a child. I felt overwhelming love but wrapped around it was this profound sense of responsibility. And to my relief, I took my mental temperature and found I had never felt so sane.
Eric told me afterwards that the birth was the most amazing thing he’d ever seen. That I was amazing. I lapped up the praise. I never told him how frightened of my own madness I had been, and continued to be. We spent my son’s first night of life in the hospital. Eric and I sleeping in the two single hospital beds in the room, and our small son squalling in the bassinet in between them. I was so tired, more tired that I’d ever been in my life. But there was this baby now. Eric had promised he’d take the brunt of the night care at first. It was a plan we’d made because mania arises from a lack of sleep. But on that first night he collapsed and slept the sleep of the dead, never rousing to our son’s cries or my own increasingly frantic attempts to wake him. So I tried to comfort my son, to nurse him, and somehow, we made it through. I kept waiting for the faint hum that meant madness had descended, but it never came. Instead there was the baby, me, cries, warm skin to skin, and pure exhaustion.
Well, and anger. I have to admit there was anger. I am a planner. So is Eric. We make plans together and we keep them and in this way we build a life together, one filled with trust, one with as little chaos as we can manage, which is a feat, considering I’m bipolar. I had counted on him taking on the night care of our baby the first weeks and I felt betrayed. Fuck him. He’d slept the night before. I’d been the one surfing waves of contractions. I was the one with an unstable mind which needed, above all, rest. How could he abandon me and the baby like this? I breathed through the anger, like I’d breathed through the contractions, and the doctor stitching me up without anesthesia. I tried to focus on this baby, who needed so much. When Eric woke the next morning, I tried to push the anger aside, never let on how it burned.
I learned later from the nurse that there had been a close call. One nobody was aware of until after the fact. After my son was out and his cord had been cut, the doctor on call gently pulled on the umbilical cord to encourage the afterbirth to come out. And the cord separated easily from the placenta, leaving the placenta inside me. That isn’t supposed to happen. The cord is supposed to cling to that placenta like it is a matter of life or death, which it is. If the cord had separated while my son was still inside me, he would have died. So my OB was right after all, when her instinct told her not to let me go past my due date. And I was right after all, when I felt the surprise and the miracle of a healthy child put on my chest.
A miraculous ending. These miraculous things we thought would be impossible to keep. A child. My mind, sane. The whole world was changed. I was this child’s only mother. Eric was his only father. We were his parents, and I fully felt the weight of that. I felt my son on my chest as if he were a grounding wire, connecting my mind to the cool earth. He had come back to us, when I’d thought he was lost forever, and I promised him I wouldn’t let him down again. I tried to breathe through the fear, the anger, not to let those waves overtake me.
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