In Pieces(53)

After the sensory signals from the lower half of my body had been disconnected, the pain stopped, my chanting stopped, and all feeling came to an abrupt halt. I was then rolled down a bright hallway, through swinging doors, and found myself looking up at the even brighter operating/delivery room lights. A new nurse, with a mask over her face, took one of my arms, pulled it away from my midsection—where I’d been massaging both mother and child—and strapped it to the table where I’d been transferred. She then repeated the process with the other arm. When my legs were placed into the chrome stirrups, she continued with the lockdown procedure by wrapping the two wide straps waiting there around each of my legs. “We don’t want you to move around or touch yourself,” she cooed. Surely I’d taken a wrong turn and accidentally entered a scene from A Clockwork Orange.

While I lay there, totally numb from the waist down and bolted to the lightly padded table, they casually talked amongst themselves, never to me, and when the doctor nodded to the masked nurse standing at my side, she began pushing hard on my mountain of a stomach. Every time the signal was given, this large woman started shoving with her hands, using all her weight, huffing and puffing as if she were the one giving birth. Suddenly something changed—who knew what, ’cause I couldn’t feel anything. There was a moment of bustle, of masked people changing positions, moving quickly this way and that, until miraculously… there he was. My son. Peter.

The nurse held him at my side so I could lift my head to see his beautiful face—which at that moment looked like a pissed-off Inuit, apropos of my chanting, I assume. I reflexively started to reach for him, but quickly realized I was tied down. For God’s sake, people! Let me touch my baby! “We’re going to clean him up and get him all ready for his new life.” I desperately wanted to reply, Cram it up your ass. Give me my SON!!! But no, I didn’t say any of that. I let my head flop back down on the chrome table and closed my eyes.

Two days later, my breasts had become painfully engorged, either because that’s the way my body works or because I was not allowed to nurse Peter except at four-hour intervals. If he got hungry in between, he was given a bottle containing water. Besides that, he had been kept in the nursery, away from me altogether for the first night, so maybe my body didn’t know what the hell was happening or how on earth to adjust to it. I definitely didn’t know what was happening or how to adjust to it.

I did know that to be released from the hospital, I had to be able to urinate, but the thought of that was not a happy one—although having a tube stuck into my bladder was not a cheerful image either. When I finally did pee, blissfully alone without a smiling nurse standing over me, I thought my insides were falling out until I realized that what was pushing against my episiotomy stitches was not a vital organ, but a piece of surgical sponge that had been left inside me. Oops.





Finally, with my boobs packed in ice and my ass on a pillow, I sat in the back next to the baby’s new car seat while Steve slowly drove us home. From then on and forever after, Peter and I would figure it out together. We would teach each other. What I didn’t understand, he instinctually knew. To this day, that remains the same.


During the fourteen months since Steve and I first married, Baa had quietly hovered, worrying that I was still feeling estranged from her and not wanting to step in uninvited. She’d been working, not as an actress but as a part-time florist, learning to make festive chrysanthemum and bird-of-paradise arrangements, and while I had gestated my way through The Flying Nun’s third season, she hadn’t been around much. But I can still see her in my mind, standing in the hospital room doorway as soon as I was out of recovery, holding her jacket closed with one hand and a bunch of flowers in the other. She stood there, not moving, until slowly we began to smile at each other. “I’ve been here all night,” she said softly, and as I attempted to sit up for the first time, she started to cry, whispering, “Oh, Sal.” Then when Peter and I were at home, away from any other supervision, I’d hear her tiptoe in through the back door every day, and feel myself exhale, letting out the breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. She’d then sit on the living room sofa with her knitting, waiting to see if I needed a break. I usually did. Gratefully, I’d hand the baby to her and watch. Never spouting singsong nonsense, she’d look in his eyes and actually talk to him; telling him about her day, wondering how his was, what he had conquered so early in life? She’d walk him around the room, then eventually move outside, all the time explaining things: a leaf, a bird, details of what and why they were. I felt in awe of her, wondering if she’d been like that with me or if I was watching her become something new. Just as I was becoming something new.

I know Steve was feeling the pressure of having a son, feeling he needed to be the kind of man his child would be proud of, and at the same time feeling the absence of his own father, this man’s inconceivable abandonment of him. In the twenty-four years of Steve’s life, his father had never even sent him a birthday card—not that a card would have cut it. With new urgency, Steve started exploring places to put his focus. He was good at hard physical labor, building and construction, gardening and landscaping, was instinctually gifted in these areas. When we’d first moved in, Steve had completely changed the master bedroom, had knocked out walls, enlarged the master bath to include two walk-in closets. But he refused to follow the rules, so if permits or inspections were required—and they usually were—he couldn’t be bothered. (God knows what happened when we sold this house and the new owners asked for an inspection, along with all the appropriate paperwork, because there wasn’t any.) Next, he decided to set up a darkroom in the pseudo-poolhouse hidden in the backyard. He bought all the equipment, plus stacks of books, and began teaching himself about photography. Maybe this was it. Step by step, he could learn to become a photographer. Except he suddenly became enthralled with the idea of going back to USC to get an MFA in theater arts, focusing primarily on writing, an arena where he also had talent. And he was completely dedicated to that for a while, until that energetic burst of enthusiasm faded and he began to lose interest, as though everything he did was only a hobby. Maybe he didn’t feel a pressing need to get out into the big bad world as long as I was making money. And in that way, our marriage hurt him. I wish I could have seen that at the time.