On Motherhood

*I wrote this for a creative writing assignment - creative non-fiction

For some women, being a mother is the most natural thing in the world. They say they loved being pregnant, and that they fell in love with their children the very moment they found out they had conceived. Maternity leave wasn't long enough, and they postponed going back to work so that they could be home with their children as long as possible. I even know one who decided to home school because she couldn't bear to be away from her kids for any length of time. In fact, I don't know that her kids have been out of her sight, ever. I am not one of those women.
Being pregnant was awful. While I never had any “morning sickness,” I was exhausted and uncomfortable the entire nine months. When I hear a woman say that she “never felt better than when she was pregnant,” or that she “loved being with child,” I find myself secretly wanting give her a polygraph exam. I imagine fitting wires to her head and pulse points and asking her to tell me the truth so I can see that she really is either a big liar, or maybe just deranged. I can't imagine enjoying the feel of an enormous creature inside of your womb ever feeling pleasant. The first feelings of movement, I admit, were pretty amazing, but they were only a precursor to nearly endless discomfort. My daughter seemed to be a budding yogi, and thought that stretching herself up into my rib cage was a proper thing to do at all hours of the day and night. I am pretty sure that her enormous head was the source of my inability to inhale a decent amount of air in the last few months. The sight of an entire foot jutting out from my spherical stomach was just plain creepy, and every now and then, what I assume was a very pointy elbow, would move from one point to another just under the surface of my skin as though it was searching for a way out, ready to poke a hole through as soon as it found a place of weakness in the thin lining of my uterus. And some women say they like this.
They always say there is no pain like child birth, so I guess that's something to agree about. I equate a contraction to what it must have been like to be Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit when he was flattened by the steam roller. It was a slow heavy rolling of pain from one end of my body to the other, and it the steam roller I felt seemed to get heavier and heavier with each contraction.
So yes, there is no pain like childbirth. However, I didn't actually do the birthing part. I tried and tried, but that enormous rib crushing head seemed to be a pelvis crusher as well, and it just wouldn't come out, so on I went to surgery for a c-section. When they started cutting, I felt it. According to what I remember the doctors saying, sometimes the anesthesia doesn't work when you try to restart it; I had an epideral the night before in the hopes that I would sleep until morning, and they'd stopped it a while before I started pushing. Needless to say, the feel of tiny metal blades slicing through my skin didn't hurt, but I could feel every layer of skin opening under the pressure of the scalpel. So, I got knocked out and didn't witness the birth of my daughter. That probably wouldn't have been so bad, had I been the first person to hold her when I woke up, but it seems that every grandmother and great-grandmother in the family was there with open arms before I had the chance to open my eyes.
They say the bond between a baby and its mother happens within the first moments of birth when the child is passed from womb directly to the arms of the waiting mother. Instead, my baby was passed from arm to arm in the nursery while I had my stomach massaged in order to get my uterus to contract. The first word I said when I came out of anesthesia was “stop.” I had thought the pain was supposed to subside when the baby came out, and here I had two nurses who were physically torturing me as I lay in a drug induced stupor in a hospital bed. I finally saw my daughter, but the endless stream of visitors and nurses checking my vital signs left me extremely exhausted, and by the time I left the hospital, I was ready to sleep. Oh yeah, wait a minute, that was supposed to be funny. There's no such thing as sleep when you have a baby at home. So I went home tired, and stayed tired for the last seven years. But everyone knows that sleep is overrated anyhow.
Somehow, that bond that a mother is supposed to have with their newborn was even more retarded by the fact that I couldn't breast feed. This is a skill that some women seem to be born with. They can pop out a boob and have their kid fed and content before someone like me can even think where they last left the container of formula. It took me a few days to figure it out, but the word formula meant a concoction formulated to ease hunger and induce sleep in babies. In mathematics, a formula is something you use to solve a problem. Well, I'll be darned, it's the same thing in motherhood, and I am grateful for it, despite the fact that it simultaneously made me feel like a failure as a woman.
Knowing that the bills wouldn't pay themselves, I was back at work after just four weeks, and my daughter was with either a grandmother or great-grandmother all day. I suppose that didn't help with the bond forming either, and by the time I picked her up at the end of the day, I was already exhausted. I know I loved her, and I would never wish I hadn't had her, but I don't recall enjoying motherhood until somewhere around age four. That is when I realized that this little person, who was actually a part of me, was pretty likable. I sometimes wonder if maybe I just don't like babies, but that would be strange; everyone likes babies. I like babies too, I just really like age four better... and five, and six, and seven.
I suppose some women are just cut out for the duty of motherhood, and they are born with amazing abilities to carry and care for their little ones, without the foreboding shadow of doubt to interfere with their ability to form impenetrable bonds with their babies. Either they are great liars, or they are super heroes who truly do love being pregnant and breastfeeding. It has taken me a long time to love being a mom, but I know I don't need a polygraph to find out if I'm being truthful now.