The Sack of Potatoes

Pain, pressure, fear. Exhaustion.

My baby is almost here. Failure edges into my thoughts—am I pushing enough? I can hear the doctor using language that’s coded in medical-ese. She’s not really talking to me, just to the nurses around me. But what does it mean when they say the baby’s in distress? The umbilical cord is wrapped around where?

I can’t do this. I feel so alone. The spotlight’s on me, but I’ve forgotten my lines and I don’t know how to ad lib what I’m supposed to do.

My ears ring with a shout. Not mine—I’m silent. I only speak when the nurse speaks to me. It’s not like in the movies—I’m not wailing or grabbing people or twisting arms off. Instead, I am gritting my teeth to concentrate. There’s so much concentration required for what seems like such a simple act. Pop out a baby, right? Women do it all the time.

Grit teeth. Breathe. Push.

I stay silent. Keep in my pain. Don’t want to be a stereotype, a cliché of “woman giving birth.” I’m not that person.

So, when there’s a high-pitched cry, I know I’m not the one who gave it. It’s her.

She’s here. She’s alive. I’ve done it. My whole body floods with warmth—relief.

Yet I’m crying too. Tears are rolling silently down my cheeks, and I almost don’t notice. But they make my nose run, and I sniff. I can’t reach the Kleenex box on the side table. It’s tantalizingly out of reach. So, I sniff and cry and try not to let my nose drip.

The crying is relief. And shock. And disbelief.

It takes a moment before they hand her to me. They have to check her vitals, unwind the cord from around her thin neck. Make sure she doesn’t need oxygen. The seconds feel like minutes, the minutes like hours. Did I fail her already? It’s too soon. She just arrived. How can I have failed her already?

I’ve spoken the question out loud. “No,” they tell me. “She’s fine.” But my mind buzzes with exhaustion. Fear. Panic.

Deep breaths. Maybe the nurse smiles at me, or maybe the smile is just in her voice when she says, “Your daughter,” and hands me a warm bundle of cloth. They’ve already wrapped her in a small white cotton blanket with a blue and pink stripe as its only decoration. Her head is covered in a machine-knitted cap that also contains the blue-and-pink stripe theme.

She’s so small. My touch is tentative on her. Fuzz of soft hair on her skin. She’s stopped crying and her eyes are closed tightly. The room is bright and warm, like sitting under the sun. I’m sweating and feel like I’ve just run a marathon. But to her, it must be cold after nine months of safety.

What a rude entrance into the world. It’s a good thing we forget the process of childbirth as a baby. It’s an awful, painful thing as a mom, but what a horrible experience it must be for the child. Like someone smothering you and shoving you at the same time. No wonder some people end up claustrophobic in life.

I trace a finger along the edge of her cheek. She’s wrinkly, like fingers and toes after a bath. There is no instant love, and guilt races through me because she seems like an alien creature that has nothing to do with me. She’s strange and small and I’m scared of dropping her. Harming her. Is my hand supporting her enough? Will I be able to take care of this little person, so small and fragile? Why the heck would they let someone like me have someone like her?

I feel like an imposter, as if she’s someone else’s child. I don’t know what to do or how to act. I am her mother, but there’s no guidebook. Only a terrible fear that I’ll do something terribly wrong.

Fear eats up my thoughts. Not love, but fear. I’m supposed to cherish this small sack of potatoes, but I really don’t know how.

The soft buzz of advice filters through the room. The nurse, telling me to put her against my chest. “Skin to skin contact is best for bonding,” the nurse tells me.

I follow her advice, but it feels strange. This tiny bundle against me. Almost like holding a doll. I’m just pretending at this mother-daughter thing as the others in the room coo over how cute she is. I don’t disagree, but I’m finding it hard to agree too. She looks like a baby. Head, fingers, toes. The usual. I don’t see anything unique about her.

Eventually, we’re separated. She’s brought to the distant land of bassinets and they bring me to another room, where I get some sleep.

But a hospital is an omnipresent hive of activity, and my stay there is no different. I’m woken up regularly, given medication for after. My baby returns to me, delivered in a clear plastic crib on wheels by the kind-faced staff.

I know I’m supposed to connect with my daughter. She seems to already know who I am—when I hold her, she quiets down and doesn’t cry. When I bring her next to my skin, she seems to snuggle in. Perhaps she knows more about this motherhood thing than me—she certainly seems to know what part she’s supposed to play. I’m still at a loss.

I go to a class given by the nurses about how to care for my baby. It reminds me of the pregnancy classes that I took, with their step-by-step instructions about what to do when giving birth. As if one could plan for all the eventualities and make this event as safe as possible while also telling women they should “experience the natural pain of childbirth” in order to be “closer to your child.”

Honestly, I found most of the info from the pregnancy class useless. I wasn’t planning on a home birth or one without drugs. That seems like the silliest way to have a baby. Why go through this life-changing experience in terrible pain? When is it, the Dark Ages? I almost feel that people pressure women to not take advantage of modern conveniences because they secretly want women to suffer more. To be taught some sort of lesson. “You earned this,” I can picture them saying. “This one’s on you.”

But here we are. I learn how to give my baby a bath without drowning her (“Don’t walk away from the baby ever”). Seems a little obvious.

Then I learn about feeding her. I’m told how it’s my choice what I want to do. But, in the same breath, the nurse tells me breastmilk is best.

Seems obvious as well. Open baby mouth, insert milk.

When I nurse her, she looks up at me, one tiny hand curled against my skin. Her blue eyes are clear and unblemished and trusting. Time slows down and our eyes meet.

I remember this moment a week later after she gets colic and cries for most of the night. I remember it a month later when she’s chubby and gurgling as I change her diaper and she pees all over the table while her bum is exposed, and I have to bite my lip to prevent groaning from frustration. Or several months further on, when she wears more of her blended peas and carrots in her hair than got into her mouth, and I sigh and wipe her up with a damp cloth and prepare her bath again.

But you know what? The one point in time I don’t remember is when it happened: when my heart opened to her. She’s no longer a stranger. I have a hard time remembering what it was like when I didn’t have to wake up in the middle of the night to feed her or change her diaper. While inconvenient, none of these moments are real inconveniences at all.

Because inconvenience is from before. Before she was mine. Before I loved her, my little sack of potatoes.