Mi Vida

Daughter

She’s 16.  Since the process takes 9 months, she was 15 when it all started.  And now she’s going to have a baby.

She’s brave.  Braver than I was then.  Braver than I am now.  15 for me was about running wild through the woods and creeks and camping with friends.  It was about bowling.  Clandestine driving on county roads.  Algebra II.  Big dreams.  The world at your doorstep.

Fighting with my mother, or “becoming independent.”

Because, for some reason I’ve never understood, I was lucky.  I wasn’t raped.

Her mother sits now, at her side.  English is her second language.  She smiles at me as I describe why we need to keep her daughter overnight for extended monitoring, even though she’s very early in labor.  She has another contraction.  Her face barely registers the pain.

Is it because this pain, what many of us consider the most intense experience of our lives, pales in comparison to what she’s already seen?

Mother gets up from the chair to hold her hand.

Two hours earlier, Mother had called me to ask when she should bring her daughter in.  Contractions had been every 5 minutes for a while.  We talked.  I asked some questions, gave some advice.  Here’s what I didn’t ask:  “Do you have a ride to the hospital?”

The nurses learned she didn’t.  They arranged a taxi voucher.

Tonight there turns out to be a lot of questions I should have asked.  A 20-year-old just had her second child. I had seen her in the office a week ago, and asked if she was safe in her relationships.   I asked if the father would be involved.  Yes, and he also lived with her.  I asked, as politely as I could, why she didn’t come earlier to prenatal care than 37 weeks.  What I didn’t ask, in my condensed 11-prenatal-visits-in-one, was “Do you plan to keep this baby? Or will you be adopting the baby to a relative who lives with you and the father of the baby, from whom you are officially separated?”

Sometimes you just don’t think to ask these things.  If you did, you’d open a door into someone’s world that they maybe don’t even want you to know.  Some patients want to hide their pain from the doctor.  But you cannot hide it from your mother.

My aunt posted a picture on Facebook tonight.  It is my grandmother, whom I never met.  She is around 2, holding someone’s hand, clutching a stuffed toy.

She looks EXACTLY like my daughter.  Down to the curls, dark blond.  The small, rosebud lips.  The round, serious face breaking occasionally into a silly, ecstatic laugh.  My daughter carts around a similar toy, called “Creature.”

The other baby, my grandmother, lost her ability to move from the neck down at the age of 25.  She died of pneumonia, after 8 years raising her daughters from a hospital bed, at 33.

Suddenly my eyes burn.  My own girl is tucked into bed, sleeping quietly in that beautiful way she does.  And I brought her into this world, on a day not unlike today, knowing how much it could hurt her.  Her life is a piece of my heart, walking freely through the world.

I saw a flash of myself in the 16-year-old.  Then in the mother’s face, bent low over her daughter, kissing her gently at the crest of the contraction.  The girl goes back to sleep between the pains.

I saw myself older, then, sitting next to a hospital bed, next to a handicapped child, with children of her own.

The phone pulled me out of my reverie.  A different woman’s baby was about to make her debut.  No pants could be found in my size.  The nurses said the baby was in a hurry.  The only options were 2XL. I briefly considered delivering the baby without pants on.  How much worse could it be than delivering one without gloves on?  I’ve done that.

Drawstrings are a nice invention, though.  I rushed into the room and caught the child, and handed her to her mother.

“Ah!”  She cooed, like many of my Latina patients do.  “Mi Amor!  Mi vida!” 

I delivered the placenta.  No one ever says these things about the placenta.

Mother went on.  “Mi amorcita!  Ay, bebe!  Ay, mi vida!”

Yes.  My thoughts exactly.  My daughter.  My beautiful.  My life.