A nightgown with tiny blue flowers printed all over it, although I haven’t worn a nightgown since I was twelve.
Three pairs of maternity underwear.
A change of clothes.
A small gift pack of cocoa butter lotion and soap leaves for a new mom, given to me by the mother of one of my recently discharged burn victims at the hospital.
An incredibly soft stuffed pig, which Max and I bought years ago, during my first pregnancy, before the miscarriage, when we were still capable of hope.
And my iPod, loaded with music. So much music. While doing my undergraduate degree at Berklee in music therapy, I had worked with the professor who first cataloged the effect of music therapy during childbirth. Although studies had been done linking music to breathing, and breathing to the autonomic nervous system, nothing had been done until that point to formally connect Lamaze breathing techniques to self-selected music. The premise was that women who listened to different music at different parts of labor could use that music to breathe properly, to remain relaxed, and to subsequently reduce labor pain.
At nineteen, I had found it amazing to work with someone whose research had become widespread practice during childbirth. I didn’t realize it would be another twenty-one years before I got the chance to try it myself.
Because music is so important to me, I selected the pieces to use during labor and delivery very carefully. For early labor, I would relax to Brahms. For active labor, when I needed to stay focused on my breathing, I chose music with a strong tempo and rhythm: Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” For transition, when I knew it would hurt the most, I had gathered a combination of music—from the songs with the strongest positive memories from my childhood—REO Speedwagon and Madonna and Elvis Costello and Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” whose angry lifts and falls would mirror what was going on in my body.
I wholeheartedly believe that music can alleviate the physical pain of childbirth.
I just don’t know if it can do anything for the grief.
While I am delivering the baby, I am already thinking that one day I will not remember this. That I will not remember Dr. Gelman talking about the submucosal fibroids that she had wanted to remove before this IVF cycle—a surgery I declined, because I was in too big a hurry to get pregnant—fibroids which are now so much bigger. I will not remember her telling me that the placenta had sheared away from the uterine wall. I will not feel her checking my cervix and quietly saying that I’m at six centimeters. I will not notice Max hooking up my iPod so that Beethoven fills the room; I will not see the nurses gliding in somber slow motion, so different from every giddy and raucous labor and delivery I’ve ever seen onA Baby Story.
I will not remember my water being broken, or how so much blood soaked the sheet beneath me. I won’t remember the sad eyes of the anesthesiologist who said he was sorry for my loss before he rolled me onto my side to give me an epidural.
I won’t remember losing the sensation in my legs and thinking that this was a start, wondering if they could fix it so that I didn’t feel anything at all.
I won’t recall opening my eyes after a knotted contraction and seeing Max’s face, twisted just as hard as mine with tears.
I won’t remember telling Max to turn off the Beethoven. And I won’t remember that, when he didn’t do it fast enough, I lashed out with one arm and knocked the iPod dock station to the floor and broke it.
I won’t remember that, afterward, it was silent.
I will have to be told by someone else how the baby slipped between my legs like a silver fish, how Dr. Gelman said the baby was a boy.
But that’s not right,I’ll think, although I won’t have the recollection.Bertha is supposed to be a girl.And how, on the heels of that, I wondered what else the doctor had gotten wrong.
I won’t remember the nurses wrapping him in a blanket, crowning him with a tiny knit cap.
I won’t remember holding him: his head, the size of a plum. His blue-veined features. The perfect nose, the pouting mouth, the smooth skin where his eyebrows were still being sketched in. The chest, fragile as a bird’s, and still. The way he nearly fit in the palm of one hand; the way he weighed nothing at all.
I won’t remember how, until that moment, I really did not believe it was true. In my hazy dream I spin back one month. Max and I are lying in bed after midnight.You awake?I ask.
Yeah. Just thinking.
About what?
He shakes his head.Nothing. You were worrying,I say.
No. I was wondering,he says soberly,about olive oil.
Olive oil?
Right. What’s it made from?
Is this a trick question?I ask.Olives.
And corn oil. What’s that made from?
Corn?
