(Not a) C-Section

"we're going to pretty you up down here"

“I prefer words that mean more than one thing. Apprehension: an anxiety or fear that something bad will happen. Apprehension: understanding; grasp. These are the same.” –Johanna Hedva

“We’re going to pretty you up down here” was one of the last things my doctor said to me the morning I gave birth, numb and naked, arms spread, strapped down, a great big T on the table, my body divided by a blue plastic sheet, some weird cross between cross and guillotine, my victim-redeemer complex realized at long last, oh no, in the process of becoming a mother. The floor-to-ceiling windows to the east were all Windex and sunrise, Bruce Springsteen grunted through some dark chords on the OR radio, the baby was crying and breathing on my chest, my husband had out the good camera, and, “I’m going to pretty you up down here!!” Dr. V was talking about the c-section scar I’d had before having a c-section.

What a line, I remember thinking, I’ll have to write that down later. And I did, but when I went back to it, on my smartphone’s Notes App, after weeks of the baby not sleeping and spitting up, and then after months of the three of us alone in a house, our teeth sore from being set to just the right “grin and bear it” edge, it seemed stupid. What was I to do with it? Make a big deal about the weird thing my doctor said as she sewed my uterus back up? Make a big deal about the first doctor who opened me up down there and stitched everything together weird in the first place? Express gratitude that one doctor was looking out for me enough to fix what the other one had botched? Express annoyance that “prettying me up” was even in the cards, even on the table, even in her mind in that post-birth moment, just several minutes after the new baby’s oxygen levels had dipped and the NICU team had come rushing in?

Like, what a line, sure, but what does it say, and what did making much about it say about me?

The thought occupied for me days. One day thinking, here, I will make an Instagram post filled with gratitude about a doctor who Gets. It. i.e., who understands the anxiety around body and beauty and, waving my arms, all of that shit. She knew, after all, about my history with an eating disorder and mental illness. In one of my iphone Notes, I wrote: This doctor took better care of me, when there was a baby involved—not just my own health at stake. It’s not that the scar “looks good,” though that’s nice. It’s that this woman was earnest in her attempts to make me feel as whole a person again as possible after major surgery—

The Note ends there, on the em-dash. I could feel my own manufactured sentimentality set in beneath my armpits. Liar, liar, liar. Cameron, you liar. Why was I always trying to come across so grateful and so put together for the sake of publication, even if it’s just for Instagram? And what did she mean by “prettying me up? When I had never thought the other scar looked bad to begin within? And who, other than myself and Kiernan, was going to be “down there” on the regular anyway? The suspicion that I was trying to smother the way my skin crawled each time I came back to Dr. V’s line, to having the baby cut out of me. Was I using “woman-to-woman” gratitude as sedative? A different Note, on a different day: The relief to no longer to be the girl who needs her insides reworked, and also the inadequacy I feel to have so big a love outside of me, a child in my arms.

True but tempered. Always tempering things like: I got addicted to Percoset while I was a crime reporter, and I’m pretty sure it fucked up my bowels, and that’s why I had to have my insides reworked the first time around. Always tempering things like: Sometimes I have to go sit on the yellow floor by the washing machine and make lists in my head about how this paint and the whirring clothes are here and the dead bodies from the old job are not with code words like “relief,” like “inadequacy.”

Always leaving out the doctor and the words she said, too, the mouth of the other, and my anger around it, leaving my own fucking bad mouth out of it, in the end, too.

Another Note, later, more fleshed out, getting at something: I came away with my first “c-section cut” four years ago when I needed bowel surgery and the doctor decided to go in through my abdomen. Afterward, I wrote a bunch of weird and jaunty poems about having a c-section and no baby and no intention for a baby. When I had Theo, the OB cut along the same incision site. “We’re going to pretty you up down here,” she said from behind the blue curtain, while my heart whined in my throat, no feeling below my chest. I spent some time really looking at this “newer” scar today, and the jagged edges from the original surgery are indeed smoothed out. It is prettier, a proper c-section now, and there’s an infant, desired, sleeping in the next room. I’m not sure what all of this says, probably nothing, just one scar on top of an old one. But the shift inside of me over the past few weeks, I’m trying to find some way to mark it, the weirdness, the fear, the loneliness. The relief to no longer be the girl who needs her insides reworked, and also the inadequacy I feel to have so big a love outside of me, a child in my arms. And still I’m drawn to those old poems, the old jaggedness, that strange self-assuredness that came with it all, even if I can’t feel my way back just yet, or right now, or who knows, maybe ever, ever.

*

I struggle reading these old notes, my old self as text, in the same way I struggle with the layered scars above my pubis: They are palimpsests of private intent and public desire, perhaps once separate, but now entangled. The last note offers vulnerability and self-analysis, inspires connection and sentiment. But it’s also a good draft of an Instagram post, designed for likes, and it filters out the true horror of my first year of motherhood, its confusion of abundant love and things I could not even begin to say in my journals, much less in text that might be read.

I do want this text read. I feel annoyed at, confused about, and—deeper still—held together by my own need to speak of motherhood, and why my son is here, and how I felt when the scar was not a c-section scar at all and I didn’t want a baby yet, and yet I desperately wanted a baby. It seemed as if the first scar marked me, as if after the first cut, a baby seemed to be the one of the only true things I wanted, after all.

Perhaps this was why I first wept reading my caesarean, a collection of personal essays about the experience of having a c-section, finishing it just a few days after we brought the baby home from the hospital, hurting less for a little while on account of the nice stories. But motherhood isn’t just about nice stories, and stories aren’t born only out of good intentions, and sometimes it is hard for me not to blame the mental illnesses of my adulthood on the naïveté of my childhood, how long and deeply I wanted to believe in my own particular version of the princess story arc, which ended not with her arrival at the identity of princess but instead with that of writer and mother, even if she had no real clue about what it meant to publish a book or care for a baby.

My ceasarean played into the fairytale: at the end of these essays of triumph or trauma or something in between—in spite of certain attempts at nuance—birth is cast as the hero’s journey. The mother as hero, the medical establishment as dragon or bumbling sidekick, the birth process as impossible task, the baby as prize at the end. Surely there’s a different way to tell this story, without relying on the same old archetypes, flatter than my body was on the OR table itself?

*

I wanted a baby for a thousand reasons, fantastic and pragmatic, flesh and dream. I did: I wanted a baby as a prize. I wanted a baby as something to hold other than a 30-year-old teddy bear, other than the round bodies of my little dogs. The teddy will disintegrate one day. The dogs will die before me. (Will the baby die before me?) I wanted a baby for the pregnancy, as an excuse to eat and sleep and take long, languorous baths with lavender soap and Epsom salt. I wanted a baby to watch my husband with a baby. I wanted a baby to replace the writing I also wanted to do. I wanted a baby so that I could be the good mom instead of the bad daughter the weird sister the girl sitting just to the side of everyone and everything she ever wanted, mother father sister writer pretty runner lover smart sick healthy writer.

I wanted a baby because I had the scar but not the baby. I wanted the baby because I wanted to quit my PhD program but in a way that would be understood. Or looked down on less than just having dropped out or gotten too drunk and bulimic and crazy to do it anymore. I wanted the baby because I wanted to stay sober. I wanted the baby because my sister’s dog died awfully and suddenly one Christmas, and I was secretly pregnant until the miscarriage made everything real in an awful way. I wanted the baby as a do-over. I wanted the baby because I wanted to love something I had made, that wasn’t all about me, but was, too, absolutely, I have the scar and dead feeling to prove it, don’t I?

*

When I read that last section out loud to my husband, writing this for part of my dissertation, I cried.

I felt vicious about crying, thrown off the anger-gratitude Instagram axis, and desperate, in the last year of my PhD, to let my doctoral committee members know this isn’t just a story about myself, that it is also a story about the medical profession’s destitution of real empathy, on the one hand, and a story about women taking care of women, on the other. But neither storyline completely fit, and I had a whole pandemic to stew over the feelings beneath the line, what the doctor said, and how my body felt down there anyway. How my right hip flexor lost its feeling with the first scar, a weird dead zone between mid-pelvis and hip-bone, how I couldn’t bear to have it touched, during showers or sex, that swath of lumpy tissue, how my own skin felt like nothing.

*

I wrote about the first (not a) c-section scar, too, several months after the bowel surgery that necessitated it, for a short read-aloud session in a nonfiction workshop. I was showing up to my third year of grad classes blurry from Klonopin, the only thing that eased the anxiety enough for me to leave the house, but of course I was taking the little 0.5 milligram pills by the fistful rather than one at a time. Why was I so anxious? There were no crime scenes, no deadlines, no dead anything. There was a lovely husband, a lovely house, some friends, a vocation. My rectum was newly sectioned, tied like a bow to my sacrum to keep it from falling out of me when I shat. I don’t really want say it more nicely. For the nonfiction class, I wrote and read fuzzy-mouthed out loud to the group:

The first gastroenterologist I meet, two days after my 28^th birthday, scolds me for my eating disorder. The second does a colonoscopy and, afterwards, says words like polyps, inconclusive, cancer, crohn’s. I think of old women, the witches from the book of fairy tales that my cousin and I read as children, hobbled and bumpy, everything sagging. The third doctor has just become a grandmother. She is tall, with a straight back and straighter ponytail. She says IBS, rectal prolapse, bowel reconstruction. “But there’s no need to live with unnecessary pain,” she says. “I can help.”

It was not untrue, but it was not quite true either. The first doctor who I wrote “scolds me for my eating disorder” didn’t really scold. Or, at least, she never really came right out and said this—this pain, this problem, this shitting your pants as a 20-something, this inability to eat anything without needing to wear a diaper or heavy black leggings—is your fault. Your eating disorder’s fault, your addiction’s fault. She never insinuated anything with the words she said. Her “scolding” was more of a feeling of judgment, the way she looked at me, or didn’t look at me, in her square little Omaha office, the way she only looked at her chart, or her computer, the data of me, the medical “history” of me, instead. The scolding continued in the way the second doctor dropped “polyps, inconclusive, cancer, crohn’s” so casually, so dismissively, did she not know or did she just not care the way those syllables would light fires in my brain? The scolding was in her lack of answers about what might be wrong, and what needed to be done to fix it. In the workshop story, I finally cast the third doctor as the hero—third time’s the charm—the one who could help me, and give me all the hope, and pragmatism, and healing that “good” medicine is supposed to offer.

But why did I leave out the messy ending? The third doctor’s dissolving stitches that did not dissolve, the scar that healed but not fully?

The fairy-tale of “the three” would be marred later, anyway, by the fourth doctor who would come along for the real c-section cut, to “pretty up” what the third had manhandled.

Now the story has changed, but I’m not fully sure into what, other than into a string of disappointing women doctors and me, mad over trying to find desire’s coherence in a scar.

*

The poem I wrote after my bowel surgery, the one I thought seemed self-assured:

Not A Baby

You aren’t, I said to my c-section.  
You are still my own.
You are still what opens
if ever my colon needs to 
be retied like a shoelace to 
my sacrum. Or if the doctor
wants to cut away another
nine inches of ileum. 

I lied that I could look at you,
even lying down
skin stretched half smooth. 
The dog sits by the sofa
and sulks over your stitches.

The lines don’t seem confident to me now so much as sad, so much as craving a baby without saying they’re craving a baby.

Am I always reading into things that don’t mean what I think they do? A point of accusation in the fights with my father as a kid, and maybe not one of his unfair ones. A point I keep pricking my thumb on, waiting for blood—when have I been a victim, and when I have let the suspicion that I might be one cast a shade over the real world and the people in it? And how do I trust the stories I end up telling myself and, god forbid, others, later? It’s never been just one thing, not with the doctors, not with the scar, not with my illnesses, not with my son.

But I so badly wanted birth to be just one thing, for just a little while, and so I wrote in the Instagram caption announcing the baby simply “Theo, 1.14.20, Love.” One line under a picture of my face kissing his perfectly capped head, the photo cropping out everything and everyone else, prettied up or not

Power lines as how my arms felt during my c-section.

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