Experiment in the Essay #5: The Most Water-- #52Relentless Files 2017
Watermelon is known to be one of the most rehydrating foods, disproportionately water. My mother gets very excited about the vitamin content of foods, and brings it up every time she eats, like an aperitif cuing the body's proper enjoyment. But when I was sitting bare-assed on the birth stool-- which, if you haven't sat on one, is essentially a toilet seat with the front third removed, supported on three stumpy legs-- leaking water from every exit point, including (I felt) the specks of pores in my inner ear-- my mother kept the vitamin information to herself. She held out, from the dark periphery of the bedroom, a plate with miniature pieces of cut up watermelon. She waited patiently while I shook my head and shook my head and shook my head and then took the tiniest one of the bunch. And left it in my mouth until it became water.
Chewing was for vagina detenta. Not for me at this moment. I had never felt more like an impenetrable membrane, a stubborn baby not dropping down, but whose heart was getting less and less discernible. Ingest one more thing and there would be nowhere for it to go. It would stay in my throat til my grave.
In this long labor with my son, I couldn't believe how much water came out of me, even with no baby in sight. It just kept coming. People moved old towels around under me strategically, the way you might when you're not sure where a raving drunk person will throw up, but want to spare them the further indignity of your preparations. You know those New York City fire hydrants someone slyly unscrews, which heave water onto the sweltering July pavement? It was like that, but from a vagina. Then, even after the significant bursts, there were residual trickles, like happens with those broken faucets your landlord doesn't get around to fix, because he doesn't really care.
My mother was very carefully trying not to say anything about the situation. She was being good. She couldn't have not noticed the color scheme--the fluid had tinges of brown, the baby's first signs of stress. Even so, it was mostly water. We paced the apartment, squatting, me saying, fuck, Jesus. Wow, did it feel great to curse at Jesus, like why didn't you warn me the cross sucked this badly?
Everything was wet, my t-shirt, sheets, the wash clothes, my underwear, which I kept on for a while, men's briefs, their thick waist band.
At my sister's own long labor six months earlier, I watched the nursing team throw out hundreds of chucks pads. I kept wondering how many chucks pads the maternity ward shed per day. How much fluid we were all losing, built up over months. What was the water weight of the things we needed so badly, but immediately disposed of.
Your mind fixates on weird points when your whole body is accommodating the eventual exit of a creature. I kept seeing my mother's dark brown, almost black hair; stark middle part, her wide forehead, her skin mottled, years of peeling. Her thin hair was pulled back in a ponytail, held by a thick rubber band, goodie brand, reliable until it got too stretched out. The laboring woman can or even must get myopically focused on details, like the stitch on a sheet. Details feel like they will save you from blasting apart in the gale force of pain. They are egalitarian, and they are redemptive. You are the night sky or you are the broken telescope. You try to track the tiniest fizzling meteor; it turns out to be a firefly gyrating. You pray to be contained, but also to be more free. Be one-pointed, you remember your meditation teacher saying. But the universe does not fit through the eye of a needle.
My mother had promised if she came to my home birth that she would not cave in to worry, her natural state. She was keeping her promise, a quality of my mother like a functioning clock always strikes midnight. Every so often she would emerge visibly from the periphery, and stroke me in a way she used to do when I was sick as a kid.
Somehow, even when I don't start essays with my labor, they wind up back there. Like the water table, like those tools you use to determine if a shelf you're hanging is flush, like the equator-- we wind up back here. My mother trying not to hover, actively telling herself not to worry.
Once, I lived inside my mother in a sack of fluid, or so the story goes. We forget so quickly that water is our original place.
Everyone must feel that they are fibbed to by the biological creation story, that there was no way they breathed through their belly for all those months, exchanging blood with another body, our escort. It gets no less believable when you do it with your own child. Interstates post state lines, welcome signs, for a reason-- we like to know where we are, even if it all looks the same, even if it doesn't matter, or we're just passing through. The driver can think-- ah, yes, Connecticut. I was waiting for this. In gestation, all the signs have been taken down, or vandalized. The baby doesn't have to know; the mother is taking wild guesses. And in labor, the signs are too small to read, you wish you hadn't faked your DMV eye-test, you wish you could see from fifty feet away what was next, but you can't see anything. You are the pink watermelon flesh trying to see the rind. It's all around you, yet always in your blind spot.
Truth is, there was some generational healing happening at my suddenly derailing labor. When I was inside my own mother, the fluid situation had been poor. She had odd pains related to something undiagnosable. Finally, told by the nurse that she had a stomach flu but sure something else was really wrong, she insisted my father take her back to the hospital. She was 7 months pregnant. Fertility drugs had done the trick. Before they could even stop for morning bagels, the situation escalated. No more substantial than the sack and placenta itself, in a confused mess of primary colors, I was born 10 minutes after they arrived at the maternity ward.
She knows sometimes things go wrong, very wrong. She believes in vitamins. She believes in knowing facts about things to counter all the facts we don't know and cannot control. She believes in holding out tiny bits of what might help, and maybe doesn't hurt.
So my mother held out the watermelon gently, and someone called the ambulance. I did not hear the measured calm of the person on the phone, faking like this was a routine part of a routine labor, giving address, giving stats. I held the watermelon in my mouth, and let it dissolve, and watched my mother step back into the dark, vitamins crackling in the air, my underwear lost in the bedroom mess, the baby less and less and fish and more and more a crisis. There was a hand on my back, we were in motion. My mother kept her promise, gathering my things, calling my father.
Watermelon has the most Vitamin K of any food. We don't talk about K much, it's not a sexy vitamin pushed by the health industry, but those who follow vitamins know it's essential. They are early adapters, and they eat watermelon, feeling vaguely superior. They are rarely thirsty. They give you knowing smiles watching you pop Vitamin C or B while they spit seeds and wipe the pink tracks on their cheeks. They are further along in the alphabet than you are. They will teach your children if you let them, if you birth them.
Watermelon was one of the first foods my mother eventually fed my son, out at their beach house, the summer he was over six months and could try solids. It was love at first bite: he signed mo'-mo', this sweet matrix beyond the vitamin-rich breast milk that had sustained him thus far. He was now in my mother's world, the world of vitamins' poster-children, fruits and vegetables, things that didn't come directly from a leaking nipple, the alchemy of his mother's own fluids.
My mother held him on her lap, where he always slipped down a bit too far; let him eat until his face was covered in pink watery smears. "Watermelon has more Vitamin K than any food," she told him, and herself, proudly. He plunged his tiny hand into the blue fruit bowl, hydrated, happy, and they ate together as a storm rolled in. Fat drops of water beat on the roof, and the scar on my abdomen bulged as if the cloud just then breaking over the roughened bay. I like to watch my mother and son from the periphery. I like to watch her feed him little bits of things. I like rain, and always have, while my mother complains about it and hopes for hot dry days. Watermelon has the most vitamin K; that rain stayed for two days; my son figured out where the fruit was kept and went to the fridge, begging, prying. And in the dark of night when I nursed him to sleep, I kept seeing that plate hovering, and my reluctant hand, taking the only thing my mother could give me.