To The A-Hole In The Pool Lane, Before My Cesarean
When I was 8 months pregnant and my rogue pinky toe was broken, a lane-hogging swimmer, an older man with a bushy mustache and an algae bloom of chest hair, tapped my shoulder blade percussively as I clung to the pool wall after completing a lap. "Maybe you should go in the slow lane instead?" He suggested, huffing his water droplets all over me.
"Or maybe you should go in the asshole lane?" I replied, as if trying out the next general theory of matter. In it, people like him would show unprecedented atomic density. I held up fake binoculars and sought bluer pastures across the plastic separators.
His black fins sent torrents of water sloshing over the perimeter of the pool, making it impossible for someone to swim even a near distance behind him. Would you swim in the wake of Cuisinart blades? The asshole always needs to make a splash.
He blinked, pushed off the wall, and began his next flailing lap, propulsed by his self-righteousness, which was as pronounced and visible as an Achilles tendon. As a slightly anemic and very pregnant person, it took me as long to catch my breath as it had to swim the 25 yards. Maybe he was right.
My overstretched bikini bottom (but do you honestly buy another one this late in pregnancy? My theory is always: no) dragged behind me when I dove under the water, and the refracted light was a coronation on no one, nothing. I loved that moment before I ran out of breath, which would go on to characterize 98 percent of my birth.
In truth: the asshole lane is open longer than all of the others and is always crowded, because every row is theirs and (your) time is nothing (and not in the liberating way) to them. They are not hard to spot, like a hammerhead shark in a jelly jar. Most are ableist, sexist, and notably horrible at the breaststroke. The dividing line painted down the middle of the pool floor-- which stands for basic principles of sharing & caring -- is irrelevant. Why notice what doesn’t apply to you?
I’ve heard that same tone of surety when (some!) OB's in the MIC speak to clients, or to me. Pretending to be a lifeguard, their suggestions are too often demeaning threats. In order not to drown, we might contort around their ego’s deliberately exaggerated and space-hogging crawl. Or we accept the ladder they are holding out, despite not having signed up to be saved.
My baby hung from my belly in the water, the weight lifted off my back and legs, and my uterus felt, briefly, like it could evade the ravages of gravity. I tried to focus on the beautiful things behind and ahead and the sharp peck of chlorine in my nose. I imagined all the children who had peed here, their low-grade biohazard (parenting, you realize pee is the least worrisome bodily fluid) dissipated by the paradox of harsh chemicals that keep us, the public, somehow healthy enough.
It's a terrible thought that you might not make it to the end of the lane, to the touching of the wall that weeps differently, to your recovery breaths. That you might not recover. It's a terrible thought that, confident you could cut through the sensations, you might just dematerialize, decompose, drift apart like spit fronds in a rushing river.
But assholes energize me. No sooner had he made his next pivot than I lapped him. Mild Anemia be damned. My baby, whoever they were, should know how to handle assholes too. And definitely never to be one. As he crashed towards me, panting, more donkey than dolphin, I tapped his shoulder blade (like unto like) before he completed his final stroke. Should I pee right there, to highlight my announcement? What could he do? The chlorine would not protect his dignity.
"I'm 8 months pregnant, asshole," I reported. "How fast would you swim if you were carrying three chain-saws?” I pushed off with the non-broken foot, and began a languorous doggy paddle just ahead of him, moving slowly, awkwardly and flaccidly enough that each palm, on its downstroke, gave effleurage to the baby's uterine domain. He spluttered at me. I was a Noh performance, on quaaludes. He could wait.
Originally, I planned to give birth at home in an inflated pool, perfect blue, the plastic elephant in the room. Instead, half-submerged in the lukewarm water, I felt like someone was driving a stake up into my pelvis. “ASSHOLE!!!!!” I might have yelled at God, who quietly made more room for me to be me in our shared aqueduct.
At the darkest midnight of my labor, where I expected to experience a deep surrender to the tide, everything felt crass, debilitated, sharp. The wrong direction, the wrong texture. But wasn’t I in the optimal medium for the smooth, fleshy baby to wrangle its way out, traveling from original waters to expressly recruited tap waters? Wasn’t my body sort of made for this?
In those brutal hours begging for mercy in the birth pool, I cried: the fucking waterbirth website lied! If this is reduced pain, what is pain? If this is maternal satisfaction, what is misery? The water trembled, my husband gave counterpressure like a boulder gives to the earth, but the baby–yield and breathe and holler and whistle-blow as we might– would not change lanes. There was no other lane but the one we were traveling.
Later I knew: it was too slow. I was too slow, then too fast, too fast. Later I understood: the light was coming through anyway, dazzling, dappling, broken, salvatory, an invisible coronation. The baby was not supposed to come out in that context. The asshole was not supposed to make way for me, nor was his wake supposed to christen me as anything lesser than a powerful being encasing a powerful being, albeit in an underwhelming nylon bikini. Sometimes, the pace is not up to us. Sometimes, our most heroic gesture is to swim in the other direction, displacing the space our old self was suspended in.
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AFTERWORD
**Because I’m a labor doula, I want to differentiate my experience from the data: the waterbirth website didn’t lie at all. There are many deeply positive effects of laboring and birthing in water. However, we can feel betrayed in our birth when our experiences differ radically from what we hoped or expected. I would recommend waterbirth to someone who is interested and for whom that is a safe option. My first baby experienced a cord prolapse, a very rare medical emergency, and was born (thankfully safely) by emergency cesarean after a homebirth transfer.