The Pillow
BY AMY BERKOWITZ.
Every night I have the same thought. I’m getting comfortable in bed, pulling the covers up, positioning the pillow the way I like it, so my neck and head are resting on it and my shoulders are on the mattress, and then I remember.
At some point during labor, after they’d given me the pitocin and the epidural and I was supposed to be “resting” — but the epidural wasn’t working and I could feel pain in half of my body and my entire body felt itchy so I was just lying there, half asleep-half awake, enduring these sensations — somebody thought I might be more comfortable if I had a pillow.
Two midwives came and tucked a pillow behind my shoulders. I like it just under my neck, I said. No, they said, that can’t be right, you must mean you want it under your shoulders, and they left it there and walked away.
I think about that every night — it’s the perfect example of what was wrong with the whole experience: Nobody listened to me. Even though they were midwives, not doctors, even though they were women, not men. Even about a pillow.
Drink This
BY AMY BERKOWITZ.
After I’d been awake for two days and pushing for four hours, after the doctor realized four hours too late that the pitocin wasn’t working, that I’d been moving the baby down the birth canal by sheer force of will, she said to me: You don't want a C-section, so we’re going to vacuum the baby out.
I was very tired, but I knew there was something wrong with that sentence. This was the doctor from the empowering midwife-led practice. She was trying to empower me, I suppose. But I'd never told her I didn't want a C-section, and I was outraged that she felt like she could tell me what I wanted, she felt like she knew what I wanted. It's true that a C-section wasn’t my first choice, but it was certainly preferable to trusting this person to vacuum my baby out of my body while I gave “just a few more really strong pushes" as I was falling asleep between contractions. I knew it wouldn't be safe.
Once I insisted I wanted a C-section, everything sped up. It felt like we were starting a new scene in a play. Get the scenery in place, the props, the actors. Doctors and nurses rushed in and out of the room. I was rushed too, to get up, change into a different gown, get ready to go to the OR. A young nurse I hadn’t seen before handed me a plastic cup and said, drink this. What is it, I asked. She explained what it was and told me that it might make me throw up, but that I should drink it. It had something to do with preparing for the surgery. I know she must have been an adult but she looked like she was seventeen. I took the paper cup and drank the liquid and immediately threw up, and everyone looked at me like, oh yeah, she threw up, and kept rushing around.
Waiting
BY AMY BERKOWITZ.
I was lying on the table waiting for the C-section to start, and then I saw the doula jump out of her chair and race across the room. The baby was already out of my body but the doctor hadn’t told us he was starting the procedure. Instead of narrating the birth like he'd promised he would — now I’m making the incision, now I can see the baby’s head — he sliced me open and plucked her out of my numb body without saying a word. In the moment I was just stunned and grateful it was over — by this point, I’d been awake for two days. But in the months that followed, I felt a lot of grief over the fact that I never experienced giving birth. I didn't care that it was a C-section, I'd just wanted to be there when it happened.
She was there, she was pulled out, she felt the opening, the cold air, the doctor’s hands, but I didn’t feel anything. I wasn’t there. I didn’t know I was giving birth. I thought I was waiting.
Amy Berkowitz is the author of Gravitas (Éditions du Noroît / Total Joy, 2023) and Tender Points (Nightboat Books, 2019). Her novel manuscript was longlisted for the 2023 Santa Fe Writers Project Award, and now she's working on a second novel that she likes to call Untitled Bisexual Jumpsuits Project as well as a nonfiction thing. They live in San Francisco, where they cohost the Light Jacket Reading Series. Find Amy online at amyberko.com and on Instagram @helloberko.