A few days ago I found an article in English that was titled quite similar to this one, and without reading it, just with the title, it already caused me a “it’s true”. After a little reflection evoking many of the moments I had lived, I decided that I had to write about that too, and in order not to “get contaminated” by that father’s words, I decided not to read it. So I would have my own reasons to explain to the world how strong and incredible my wife is and, by extension, all women (or the vast majority, I imagine).
That one is receiving from childhood the message that they are the weaker sex because “you hit like a girl”, “you run like a girl” or “you cry like a girl”, “babe”, but when you grow up and see that the girl She is already a woman, and you see her gestate, you see her give birth and you see her nurture, you are forced to surrender to the evidence and ask yourself who knows how many men would be capable of doing the same. And it is that I did not realize how strong my wife was until I saw her give birth (and raise) .
That first delivery that ended in a cesarean section
It was Jon’s delivery, just over 11 years ago. She was 24 years old and I was 26, and we hardly knew what the film was about, but we were quite clear that being young, it was most likely that everything was filmed. But not. After a dilation that was going too slowly they decided to put the epidural to help a little with oxytocin. I was not present, and I was surprised by how she told me after that moment of “Don’t move, darling, I’m sticking a needle in your marrow”, about to have a contraction.
After the epidural came the oxytocin, the baby began to have bradycardias (the heart dropped) and they decided to do a cesarean section . At that time she was alone. They told me that he was going to have a cesarean section and that he had to wait in a room, alone.
She alone, and I alone. I had a bad time? Relatively. Nothing compared to what she was living: Caesarean? Implying? It hurt? Is my baby okay? Where is Armando? Do you know I’m here? Is everything alright? I’m going to die? Will you die?
Two hours later he came upstairs and his whole body was shaking from the analgesia. He wanted to catch Jon, but didn’t dare because he was cold and shivering. I was happy, but pale. I was excited, but scared. And I was nothing more than a young “man” with a baby in his arms and a woman lying on a gurney, with a newly opened abdomen to the entrails and an impressive pile of gauze hiding the obvious.
I remember the days after, asking for my help to heal his wound. “Look to see, Armando, I think someone is getting infected.” His swollen, bruised abdomen, joined from top to bottom like someone closing an envelope, almost like a flap, and all anchored with an infinite number of staples, or so it seemed. There where I had put caresses and kisses there was only a tremendous wound and a lot of staples. Staples. When we were little they told us to stay away from staplers because we could stick one in our finger; and Miriam had almost ten. And instead of saying to me: “Look at my abdomen, what have they done to me”, he asked me to heal him in case one of them was infected, and “come on, lest the child start crying.”
Because all that didn’t matter to her. Do you want to talk about what happened ?, It was a question that flew over my mind and I never asked him. Of course, over time we have talked about it, but not at the time. Only superficially. Because it was not necessary. For her it was just one more detail of the path that led her to be a mother . And that was what was important to her.
Crying, for the cracks in the nipples
The first day they asked her what she wanted to do, whether to breastfeed or not. And she said the chest, but she had not raised it. And once he made the decision, he never let go of it. I remember coming home in the afternoon and seeing her with the house in disarray, sitting on the sofa, with the child in her arms and crying. Crying to see that there was nothing she could do but take care of Jon. Crying in pain from the cracks he was causing. Crying to see that despite the pain, his dedication, being there for him at all hours, his baby kept crying . Crying to see him cry.
I didn’t suggest the option of giving him a bottle, or I don’t remember doing it, but if I had told him he would have said no. Why do you continue if you suffer? Why do you go on if he’s not okay either? There would be no answer. She had decided to do it that way and I was not going to be able to change her mind, whatever she said.
And so we planted ourselves in the month of life, when we realized that he had earned little for all that he had suckled. About 800 grams since discharge for a baby who lived attached to the breasts of a woman who trembled every time she heard him moan, because he knew that seconds later he was going to have to offer her breast between tears of pain .
I realized that what a mother can do for a child, no one will ever do for someone else.
Days later, a surgeon cut a sublingual frenulum that reached the tip of his tongue (thank goodness this has changed a lot now and is not only detected earlier, but is acted upon earlier) after asking him: Are you really telling me, That this child is sucking, that you are not giving him anything else and that he is gaining weight?
It goes without saying that that same afternoon Miriam saw a clearing in the clouds, she sighed and I could swear that she shed some tears of emotion when she realized that she was finally making a breastfeed with little pain.
The second delivery, seven days
If you ask her if she feels like more of a woman, more of a mother, a better woman or a better mother than the others, she may wonder why you ask something like that, of course not, of everything . But I do see it that way. At the very least she’s more of a woman than any man (whatever that means).
The second pregnancy brought us an unexpected surprise. At week 34 the contractions began and in the hospital they decided to try to stop the labor. Each day spent in the womb would be fewer days in the incubator. To achieve this, they prescribed some pills that he had to take every day to prevent the baby from being born already.
And this phrase stuck with him: “Every day inside is several days less in the incubator.” So recorded that it endured a whole week of contractions every 10 minutes , which is what the pills achieved, that they were not effective, that there was no dilation, but without eliminating them completely. And when I say every 10 minutes I mean day and night. One week. Seven days with its seven days and its seven nights. With a nearly three-year-old who still needed her to fall asleep.
“Do they hurt?” “Of course they hurt me. But a lot. I think they hurt as much as labor contractions” (later she confirmed, on the day of delivery, that they hurt the same). He closed his eyes, slept for a while, and began to curl up in bed, moaning, until the contraction went away. He slept for a few minutes, cringed again, complained, and the same cycle again. So until at two or three in the morning he would go to the sofa or sit on the ball for a while.
“Armando, give me a massage please, my back is ruined.” And it was three in the morning. With the lack of sleep that we had been for three years, at those hours sitting in the dining room while the child slept. And I wanted to go back to bed … but what did I say, that I had a dream that was dying? Yes, she had it too, but on top of that she couldn’t sleep because her body was telling her that the baby wanted to go out and the chemistry wouldn’t let her do it (Every day inside is several days less in the incubator).
A week later, the moment came when she couldn’t take it anymore (I still can’t explain how she endured so much) and we went to the hospital, where she still spent twelve more hours to give birth, after stopping taking the medicine. Aran was born, who needed six days of incubator. And she still wondered if she couldn’t have held on a little longer .
Incubator was to go to the hospital continuously to breastfeed, return home, back to the hospital, express milk so that I would give it to her at night, argue with the nurses about not letting her breastfeed on demand, but every three hours, crying for telling him that he was obsessing over it and that he was doing it wrong, and meanwhile trying to continue being a mother to Jon, that the poor man no longer understood why we spent so much time in that place, and trying to be a mother to Aran, with the pain of feeling that he was where he was, left one of his children without his presence.
And the nights of Aran
And so Aran’s nights came, that the first months, perhaps due to the inertia of having spent a week trying to be born without success, decided that to sleep she needed a breast, but not in bed, but in her arms. And not in the arms sitting, but standing. “Like when you moved on the ball, Mom, and you told me to wait a bit to be born. Rock me, Mom, and calm me with your chest.” And she did. She went to the dining room with him so as not to wake Jon, every night, to walk him on her chest. Because in fact that was how she sucked during the day: on the chest, on the move. If not, he cried. And there was no possible consolation.
And then came Guim’s pregnancy, with nausea and dizziness (like being on a boat at all hours) that we thought would end in three months, then maybe four, possibly six, and that we finally understood, and understood, that they would continue until the moment of delivery. Alone at home while I was working outside with two kids and all day staggering or lying on the couch trying to avoid passing out .
The day of delivery? All ills left him and he became a person again.
I didn’t realize it until I saw you do all that and much more
And I have only told you one part, which is the one I remember best because they are the most momentous moments. But all the others are associated with them: the week she was admitted with the little one for a urine infection, she barely slept and when she got home she woke up totally disoriented, dreaming that her son was being taken away, looking for him between the sheets when he was had by his side; the nights spent with the tit out and a child stuck at all times; the long walks with the child in her arms when I had not yet discovered the baby carriers … and all the moments that she has not told me, that I have not seen, that I have lost, or that I no longer remember. Because if all this, which seems so incredible to me, seems to her something like normal, the rest will be nothing for her, a bad little while and that’s it .
That is why when I see women breastfeeding their children while they rock them standing up to sleep, when I see that they carry them and carry them to the teeth, probably with the weight of the whole day on their backs, when they still ask me If that waking up every hour at night can be a problem for the baby, because if it is because of them they are willing to continue like this because they do not want to stop being there for their children, I cannot help getting a little excited . Because I see great mothers. Because I see that we connect in that of loving our children above all things. Because I imagine that I was a baby, and I wish a mother like that.
And be careful, I’m not saying it because I think that all women have to take care of this and those who don’t do it badly. I say this because I am aware that, even if I told them otherwise, they would do the same. Because before asking me, or before I see them, I am sure that there have already been several people who, weighing in their comfort, have wanted to teach them to raise differently, without success.
And Miriam was (is) one of them. Not in a hundred lives would I live the same that she has lived in the last eleven years , so I can only surrender to the evidence that they are the ones who deserve all the admiration and respect of society for being mothers.
They, with their dark circles, their hours of sleep faded, their wrist pain, back pain, neck pain … their physical scars and their psychological scars, those that remain after someone treats them like little girls, when they are doing the greatest thing there is, which is to bring a life to the world .
They, with their days and nights, thinking first of their babies, perhaps of us and then, if that, of themselves. And many, above all, trying to convince us (WE, who have done NOTHING!), That we dedicate a little more time to their children, who are also ours , because they only want us to love them and take care of how they feel that they should do it, because it comes from within.
I never realized how strong Miriam is , and how strong they all are, and everything they do, until she brought our children into the world and cared for them like I would not have known, for sure, in those hundred lifetimes.
Photos | Kelly Sue DeConnick on Flickr, iStock
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