Page 18 - WTP Vol.X#1

A Birth Primer (continued from preceding page)
What’s best is “the death without pain at all,” press- ing their chests before they draw a breath. Keep them from cold and claws. Use kindnesses so instinctive they rush to help like faith.
Above all, do not dwell on their faces. As much as possible, do not touch them.
Go home with the baby you fiercely love. If all goes well, you will be forgiven.
LaMaze 2
In a room set aside in a neighboring town’s commu- nity center, my wife and I attended a demonstration class. Six couples followed a woman’s directions about how to control pain through a loved one’s sup- port and the mother-to-be’s practiced panting each time the pain of a contraction reoccurred.
Lesson Four: Why SIDS is More Likely
From sleeping on the stomach or side. From sleeping on a soft surface.
From lying face down on a fluffy comforter, a soft mattress or a waterbed.
From sharing a bed with parents, siblings, or pets. From being too warm while sleeping.
From being premature.
Revisiting the Legends
In the stories retold for centuries, a child is raised by wolves; others are nurtured by baboons or a mis- cellany of friendly forest creatures. Yet once, at the college my wife and I had attended, a student, with- out the subsidy of folklore or religion, gave birth in the privacy of her spring break dorm room, then
wrapped and disposed of that child inside a week’s worth of clean sheets and towels. For years, the story was passed down to every dorm resident. After de- cades passed, it became something like a legend.
LaMaze 3
Sometimes, in the car, when a radio song began, I would choke my wife’s thigh just above her knee, and she would startle, then pant until I relaxed, watching the highway with one hand on the wheel, gripping her again near the end of the radio’s song, that inter- val a sign of urgency, that contraction insistent with imminence, and she would close her eyes for the darkness of realism, riding tensed and blind in the passenger seat, poised for the claw that demanded her practiced, rapid breathing.
What We Disagreed On
Whether she should be driving when I clutched her thigh.
Whether my refusal meant I was cautious or con- trolling.
The Impossible
A local woman gave birth in her bathtub, then al- lowed her newborn daughter to drown. She told
her boyfriend to carry the baby outside and stuff it deep and fully covered in their garbage can, “Now I lay me down to sleep,” the boyfriend testified he had prayed over the baby’s body when he had wrapped it in plastic and buried it under leaves rather than plunging it in garbage. To show his concern for the child, he said. To show he wasn’t heartless, not like his girlfriend who’d also stuffed toilet paper down the baby’s throat. “Blue,” he said. “The toilet paper was light blue,” as if he needed, just then, to colorize death.
The Possible
“None of those stories have anything to do with us,” my wife said. “Worry about the possible if you have to worry.” My wife’s mother, when she visited, lapsed into the story of a relative who had brought home her healthy baby, nursed it nine days, and then dropped it. “Nine days,” she said, like it was the title of a book we should read. “The baby died.”
Runway
When a gate across the airport service road was left
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