April - The Flood 13 страница

Jasmine got in at the edge of the bed, and Gerard had wanted to be in the middle this time. He wrapped his body around Jasmine's and placed his palm on her stomach again. He kissed her forehead, and whispered something into her ear. She turned over and smiled at him, and then they kissed for some time. I ran my hands down Gerard's back and waited until he turned over to see me. We kissed too, and I took his hand and I placed it on the center of my chest. My heart beat beneath his palm and I placed my free hand on his face. I moved my thumb to over his mouth, so I could feel his breath come out in small bursts. Jasmine hand reached out and did the same to me. We turned ourselves into this giant human knot, all touching and holding one another, holding our lives within our hands. I began to understand and feel what Lydia was talking about. We all had the same collective unconscious, our own memories stretched out and out forever, and we all bleed the same time. We all spoke the same languages, and we kissed one another using the same tongues. I couldn't see a difference between my body and hers or his, and we all linked our hands like five-pointed stars and then collapsed them into a tight clasp. We were all irrevocably linked, Jasmine had said. I believed it - really believed it - now. When we fell asleep, I swore we were at the top of the tower, our hands reaching towards the sky, and eventually becoming it.

May - Gold

"This is a gift. It comes with a price."
Florence and the Machine, Rabbit Heart

Chapter One

I went to Jasmine's first class with her on a Monday. I was able to take the afternoon off, though I had now started the full time schedule at work. My days were still very much formulaic and resembled training, so I didn't feel as if I was missing too much. The management I usually reported to seemed impressed with my work, too, and knew that my morning output usually equaled or surpassed most other employees' entire day. It was still strange to hear praise from my bosses, especially since I didn't care about the work whatsoever. I put numbers into a computer all day it seemed. I had shut off my brain for that. What I did care about was Jasmine and that first class, and I practically vibrated as I waited for the afternoon to come.

The class we were attending was usually right around the time I got off from work, but since Jasmine was going to also be seeing the ultrasound technician just before it started, she wanted me to pick her up then. Although she wanted me to be with her for the class, I was surprised when she went into the ultrasound room alone. All the paint from the mural had come off of her belly after the second day, so she wasn't worried about flustering the person there. I wasn't sure why I was barred from one place of this center but not the other, but decided to not press the issue. It was disappointing, but at least I had finally gained entrance to this place. The alternative birthing center was a lot better than any waiting room. They didn't even really have a waiting room. There were no corners of chairs with outdated magazines for me to look at or bad music filtering through a system. There wasn't even a door for the ultrasound place; the entire birthing center didn't seem to have any doors but the front one. From there, Jasmine and I had walked into a large, pinkish room that then extended to a bunch of different hallways and directions to go. We went to the left when we got there, and instead of having a large lounging area where the ultrasound was, there was just a small lobby where Jasmine went to check in, and then was ushered away into the back. The "back" was really a large curtain where she and the female technician then became shadows, and I was told to go back to the large room, and choose another path.

To my right, there was a library and I figured that was the safest place for someone like me in this place. I walked into a small, cramped room with overstuffed chairs and someone at the desk to check out materials (the old fashioned way - with a card and a due date at the back stamped on). Every inch of the walls was covered, whether it was stacks and stacks of books, or posters and other information material. There were wall charts of babies inside women, and other typical mother and parenting resources, but there were also some outlining family structures that I had never seen before (blended, extended, nuclear, single, and matrilineal). There were small charts describing parenting styles and how to discipline kids (Authoritarian, Propagative, Freeranger, Neglectful, and Slow Parenting). There were also health charts that had the vegan food pyramid that Jasmine had told me about before, and then a list of craving and what that meant you needs in terms of vitamins and minerals (fatty and salty foods? Calcium. Chocolate and peanut butter? Magnesium). I spent more time following along with the sex/gender/identity differences in charts that displayed each as a separate and distinct category in multiple colored bubbles; there were also health charts that fascinated me about what physical changes happened with each sex hormone. From there, this expanded out to the list of different pronouns people could use (ze? Hir? I tried to say these in my mind but failed miserably). I was completely enthralled by now. There was more on the walls than on the shelves. I was gradually making my way around the room merely reading what was in front of me until I finally hit the front desk, where a woman in a cardigan, her tattoos peaking out, and thick rimmed glasses, smiled and said "Hello" to me. After greeting her back, I noticed the last of the visual aids in the room: a sign on her desk that said - Shhhhh, Reading; another poster in behind that read ASK FOR PRONOUNS, and another beside it declaring: Never Assume The One That Carries Is The One That Raises. I thought of Hilda for the last card, and how she had lamented non-stop about how everyone would always ask her the sex of her baby and when her baby was due, only to tell (while becoming more and more enraged) that this wasn't her kid. I had never realized, even in my own mind, how often I merely assumed a pregnant person meant a mother. I was floored by this room and just by the sheer number of my perceptions that were changing just from wall charts. I couldn't even imagine if I were to go into the library and begin to look around, just what I would find.

I had doubled back to the vegan food pyramid, realizing I really needed to eat more fruit, when Jasmine came out. She was smiling from ear to ear and shoved an ultrasound photo in her bag. She took my hand and began to bring me to the classroom. Though she was radiating with how happy she was, she didn't want to say anything. Instead she told me that Vivian was expecting us for dinner afterwards. That was when I knew she had found out something good, and this was another surprise that she could share with all of us at once. I hugged her shoulder with my hand and we walked into Lydia's Lamaze and Alternative Birth seminar. The name sounded so fancy that I almost expected a seminar room like the ones I had been in for art history in college. Instead, it was more like a primary classroom. Although there were chairs lining the backs of the walls that people could take down and sit on, there were also couches and cushions that people opted for. Everyone sat on the carpeted floor in a semi-circle in front of Lydia, who stood with a chalkboard behind her. There was also a projector/computer display that she apparently only used very rarely when she wanted to demonstrate something scientific, like an actual birth.

"That was what she had shown us the first day," Jasmine said, with a laugh. "She said she needed to debunk the myth that birth was beautiful and all roses and that little birds come and greet you as you bring new life into this world. No, it's actually quite bloody and gross, you usually end up tearing yourself a bit - though it feels like you've ripped yourself in two, and more often than not you shit yourself."

"Really?" I gasped. Jasmine rolled her eyes and nodded. Apparently I was still used to the televised births that somehow produced clean infants and mothers who were ready to get up and take care of them shortly after. The others I was used to seeing didn't suffer from postpartum depression, didn't tear their vaginas and then get infections from stitches, and didn't have to deal with the embarrassment of shitting themselves from pushing too hard. I had a lot to learn, clearly, as Jasmine had as well. She kept telling me more about the first class and how Lydia had been just brutal. She had wanted to get rid of all the wonderful lovey-dovey and gooey notions of birth that had happened form television; she needed to in order to have a critical audience in her classes. She had read out a lot of facts and shown some brutal images, and the entire class had been just soul-crushing, according to Jasmine. They weren't always going to be bringing in this wonderful life into the world. Sometimes it was just blood and gore and death. Still births. Breech births and umbilical cords around necks. Sometimes, it was just a horrible experience and it just sucked. It had only been in the last one hundred years that the leading cause of death for women was not child birth, and even then, the US still had a ridiculously high infant mortality rate. Compared to countries like Canada and some in Europe, it was staggering.

"So if she told you all of this stuff, why do people stay? Why do you stay?" I asked. If I had heard all of this for the first time, and knowing I was pregnant, my god…I would probably get rid of it. It sounded like too much to handle. But Jasmine now was past "the point of no return" as she called it, and it wasn't like she hadn't considered the other option.

"I think I would have been more likely to not reach this point if I had not gone to that class, or found Lydia, honestly," she confessed. "At least here, she is honest. She tells me pain is normal and that I'm going to be uncomfortable and that this sucks. If I had a doctor telling me I was fine half the time, I would kick him in the teeth. I don't feel fine. But I'm not supposed to."

"Then why are you doing this?" I asked, biting my lip. I didn't know if I was going into territory that I shouldn't have been. She was keeping the baby, after long and arduous talks, she was. She would tell me when her sleep was getting disturbed and the fact that she wanted to sleep all afternoon, her odd food fixations (which I now knew were magnesium and iron deficiency!), and some back pains, but she never really dwelled on her condition too heavily. But hearing her talk sounded like she was really in pain - or was anticipating being in real pain. I was still operating with old perceptions of birth. I imagined that glow that was all around her (which was there, I knew, but it wasn't because she was pregnant that she radiated, it was because she was Jasmine) and I imagined people giving up their seats for her, fawning all over her, treating her wonderfully. But she had hid the pregnancy for so long and her employers had taken it somewhat well. They were mostly worried about the technicalities of having both editors off on maternity leave and didn't want to hire anyone yet. Everything was still up in the air. I realized this entire process was causing more difficulties than miracles, and Jasmine was not brainwashed by popular culture.

So my brain was still asking, why on earth do this? She had told me about Gerard, about how bringing a kid into the world where he existed seemed okay. Her doubts had harboured with the state of the world before, and that had been somewhat cleared up. Now these doubts and fears were held within the act of pregnancy and birth. It ruined her body and was not beautiful. So why?

She considered my question awhile. "Lydia said on the first day, after she had told us that these were the facts and this is what was going to happen to us, that even in spite of all of this knowledge, people still choose to have babies. Choose is an operative word here. It had to be a choice in order to understand what the repercussions were. And though giving birth is not this magical process that the world can sometimes make it into, it certainly feels that way sometimes. After the fact, usually, when you look back. Hindsight always makes things seem more beautiful than they really were. So long as you know that, there is nothing wrong with that. Some people want that little story they can reflect on. Others don't. There wasn't anything wrong about either option. The whole thing was a journey, and a process, and by the end of it, there could be something good. I guess..." she trailed off, looking around the room at the charts and the audio equipment, and then back to me. "This just made sense. I wanted to see what I could do, and I knew that it was possible to make something beautiful out of this by the end of it. With... well, you know."

She began to get embarrassed. People were coming in now and taking their seats with us on the carpeted floor. She was talking about Gerard, I knew, and I just put my arms around her and nodded into her neck. This was going to be gory and awful and painful, but we could try to hold things up to the light and see what we could reflect through. I kissed her on the forehead, and we dropped the topic for now.

I was nervous for the class. I didn't want to be read as Jasmine's husband, especially since I had not been to the bulk of the classes. I did not want that to reflect badly on me, even though it had been Jasmine who told me not to come (I could totally understand why, now, realizing how vivid and telling Lydia was - I would have run screaming from the room). Apparently she and Hilda used to partner up a lot, and there had been some classes where Lydia had forbidden any partners from coming just so the pregnant people could talk to one another about the aches and pains in their joints, the certain nuances they were getting used to with their body, and the acceptance/disapproval from places of work. When partners had been needed or used, Hilda enjoyed being with Jasmine and they would have a lot of fun doing role reversal where one would get to pretend to be not pregnant for a while. Hilda enjoyed pretending her seven month - nearly eight - gut was a beer belly and would slap it regularly as she pretended to be not pregnant. Hilda knew that I was coming to class today, and this time had brought in Brian and Ryan, the baby's adoptive fathers. It was surreal seeing a gay couple - a married gay couple (they had gone to Vermont) living together in the typical white picket fence, American Dream. They both worked in business jobs, knew one another and Hilda vaguely in high school, but never really "clicked" according to Brian until third year university, taking the first year economics course. Neither one knew anything about numbers or figures now because they had been too into one another. After finishing school and finding jobs, they moved in, and then ran into Hilda again at one of her workshops (on Safe Anal Sex, of course). Now, with her help, they were making their family complete. Although gay, they were very normal in every single other regard, and it was not a fact that Hilda let them forget. "Unless they walk around with one another's dick in their mouths, no one has a fucking clue they're fucking," she had confided to me before the class began, and it was hard not to disagree. They even came in separately, having different commuting times and enough money to afford two cars and they sat stiffly in the chairs that they had gotten from the back of the room. Brian had showed up first and made small talk with me and I just found it too hard believe that he was gay. Myself with Jasmine seemed more gay than he was. It wasn't until Ryan came into the room that they both seemed to drop their stiff outward appearance. Although they both sat awkwardly in chairs together with Hilda on a cushion in front of them, they were holding hands. I was convinced then.

The other couples or singles - there was even a quadruple - in the room were pretty diverse. There was a lesbian couple, the pregnant one of the two covered in tattoos. There were even tattoos on her stomach, which were now getting stretched with her extended belly. There was an interracial couple, and a few other ethnicities spread out in the room. There was an older couple, possibly in their forties or fifties, who had come to see Lydia because no other doctor would tell them it was a good idea to conceive. It took using a turkey baster (the same way Hilda had done it) to get them pregnant and now Lydia was overseeing their pregnancy and watching out for problems. There were about five or six large groups of people with a baby between them - sometimes more. One woman, a tiny girl with dark hair and olive skin, was having twins.

Lydia stood at the front of the room and welcomed everyone. Instead of name tags, she had people go around the room and say their names and something about themselves. "But not about the baby," she insisted. That was the one rule about attending the class. Identity had to remain separate and she would apparently correct people if they began to slip with their pronouns and began to use "we" to mean either the baby and themselves, or themselves and their partners. I had no idea what to say about myself other than that I was a struggling photographer at the moment. Most people smiled and nodded, and to my surprise, no one made a big deal about it. There were other things to worry about. Jasmine said she ran a magazine, Brian and Ryan gave their occupations, and Hilda was the only one to break the occupation train by declaring that she loved fisting for a reaction. It worked, at least in as much as people were no longer hiding behind their jobs. Someone did confess they liked S&M, but for the most part, people moved onto their likes. One person said their name and what she had been craving, but Lydia corrected her and made her pick something else to say. Then, finally, the class began.

Lydia just talked a lot. She seemed to pick a topic, and then lecture for a while before turning it over to us to contribute to what she had to say, or for us to work on breathing exercises with our partners. I had expected, since most people had brought their significant other with them today that we would be working on those typical breathing exercises I had seen on television, but I should have been learning by now not to take anything like that seriously. Instead, Lydia had wanted us all here so we could debunk pregnancy myths in the very similar way that she had debunked the myth of birth in her first class. There were no videos to show us, but she did flash pictures of a sperm and egg, the baby out of the womb, the baby inside the womb, and the legal times for abortion.

"You are now at the place of birth," she began seriously. She waited for a moment, and then shifted her body entirely along with her tone of voice. "Or are you? When, exactly does a birth start? When does a baby's life really begin? Is it when you are five and you realized that yes, you would like to bear children one day? Is it at the moment of conception, even if you are unaware of conception? Is it at the moment you get contractions, as you realize that you are going to be breaking down that barrier, finally? Is it what the law says is legally a person? What if you go past your due date, did you miss that place of birth? All beginning are constructed in the same way that these timelines and these dates are. All beginnings are man-made and so are ending as well. You can start whenever you want to start, and that is all that matters - that you have decided to pick up and begin. As I have been talking, you have already begun. You are already writing your own story and birth through this."

She looked around the room, taking a minute to let her words sink in. She would talk like this a lot. Say a grand sweeping paragraph, then wait and begin again. Her voice was even and strong, convicted. She wrote none of her lectures down, but she spoke the same words very eloquently each time. Her capability for memorization enthralled me. "You are now at the place of birth. The place is important: it is the room that is constructed around where you are constructing your own beginning. Where will you let that place be?"

This pause was for us to respond to, and a few people tossed in their own replies: their house, the birthing center, a water birth, and then one person said hospital and Lydia stopped them and went on. "The hospitals are prisons for the body. They make one sick, they don't cure sickness. They give names to ailments which come and go, making them chronic. Names and places are important, and you need to pick your place carefully so that you don't get named in the wrong manner.

"This is why we can't trust the pregnancy books. This is why you can't trust books blindly, and you need to inspect the ones you see in stores with a critical mind. They don't tell you everything, even though the title claims it. They say that pregnancy is for everyone, and it is simply not a tested fact. People do not welcome all pregnancies. I've dealt with women who had not been offered the bus seat, but been spit on instead. I have been with women who had been told to get abortions, who have been kicked and beaten simply because they are pregnant. Not everyone wants the baby from the womb, even if you do. You have to be careful about the books you read, the words you use, and the places you go. You do not simply exist at the place of birth, and you absolutely must make that space for yourself. Disregard all the words that erase you from simple ignorance and misuse. Throw back the books. Write you own."

She smiled. Her talk was becoming much more heated, and she could tell she needed to lighten the energy in the room. She took a step back and everyone breathed. "There is a theorist and a poet - funny how these two things can go together, right? - whom I like. Her name is Audre Lorde. Some say she is famous for stating, among other things, that you cannot dismantle the master's house without using the master's tools. You also cannot build your house using tools from other people. Keep this in mind when you bring up your babies, when you give birth to them, and even more so, for when you think about yourselves."

Satisfied with herself, Lydia backed off and ceased her diatribe for a few moments. She got us all to go around the circle again and consider our options. Then she went over, using some slides, the options we had there at the center, or at home, and the reasons why hospitals were problematic (many of those reasons Jasmine had already outlined to me). What I appreciated the most from this discussion was her ability to say that hospital were bad, but then still give us information on them. Some people just had to use the hospital to give birth, and it was unfair to discount them from the session. Instead she outlined how one could use the hospital, instead of letting the hospital use you. She listed what questions to ask, what drugs not to take or to ask for other options for, and where their rights as patients ended and the obligations of doctors took over. She was extremely helpful. Although a lot of her information did not exactly resonate with me personally, I saw the tremendous value in it. In the afternoon that I had spent there, I had already begun to change a lot of my perceptions, or I at least had them shaken. I was uncomfortable, but Jasmine had said that was an affect of Lydia.

"It means you're thinking," she explained. "I thought my mind was going to explode the first time I saw her."

Explode was an understatement. I was glad when most of the discussion was finally over and we were allowed to do some breathing exercises before we left. Jasmine leaned back into my arms and we pretended she was going into labor. It felt really funny, and Jasmine didn't like it. She said she was used to playing the un-pregnant partner role with Hilda, so she got me to be the pregnant person. Though we seriously and studiously practiced our breathing, it became a fun game of mime and dress up. She was laughing and kidding around, a large feat after that heavy lecture.

When people began to get up and go, Jasmine asked if she could talk with Hilda for a minute. Vivian had invited her as well to dinner, knowing that the two of them had the class prior to it. I nodded and had planned to go back to the library room to look around, when Lydia approached me.

"Hello, Frank," she greeted. "I believe this is your first class. How come you have not come before?"

"Jasmine wanted to do things by herself. I thought she would have told you?"

"She did. I just wanted to see how you explained it to me." She smiled, which apparently meant I had explained it correctly because she did not dwell on the issue and went on. "What did you think of this first class?"

"Intense," was all I could respond with, which earned me another smirk.

"Birth is an intense act. Life and death usually are. I deal with extremes, I suppose." She crossed her arms. She was wearing a bright lime green today, and up close, it looked even brighter. "Where is your friend?"

"Gerard?" I questioned, and she gave a little nod.

"Jasmine has explained to me that he is as much of a father as you are."

"He is.... he just gets busy, sometimes. He has an odd schedule. And he doesn't really like doctors," I tried to explain, but I fumbled over my words. I had been so excited about coming to this myself that I hadn't even considered if Gerard wanted to go or not. If he really would go or not, and if Jasmine would allow him to.

"We're not doctors, Frank. We are deliberately not those doctors that scare him. Don't you remember what I was saying?"

"I do, yes, I do. But... " I struggled to try and explain Gerard's resistance, his view on health and sickness. It actually sounded a lot like Lydia's; instead of maintaining health, it was promoting sickness. "He just doesn't like anything to do with medical attention, even if it is this stuff. I think it's the building that scares him."

"I wonder why that is," she said, seeming to be hinting at something in her voice. She moved on quickly. "He should come next time, that is, if Jasmine is okay with it."

I nodded, feeling self-conscious, and told her I would try. She told me I was a good man again and to take care of people, and then went to pick up her supplies. Lydia was calm and pleasant, and then seemed to flip and be able to be the most intense person in the room without raising her voice. I didn't have too much time to myself before Jasmine came over to me with Hilda. Hilda's arm was around her and she kissed her temple, both in jubilant moods after the class. Hilda was wearing a shirt that covered her stomach today - possibly because the baby's adoptive parents were around - and tight jeans. Jasmine was wearing a large men's shirt that she buttoned up over her stomach and a slightly bigger size of pants. She and Hilda, I was noting, had both refused maternity clothing.

"Ready to go?" Jasmine asked, and then we were on our way. Jasmine took over the driving duties, trying to get her fill of it before she wouldn't fit behind the wheel. I was shotgun, while Hilda hopped in the back, lamenting about how she was no longer permitted to ride her bike. She hadn't really been allowed to ride before, but now a strict warning from Lydia over the weekend had thrown her.

"And I can't even drown my sorrows!" she teased, and then the car fell silent. It was as if the midwife took up the forth seat in the car, her words still echoing in our minds. I still had the vision of her before me, asking me to bring Gerard next time. I leaned over and suggested it to Jasmine and she nodded. It was fine. The next time we would go, it would be all three of us. Like it should be. You are now at the place of birth, I thought, and I began to construct that beginning as we drove to our old home.

Vivian's house seemed empty without us living there. The extra furniture that the upper floor had possessed since Gerard and I moved in for those months and required more space in the basement, was now back in its place in the basement. It left this huge ditch in the middle of her living room, as if an earthquake had separated the two sides. I missed the look of her over-cramped house; it had this strange aesthetic appeal, as if there was so much life things were spilling over. Her main floor was still pretty full, and it was always going to have this quality of disarray to it since she was a teacher and had a million art projects on the go, or half completed and hiding behind and under things. There were also her cookbooks that lined the shelves and hid under cabinets, which also weren't going anywhere anytime soon. But the mess that Gerard and I had created, the awkward furniture arrangements and jumbled art materials, that was now no longer there. The wide gaping space in the living room made me think about those months where we had lived in her basement and stayed up all night together. I realized I yearned for them in the same way that I yearned for the time spent alone with Gerard seven years ago. I liked it when we had our own little world together and we populated it with nothing but art.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14