Taking it in, and out
Arms frozen into a T
on the O.R. table
I scanned green wall tiles
while two men’s heads
behind masks floated
above the puppet-show curtain
as they replaced my baby-free insides
and talked about Georgetown basketball.
I asked to see my placenta.
Weeks before,
the maternity ward had competition –
babies dutifully pushing
their heads into the world
Mine bumped my ribs with his.
We’d watched March Madness
while waiting for a turn
to have my baby turned
so I could be returned
to the midwives at the birth center.
Finally, four hands on my belly –
offense and defense moving together –
could not budge my boy’s bottom
out of the basket of my pelvis.
But it never fell further, either,
so instead it was lifted out
from my passive middle,
after eight minutes on the clock.
He cried, we sang and cried,
Then his father followed him out,
and I was alone
in surgery SportZone.
Months later,
at the c-section support group,
Someone quoted Ina May:
“How they get in
is how they come out.”
That fateful June evening,
resigned to remain a non-mommy,
at least until my hormone curves
matched the length and bend
of the norms,
I gave sex like a favor –
not invested in pleasure or product,
thinking instead of summer vacation
and nutritional supplements.
I shrugged when it was over
but waited to get up to pee.
Looking back after two weeks
and two pink lines,
it seemed almost pathetic:
Wifely duty + hesitation = son.
The next spring,
waiting for my body
to be stitched whole again,
as if that were possible,
and to see my baby again,
I peered into a jelly bean of a steel pan
where my heavy life sac lay
deflated, clutching a stub of a cord
too short for a body to turn.
Years later,
still skeptical of another
someday conception,
on the chance that we succeed,
I figure I owe it to the sibling
to intensify each romp
toward deep and exquisite
so she will peal out
with a bawdy yawp
and a cord so long I can
catch her
myself.
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Jessica Claire Haney has published poetry in Earth’s Daughters, Court Green and Beltway Poetry Quarterly. In addition to her personal blogs, Jessica’s writing has also appeared online on the Motherverse Mothering Out Loud Blog and Mothering Heights Second-Annual Mother’s Day Online Anthology, and she writes regularly for DC Metro Moms Blog. Jessica has an essay forthcoming in the Journal of Attachment Parenting International. She lives in the Washington D.C. area with her husband and toddler son.
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