Out of Water
Two days before my due date, I executed a slow roll to get up off the couch where I’d been resting and felt a rush of water dampen my leggings. I’d had the same sensation earlier that morning when climbing out of bed. On the phone with the nurse though, I couldn’t confirm the word “rush,” nor the word “water.” Even so, she said, I’d better come in.
I live in Woodside, Queens, on a street that used to be a stream but is now a fair distance away from any body of water, including the one separating us from NYU Langone Hospital in Manhattan. We’d been strategizing about that journey ever since deciding to deliver there and ended up having to do it twice—that night when my water hadn’t, in fact, broken, and the following night, when my labor had finally progressed enough that the doctor agreed to admit me. I’d never heard of back labor before or vomited from pain. Those wrenching contractions eclipsed any worry about traffic, about bridge or tunnel closures, about the parking garage being full; all I could do was try to keep my body from coming apart. Besides the pain, what I remember about that drive across the water is the exact liquid black of the night sky on the East River and how it danced with the white lights of skyscrapers.
In our largely unhelpful birthing class a few weeks earlier, the teacher described labor as the hardest work we would ever do. She meant physically, and I’m sure, no matter where my life takes me, that this will always be true. But there was other work: when I arrived at the hospital, begging an immediate epidural, the doctor asked me to wait. I said now now now until she relented. I was a white woman with excellent insurance at a top-rated hospital; think of the additional labor of Black pregnant people, whose trauma and voices are often discounted and whose maternal mortality rates are rising, or those who are undocumented, or living with disabilities. Childbirth is an act associated with pain and yet, still, that pain and the needs it might communicate can be disbelieved.
That fought-for epidural had to be turned off for active labor. While I was pushing, I wasn’t able to speak—I had to be reminded, over and over, to breathe—but was able to ask for water on my face, a damp compress over my eyes. I couldn’t negotiate both the stimulus of the outside world—the sounds or the people or the lights on the ceiling—and of the inside, the work of birth. When, after four and a half hours, she was finally born, I had dissociated enough that I didn’t know; I didn’t hear the room full of people yelling at me to look, look, not until my husband pulled the damp cloth from my eyes.
During labor, around me, there was a constellation of women working. There was the on-call doctor whose name I don’t remember. There was Doctor Taylor-Shih—the one doctor from my practice I hadn’t met before because she was due around the same time I was, yet was on call when I arrived at the hospital and who we ran into a few months ago having brunch with her wife and children and thought maybe we’d met at a party until she sheepishly explained how we knew her—and Doctor LaJoie, who delivered my child, and who screamed that she was “about to have a diva moment” if the anesthesiologist didn’t show up, which he didn’t, which is why she had to sew me back together without anesthetic. And there were Sumi and Emma, the nurses. Sumi was with me all night, checking each time I thought my water had broken, when each time I was wrong—how could I not know and yet—and Emma, who coached me through pushing while the doctor popped in and out, delivering other babies. She was so creative, wrapping a sheet around her arms and bracing herself against the bottom of the bed, yelling “play tug-of-war with me!” hoping that as she pulled, I could push harder. How many births must she deal with and yet, when she hugged me afterward, she was genuine in her pride.
After those first two sleepless nights in labor, the two sleepless nights in the hospital after—parched, drinking pitcher after pitcher of water and trying to turn that water into milk—the two completely sleepless nights at home after that, after the two and a half years that followed—the first one sleepless, the second full of unbroken nights and naps—Opal and I often take the train to the new waterfront park in Long Island City, either alone or with friends, and point at the ferries and helicopters and ducks with fingers sticky from the chocolate chip cookies we buy on the way. Last time we were there, Opal gestured across the river and said, “See the building with the big purple sticker on it? There’s the hospital where I went when I was born.”
I said, “You remember me telling you that?”
She repeated, “I went there to be born.”
Neither my husband nor I can say for sure if we took the tunnel or the bridge to get to the hospital that night, but if I really think about what would have made sense, it is most likely we took the tunnel. It is so much closer, and usually a clearer, quicker path to the city. So if I remember the city’s stars rippling on the East River when it is likely we were actually under the water, Opal can remember making that trip across—and out of—the water, too.
In the end, my water never broke; it had to be broken. It never was water to begin with, and although it was mine, it was also hers: a warm and comfortable world for exactly nine months to a baby labored for, and with.
Body of Water
East River
About the Artist
Nicole works as a museum educator and teaching artist. She is the author of the short story collection Speed Dreaming (Little A, 2015). Her writing has appeared in Joyland, Post Road, Tin House's Open Bar, HOW Journal, Newtown Literary, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere. She is also co-founder of the reading series Halfway There. She holds a BA from Vassar College and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in Woodside, Queens, on a street that was once a stream.