You’ve heard, if you’re a parent, the phrase, the amnesia of childbirth. Some people think the reason we mothers forget the pain of childbirth is that giving birth is so horrific we’d probably never do it again if we could remember.
I beg to differ. I would have done it again, for sure, and I definitely remember. It wasn’t that terrible. Perhaps because I was seven and a half centimeters dilated by the time I got to the hospital, and missed much of the misery.
You might wonder why I waited so long to go to the hospital. I wasn’t convinced I was in labor, because I’d only felt pain in my back, and my contractions were irregular. Also because I’m a little neurotic. I couldn’t rush to the hospital. Suppose it was a false alarm? Then I’d have to slink home in shame.
I finally decided to call my doctor after a night and day of backaches. She lived in the house next door to ours, and we’d known each other for years. I used to babysit her twin girls while she was in her residency at the now defunct Women’s Medical, and I was at Girl’s High.
I’d been the first of Mary’s patients to ask for natural childbirth. She’d laughed, then tried to talk me out of that notion on my first prenatal visit, but I’d insisted, and she’d gradually come to support my decision.
Nonetheless, I hadn’t been in the labor room for more than an hour when I turned to her and said, “Mary, I think I’ll take that shot after all.”
She smiled and said, “I’ll hold your hand, instead.”
My husband, who was supposed to be my partner, was circling over the Philadelphia airport at the time. I hadn’t called him in Boston, where he was working, because of the old false alarm thing.
“You’re really close,” Mary said.
So I agreed to do what I’d wanted to do in the first place, and she was right. Bonnie was born within two hours of my arrival.
My mother had tipped me off that delivering a child was like pushing a truck, and it turned out she was right. When I got close to the end, I got sly. I decided I’d take a little break from the pushing. It would be easy, I thought. I simply wouldn’t tell Mary when the next contraction arrived. As if.
That was forty years ago, last December. My baby girl now has two of her own. I still say that having her was the best and most important thing I’ve ever done. Two hours of work never produced a better product.
I’ll also tell you that she was the easiest, sunniest, smartest child ever. You might ask, wasn’t she terrible in her teens? Although my mother used to say, when I turned thirteen, “It’s a good thing God gave me twelve years to learn how to love you,” I maintain that Bonnie was perfect– all through her childhood– and still is. Call it the amnesia of motherhood.
