Midriff Muse

Katie Mahoney is 23 years old today. She’s not happy about that, the number 23 that is. It’s a prime number. She doesn’t like them; she thinks that they’re uninteresting and difficult to work with. (God, whose daughter is she? That would be me, the one with the whimsy that finds personification in everything.)

This April day is not unlike the April 7^th of twenty-three tears ago. The kind that look like they should be warm because the sun is higher in the sky and the day is bright and clear, but there is a biting April wind that demands or at least strongly urges a heavy sweater or a well-lined overcoat.

She was born about 2:10 pm, seven days past her due date. I had been working on it since about 4:00 am that morning. A few weeks earlier I had expressed my concern to my Mom that I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to tell if I was really in labor or not and would be one of those who would get to the hospital only to be told she was having “false labor” and be sent back home – rookie! My Mom was soothing. “Oh you’ll know, honey” she calmed. “They (the contractions) will feel different from anything else and they’ll keep on coming back.” My Mom, having safely delivered eleven into this life, knows something about these things. And sure enough, the first pain woke me from a dead and restful sleep in the wee hours. A “what the holy hell was that?”, startled wide- awake, sensation, followed by a similar pang six or seven minutes later and then a third and a fourth. I woke my husband. Some time between 5 and 6 it seems, we were driving into the sunrise on Cleveland Avenue in the blue Volare wood-paneled station wagon, my seat in the fully reclined position. I remember looking into the orange-pink glow along the edge of the horizon. I am one of those who falls into what they call a “twilight sleep” in between contractions, a strange, helpless, semi-consciousness, a natural state, masterfully designed to conserve strength until the next contraction lurches you into fully conscious and on deck once again. The thing about labor is that you are in it until the end. You can’t change your mind; you can’t decide you’d like to wait another day or two. The world is going on with all its business, but you are singularly engaged. You are ensconced in a bubble until you are done, all your compasses in a circle and pointing to your true North. There is but one direction to go.

As length of labor times go, nine to ten hours is not bad for the first one, but there are a million moments of eternity and forever encased in the duration. Another contraction heaves in and you have no choice, sitting upright again, trying to let the waves roll through until they are mere ripples once more and you can flop back. I know that I had at least one “I can’t do this anymore!” moment. This happened after I had been laboring in what I thought was getting to be the “hard labor” for an hour and a half. The nurse came in to check my cervix, which was dilated to 3 centimeters the previous check. I figured I must have gotten to around 6 and must be near the home stretch (10 is the magic number). The nurse stood up and cheerfully said that I was up to 3.5 – No! No! No! An hour and a half for just a half a centimeter? No way could I last! This was impossible! But my husband was really happy for me. He said: “You’re doing really great, Hon!” and he meant it because when my stepson Brian was coming into the world, his mother had been in labor for 18 plus hours. They kept giving her more petocin to try and get the labor to progress, but she never got past 3 centimeters and was exhausted. They finally realized that Brian was breach and called the doctor to come in and do a C-section. So because of this experience, my husband was sincerely excited and happy for me that I was dilated all the way to 3.5. He really did think that I was doing just great and that probably meant something to me. About three hours later I was at 10 and pushing. He saw her first; I had flopped back down after the final push.

“It’s Katie, Hon.”

Katie seemed reluctant to nurse initially and with the first one when you’re not sure how it’s supposed to go and what it’s supposed to feel like, you just don’t know if you’re missing a step or something. My baby would suckle for a couple of seconds and then drop back to sleep. She seemed okay; she looked okay – I mean she was gorgeous! – and apparently satiated in some way. But all through the next day when my daughter, by this time a ripe 18-24 hours old, continued her briefest of suckle and nod routine, the nurses and NA’s seemed to think I needed to force feed her somehow…

“Stroke her cheeks to stimulate her so she stays awake!”

“Try splashing a few drops of cold water on her face.”

One nurse told me that I needed to be more assertive with her and then literally proceeded to try and screw her little head onto my nipple.

Finally the doctor looked in and pronounced everything fine. She said one of her own babies was the exact same way. “She’s just tired from the birth and once she’s rested, she’ll feel hungry and eat!” And so she did. They brought her in squawking at 3:00 am the following morning and when her little mouth found my nipple, I experienced that “latched on” feeling. It’s like your nipple is loaded with little shreds of iron and the inside of their mouth is a magnet; the suck, pull, and attach is an absolute lock. With one eye hidden behind my breast and the other trained on my face, she downed her first meal. That whole taking her time to get started thing, that “I’ll do things in my own fucking time thank you very much” – she gets that from her Dad, and the other branch of the same tree – that “my top speed is amble even if I’m supposed to be running to first base” – she gets that from her Dad too, but I digress a little here.

In the days and months to follow, the hours of breastfeeding were and still are the most Godlike thing that I have ever known. With all three of my babies, it was nothing for me to sit and continue holding them for another couple of hours, asleep in my arms after they finished nursing. If someone were to ask me to name some of the finest moments of my life, nursing my babies would be quick to come to mind. I’ll never forget the first time that Katie raised her little arm and rested her hand on my breast while she nursed. I have total recall of that moment and its sensation. I may not remember a given word or name when I want to; I may loose a phone number between the time I look it up and begin to dial it (yes, I am of the generation that still listens to albums, not CD’s and when I call someone, I dial the number), I may forget why I turned around and walked back to my dresser to get something after I was already half way down the hall, but I have instant and total visceral recall of that teeny little soft pad of pressure against my engorged breast.

As usual with my writing, I have traveled a circuitous route and missed many of the stops I thought were essential at the outset. This was supposed to be about Katie. I assume that most mothers mentally rebirth their children on the anniversary of the day they were born, but I don’t know that for sure. For me, on my children’s birthdays, I am walking around in a state of consciousness with the events and experiences of the day they were born replaying on a continual loop. So I dump that all out here and most of what I’ve managed to include about Katie herself makes her sound like she is slow and stubborn and intolerant of prime numbers. These are only partial truths.

Katie does have a persevering stubbornness that serves her well 99.9 percent of the time. She is not particularly quick of movement but she has tremendous speed at jigsaw puzzles, and it is not so much that she is intolerant of prime numbers as she finds them boring. She possesses some sort of innate responsible, organizational, skill set that must have come from a strand of DNA blowing in the wind the day she was conceived because neither her father nor I possess anything like that. Throughout grade school and high school, she always had a jumpstart on any long term homework projects without any prompting from either of us and to this day still gets things done while traveling in the car or on the bus. She has always loved to wear hats. “My haet-ta!” she used to say, pronouncing the T hard and adding the second syllable in her breathy toddler voice. She now collects vintage hats. When she was not even 2, I sat her in the high chair one day with a plastic bin of crayon nubs accumulated over time by her older brother, Brian, (my stepson.) On a piece of blank paper, I showed her how to make a circle. She got it and sat there happily occupied for some time until she had filled the whole page with little multi-colored circles. “I make-a cay-culs!” she proudly proclaimed (I don’t know where the fake Italian accent came from.) This became a ritualized activity in which she would line an array of different colored crayons side by side along the top of her high chair tray, pick them up one at a time, “make-a cay-cul,” going around it 2 or 3 times so that it actually formed a little coil, until the page was full of different colored cay-culs. The great thing about this was that she was safe and occupied and I could usually get some housework accomplished. Somewhere around this house is a box with about five or six spiral notebooks filled end to end with pages and pages of little cay-culs edge to edge, top to bottom.

Katie will graduate this May from UW-Madison with a degree in History Education and English Literature. She studied one semester in Quito, Ecuador and another in Galway, Ireland. She has taught classed of ESL (English as Second Language) students during her practice and student teaching assignments. She would like to continue to do so when she gets a teaching job, but that requires (at least in the state of Wisconsin) a separate certification. I am impressed by her creativity and artfulness in her lesson planning. She is not afraid to don a costume for visual emphasis. She once had an ESL student remark that we didn’t seem to have any women in our U.S. History so in her next Power Point presentation she included a picture of her sister with a cartoon bubble above her head saying: “Where are all the women?” Katie’s level of conscientiousness is of the same intensity that once filled every space on a page with different colored little “cay-culs.” Katie is going to be a wonderful teacher and I am immensely proud to be her mother.

Happy Birthday Katie Mahoney Girl! May your cay-culs forever be unbroken!

April 7th, 2009 | Tags: Add new tag, Daughter, daughter's birthday, labor, labor pains, mother and daughter, vintage hats | Category: Daughters, Family | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL