Birth in the time of Covid: The Swing and the Drip of Wax
This is the second piece in a two part subset within “Birth in the Time of Covid” that details the memories of pre-labor and the birth of our daughter, Luna, on January 21st, 2021. For more details on the preceding events, please refer to Birth in the Time of Covid: A Tale of bat and ball.
The Natural Bridge Wax Museum “melted into Natural Bridge’s yesteryears much the same as the legends woven into the museum’s displays,” — (Roanoke Times, July 1st, 2014).
Where do the figures in a wax museum go when the wax museum closes? Are they burned and melted into candles? Is there a grand auction where the bodies are decapitated and heads are sold in some sort of hooded ritual? Are the figures relocated to another museum somewhere else where wax museums are still popular? These displays were made to be presented to the public. Artisans put in the time and effort to create them. Does the closing of a museum put the creators out of a job?
Perhaps the end of the wax museum is just the beginning of a new chapter for the figures within.
The nurse sat next to me as the contractions came closer and closer, my wife sloshing around in her own fluids which I helped to mop up from time to time with a towel, tissue, or whatever I could find. The tennis ball was getting its fair share of the liquid.
It seemed that my wife was melting. I looked over to the bespectacled nurse sitting next to me as she held my wife’s hand and rubbed her back. She seemed too young to be doing this job, and yet I had to trust in her experience. This was her job, and I liked trusting in her.
“When the pain comes, push. Try to hold for counts of ten. Don’t push when there’s no pain. Push through the pain…ten seconds,” the nurse said.
My wife nodded. The next wave came. I kept my face centimetres away from my wife’s face. It was beaded with sweat and contorted in a manner I had never seen before. Still, she was herself…but a version of herself that seemed to surpass herself. As Ichiro pounded my wife’s spine with his bat, I smiled and counted directly along with her. I knew that all of this pain and effort was for something greater than both of us together.
“One….two….three….” with each number that I counted, I snapped the fingers on my right hand. I became a metronome, ticking off the seconds before life entered the world.
I was on the swing on the front porch at Mrs. Imeson’s house in Lexington, Virginia. I was in fourth grade, unsure of how I’d do during the actual piano lesson. As usual, Mom had dropped me off early, and I had some time to enjoy the air outside before opening the screen door to the inside of the house.
“Four….Five…..” I could hear Mrs. Imeson counting inside the house to the piece of music that the girl before me was playing. The piano was right there as you walked inside, and there was a staircase that made an angle as it went up, against the wall. During recitals at Mrs. Imeson’s house, the students would wait on the staircase for their turn to perform. I would peer through the wooden posts on the stairs at the audience sitting in her living room, hoping I wouldn’t mess up when it was my turn to play.
Outside, the house was blue, there were red shutters around the windows, and I loved the swinging wooden chair/bench that hung by chains on the front porch. If the weather was nice like on this day, I would wait outside and swing back and forth as the girl before me finished up her lessons.
(I want to say her name was Becky, but I can’t recall.)
I looked up at where the hook connected to the wooden panel ceiling on the porch to support the weight of the swing I was sitting on. I liked the sound the chain made when I swung back and forth…like something stretching or twisting…metal and wood interlocked with one another. It felt safe, and the light played with shadows on the porch. The tips of my shoes brushed across the the porch making the sound “tsssskkkk, tsssssskkkk” as I swung back and forth.
“Six….seven….”
I listened as the girl inside made a mistake in her piece and stopped playing. The metronome kept clicking back and forth. Thinking about my own lesson made me nervous. I wasn’t a horrible pianist, but I didn’t put as much time or effort into practicing as I could have. I always wondered if Mrs. Imeson noticed (I was sure she did), or if she was disappointed. Perhaps I would be able to sneak past her expert ears and rise to the occasion during the actual lesson and play beyond my ability, surpassing myself just for the moment.
“Eight….”
We were on another round, and the nurse was not in the room anymore, as she went to check on another patient. She had told me to call her in if I could see the top of the baby’s head. When she left the room, I had to trust my own instincts, as well as my wife’s natural breathing and pushing. We had not attended any classes together.
The top of my baby’s head? Is she kidding me? Is my baby going to come spilling out now, here in this room? I thought to myself. Surely, this couldn’t be the case. Even though part of me was hoping it would happen.
She came back in the room as my wife took a short respite between contractions. After the counting, she pointed down towards the baby’s emergency exit area — a green sign seemed to be illuminating the way in my mind’s eye. As she opened up my wife a bit with her fingers, she directed me to take a look. I recalled my friend telling me not to look at that area during labor.
“You don’t want to go down there,” he had said. “You’re place is by your wife’s head and holding her hands. You don’t need to see that.”
Snapping back to the present moment I asked the nurse if my baby was going to be born at this moment, here and now. She chuckled and calmed me down.
“No, we’ll move her to the labor room, but you can see the top of your baby’s head now.”
I inhaled courage and traveled the journey from my wife’s head towards her nether regions. The drum was beating a metronome rhythm of anticipation in the background. The nurse was prying open my wife with two fingers on both hands.
“Nine….”
I peered inwards and wasn’t sure what I was looking at. It was so dark. Did the nurse have super vision? Surely not. I focused, the metronome clicking back and forth.
A meatball.
This was my first thought. Inside of my wife was what appeared to be a hairy meatball mass which was only centimetres away from the exit. It was the top of my baby’s head that was starting the push outwards.
Prior to touching the keys on Mrs. Imeson’s piano, she would sometimes inspect my fingers for cleanliness. She wanted to ensure I didn’t smudge those white ivories. Sometimes children have filthy hands, and I was no exception. I wouldn’t be contacting the piano with those dirty fingers, not on her life.
During the lesson the metronome wasn’t always used, but it was always there with the possibility (threat?) of being used, lording over the piano on the corner like the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. There was part of me that wanted Mrs. Imeson to use the metronome, and another part of me that feared the metronome. The device kept impeccable timing— timing was its one and only purpose.
But then there was the question of why the timing needed to be perfect. Was there such a thing as perfect timing? Couldn’t we be satisfied with the timing that each individual played as the performer made his own way into the world? Did everything need to be exact? I played my piece, “The Sad Farmer,” a piece that I wrote, and I glanced up at the metronome. I stopped playing amidst the more challenging measures, the ones I hadn’t practiced.
“Ten….”
They had wheeled my wife into the delivery room some 15 minutes prior. I could still hear her screams from time to time, and I didn’t know what to do. I knew what they were doing, but I didn’t know how many of “them” there were. I knew that someone was pressing a fist down into her swollen stomach, as if they were trying to get the last bits of mustard out of the tube. The spectacled nurse had shown me how to do it as well, but apparently that was just the warm-up round. Judging by the level of screaming I heard coming from the delivery room, this was the real deal. They would wait until the last couple of minutes to call me in. Until that point, all I could do was pace and wait.
Suddenly the doctor came out, another young woman with glasses on and short black hair. She motioned to me to enter the delivery room.
I approached the screaming.
Regardless of how I played, one of the rituals that happened at the end of each piano lesson was being allowed to enter the kitchen on my own and take a cookie from “Mr. Cookie.” Mr. Cookie was the cookie jar that Mrs. Imeson kept on her kitchen table, and she always kept a supply of chocolate chip cookies for her students to enjoy post piano lesson. I would walk into the kitchen, and there was Mr. Cookie waiting for me. I knew what was inside, and although they weren’t the best cookies….a cookie is a cookie, and so I wasn’t going to refuse. Removing the top, I always made sure to take only one cookie from Mr. Cookie. The cookie wasn’t a reward, but rather just the capstone to the lesson. It meant that the lesson was over, and I could go back outside and wait on the swing and enjoy my cookie while the sunlight played with shadows on the porch.
The lights shimmer as I enter the delivery room, like in a dream sequence. There seems to be light coming from every angle, fringed with fog on the edges. There’s a certain feeling of unreality, cinematic reenactment of a delivery, almost. I can’t recall how many nurses are in the room, but there are quite a few gathered around my wife, who in position, legs lifted high, feet in stirrups.
There’s blood on the floor in small pools.
She raises her eyes and tilts her head up to see me coming in, her exhausted smile glowing with relief. I start to walk towards her. A member of the hospital staff stops me when I get to her head. This is as far as I’m permitted to go. They don’t let me go any further than her head, and they place my hands on both sides of her face as if to stabilise her, or perhaps to channel some sort of energy.
I look around the room. I’ve been here before — in my mind, in movies, in fiction, in improv scenes. Everyone is in their positions. Everyone is exactly where they are supposed to be, playing the roles that they play, stuck in the soundless tableau display case. I’m in my spot, embracing my status, my wife’s head channeling energy all the way down to her pelvis where our baby will be enter the world. My wife gives her strength….
We’re in the wax museum. Everything is real, and these are real people around me doing the real jobs that real people do, but everything in the room is shining, dripping almost — everything is made of wax. There’s a clamminess to it all, each second melts into the next, and memories fog the walls. I know that what I see and do in these moments I will never truly remember or feel in exactly the same way again. The wax figures take their positions on the spots marked “X” beneath their toes.
The final push.
The wax figure who retrieves our daughter as she comes out is so incredibly close to my wife. When our baby comes out, the doctor pulls her up and her head slumps to the left, slightly pink and blue, wet and waxy. Luna will never be this young and small again.
She cries, and the wax figures come to life. The doctors and nurses retain their sheen, but they are people again. They take our daughter over to another table under many lights and put numerous tubes and suction devices into her nose and throat to remove any excess fluid as she cries with no tears. They measure her head, weight, and height with incredible smoothness and dexterity.
My wife sighs with relief. As she smiles I look down at the doctor, so close to the exit wound. I can see the blood in the bright reflection of her glasses as she sews and threads and stitches my wife back together. They bring Luna over to us and show us her fingers and toes, counting them out. They pull out the placenta. I see it taken away, Luna’s first bed, her first friend. She will never know it again.
“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.”
My daughter has her very own metronome, and it ticks to the rhythm that only she can know.
