Ruined, page 25
A few hours later, I met Doug at Murray’s, as planned. The dining room was elegant, with tall ceilings, white tablecloths, and waitresses in uniform. The restaurant was full, and the air was filled with electricity. It seemed that everyone who needed to wait out the storm downtown had come to Murray’s.
The waitress brought our menus and a small dish with chunks of garlic toast. The buttery bits were too salty for a pregnant woman whose ankles were swelling. Still, I crunched one after another until the dish was empty. When our steaks were served, we cut them with our butter knives. Halfway through mine, I felt decidedly queasy, but I was determined to enjoy every mouthful. The beef would be good for me and the baby, if only I could squeeze it into my nine-months-pregnant body.
After the meal, Doug and I were barely back at our apartment when a pain twisted through me. Besides the shock of it, the pain scared me. Could this be a contraction? I was two weeks shy of my due date. It had never occurred to me that I might deliver early.
Not only was my stomach uncomfortably stuffed with steak, my heart was full of anxiety. “This can’t happen!” I yelled to Doug. “We haven’t had the last childbirth class yet!”
There were so many things I didn’t know. I didn’t know how big the baby was. I didn’t know what the gender was. I didn’t know if I had what it took to be a mother.
At my last appointment, the doctor had palpated my belly and said, “The baby’s still on the small side. You should slow down. Stay home. Put your feet up. Relax.”
Why hadn’t I listened?
Doug drove us to Abbott Northwestern Hospital. Apparently every other pregnant woman in the Twin Cities area had arrived just ahead of us. The admitting clerk said it was the storm—a drop in barometric pressure can induce labor.
“It’ll be a busy night,” she predicted.
We filled out the paperwork and timed the contractions. They were disappointingly irregular. After an hour or so, the doctor breezed in. He was wearing tennis whites with a sweater knotted casually over his shoulders. He exuded a sense of irritation as he spoke to the nurse. Since my contractions had failed to progress, the doctor and nurse discussed the possibility of sending us home. Meanwhile, another nurse came in and asked Doug if he had parked in the correct lot. He hadn’t. It was a common mistake, the nurse said, but he needed to move the car right away. Doug left to take care of it.
The doctor lifted my hospital gown and checked my dilation again. He spoke to the nurse and she handed him something, which he inserted into my vagina. He made a sudden pulling gesture. Fluid gushed out of me.
“That should help,” the doctor said. Then he left the room.
When Doug returned a few minutes later, rainwater cascading from his jacket, he found me sitting in a puddle on the examining table. I was sobbing in anger, cursing the doctor, the nurses, the tennis whites, the hospital, the storm. Fortunately, my body was in control rather than my emotions, and my body knew just what it needed to do. My contractions quickly became more forceful and frequent. As each contraction rose, crested, and receded, I tried to breathe through it.
The force of the contractions shocked me. They consumed me. I’d never imagined that my body held such power. Everything spasmed and twisted at the same time. I felt as if my pelvic bones were being wrenched in opposite directions. My body seemed to be following a set of instructions I had never seen. Each contraction was a corkscrew. Why had no one told me? The baby wasn’t going to be pushed out; it was going to be wrung from my body, the way a woman wrings out a dishcloth.
Hours passed, but I had no sense of time. Where were the painkillers? Doug spooned ice chips into my mouth and reminded me that I didn’t want painkillers. I pushed him away. This was all his fault! I twisted in the bed.
Finally a nurse gave me a shot of Demerol. The effect was immediate. The pain was still there, but now I was watching it, like an interested bystander. As the nurse left the room, she paused by the small, square calendar that hung on the wall and ripped off a page. The new page was a number in bold type—the date. I stared at that number between contractions, trying to remember something. 26.
Around five o’clock in the morning, our baby was born. A girl. Five pounds and three ounces of baby girl. The delivery nurse cried out, “A perfect little peanut!”
The baby was healthy—everyone said so. The doctor laid her on my stomach while Doug cut the umbilical cord. The baby lifted her head to look around, and the doctor laughed.
“Oh, you’re in for it,” he said.
I didn’t know what he meant. “Is she okay?”
“Fine,” he said. “Just fine. She’s a very alert baby.”
A couple of the nurses tended to the baby. Another nurse brought a warmed sheet and rolled me into it, as if I were the infant. I hadn’t realized that I was bone cold. Being warm and swaddled felt rapturous.
We were transferred to a recovery room. The three of us were a family, a brand-new family. Our three heads pressed close together. Doug and I could only marvel and coo and wipe tears from our eyes. My heart felt as if it might explode with happiness. Our baby was here. A miniature human being.
I stroked her bald head and inhaled deeply. Other women had told me that newborn scent is what God smells like—this fleeting smell from the top of a baby’s head. Her smell was indescribable, like nothing I’d ever smelled before, and I knew the women were right. This baby was fresh from God. Her eyes were open, a midnight-blue color, and her gaze seemed distant and wise, as if she had come from far away and knew things that the rest of us had forgotten.
Doug and I counted her tiny fingers and toes and stroked her cheek. I cautiously tugged at her blanket so we could inspect her umbilical cord with its plastic clamp. She seemed so breakable, and I knew I would do things wrong. I loved her, but I would do things wrong.
I remembered something I’d read in one of those pregnancy books: that baby girls are born with all the eggs their ovaries will ever produce. Those eggs would ripen and release over the course of a lifetime, but they were already there, formed in her tiny ovaries, at birth. That fact seemed almost too much to fathom. How could this helpless five-pound bundle be equipped, in some primal way, to procreate? It astounded me. It could only be proof that God intended for life to outlast death. Proof that the will to create is at least as elemental as the will to destroy.
We watched our baby’s tiny nostrils flutter. Her little chest rose and fell with its unaccustomed breath. A heartbeat pulsed in her chest and throat and creased the soft spot at the top of her head. Everything about her five-pound body was bent on living. The gift of that overwhelmed me. I had no doubt that this life, this breath, this ferocious will to live came straight from the source of life Himself. What do we call this, if not love?
33
THE NURSES TRANSFERRED THE THREE OF US to a hospital room, with me in a wheelchair and the baby in a bassinet. When I was settled in bed, Doug gestured to a phone on the side table. “I suppose it’s time to call our parents. They’ll be awake soon anyway.”
I suddenly realized why the “26” staring at me from the calendar had seemed so weighty. March 26 is a milestone for my family, on both sides. My father’s mother was born on that date in 1895. My mother was born on that date in 1929. And a generation later, my sister Mary Lynn gave birth to her first daughter on our mother’s fiftieth birthday.
Still, it had never occurred to me that my baby might also be born on this magical date. Now the coincidence seemed not only improbable but even a bit mystical.
Four generations of mothers had given birth to daughters on March 26. I had taken my place in a long line of laboring women and, like them, had been rewarded with an armful of daughter.
I knew, piercingly and beyond a doubt, that my mother had always loved me, just as I already loved my yet unnamed daughter. Imperfectly, but fiercely. I felt a blessing descend on me like hands laid upon my head—hands from a community of women who transcended time.
At least I was pretty sure it was a blessing being conferred, and not just the aftereffects of the Demerol.
Doug made the phone calls: first his parents, then mine. I listened to him tell my mother, “Happy Birthday, Mom!”
I couldn’t hear my mother’s words, but I could hear her chuckle.
“I’m calling for Ruth,” he told her, “because she’s a bit busy right now.”
A pause, then Doug spoke again.
“Well, we have a birthday gift for you, but we couldn’t manage to get it wrapped and mailed.” Doug winked at me and held the phone so I could hear my mother’s response.
She was chuckling some more. “Oh that’s fine, I know you two are plenty busy these days.”
“Shall I just tell you what the gift is?” Doug asked.
“If you like, sure.”
“It’s a baby girl.”
He didn’t have to extend the phone for me to hear the whoops and hollers on the other end.
“I’m on a plane, I’m on a plane!” my mother said.
My heart was so full that it actually hurt. Doug handed me the phone, and my mother and I sniffled and exclaimed as I gazed at the baby. We didn’t talk long because my mother had an airline ticket to buy.
Sandwiched between my husband and our baby, I could feel love in new places in my body. Love tingled in the tips of my fingers and pulsed in the base of my throat—that delicate, hollow spot between the ends of the collarbone. My heart seemed to still be beating with enough force for two instead of one. But I had been watching her precious heart beat on its own, her little lungs fill and expel. Now there was an entirely new body for me to love, a new body that needed to be constantly filled with breath. For the first time I understood what the word vulnerable meant.
How could I bear it if something or someone ever hurt this child? I was suddenly cognizant that there were innumerable ways that my world could be shattered now—ways I’d never imagined. I could count the number of minutes my daughter had been alive, and already I glimpsed that love holds in itself the seeds of great suffering.
A nurse appeared to show us how to care for the baby. With practiced hands, she showed us how to suction tiny nostrils with a blue vinyl bulb. She explained that this was important to prevent aspiration. She deftly rolled a blanket and laid it in the bassinet to be used as a prop behind the baby’s back. She explained that this was to prevent crib death. Every one of her words and actions, meant to be reassuring, was terrifying.
The feeling of fear had been familiar to me in the past, but this was a different kind of fear, one that went beyond the borders of my own body. I saw something I’d missed when I wrote my Constructive Theology paper. The question isn’t whether suffering or love is a more foundational concern, or how a sovereign God can will both. I had gotten so caught up in the matter of sin and evil that I had neglected to see another fundamental dynamic. It’s not just evil that causes suffering; so does love.
Love and suffering are tied together. Maybe love is so tender that it leads to suffering. Or maybe suffering so softens us that it becomes a gateway to love. Or maybe love is simply unabated by suffering. Love is shown in flesh but persists beyond the limits of flesh. Yes, that is maybe the truest way to say it. And isn’t that a guarantee of pain—something that is both limited and limitless? Isn’t this the central message of the gospel, the meaning of grace? In incarnation, love and suffering are bundled together in Christ’s flesh. An infinite God chooses to become finite to embody love. How else could it be done?
How had I not seen this before—something so obvious and true? I had turned in my paper last semester, but I needed to add some sentences. A paragraph. Something. I needed to try. Then I saw that my theology would never be a clean document after all. And maybe that was all right.
We named the baby Hannah, after the biblical figure who pled with God. Hannah was barren, a fate she protested in prayer. She even had the temerity to bargain with God, promising that if He gave her a baby, she would give the baby back to Him. Her prayer changed God’s mind, apparently. In one of Scripture’s happy endings, Hannah gave birth to the baby she so deeply desired, named him Samuel, and dedicated him to be raised as a priest.
The legacy I wanted to pass on to our daughter was the courage to bargain with God. Although that did seem a bit much to bestow on an infant who weighed only five pounds.
That fall Doug and I juggled child care while he did his student teaching and I whittled away at my seminary requirements while continuing to work a few shifts each week as a legal secretary. Our weekly schedule was color coded: pink for the baby, yellow for the car, and blue for our jobs. Pink had to be a continuous line, yellow could never overlap, and blue was the most complicated of all, logistically. But by the spring, Doug had obtained his teaching credentials, and I had only one year of seminary left. Amazingly enough, we were on track.
Doug was unable to find a teaching position that fall, so he took a job working with severely disabled adults. He was disappointed not to get a job in his field but knew this was temporary. Plus, the job had good health benefits.
I plunged into my fourth and final year of seminary, which included a third and final internship. I was delighted to serve at our home church, Dayton Avenue, under the direction of the Reverend David Stewart, who had been installed shortly after I began seminary three years earlier. The church was thriving under Pastor David’s leadership. The sanctuary had a new heating system, and the building bustled every day of the week.
As an intern, I gave guidance to the deacons, taught adult Sunday school classes, and preached once a month. The members of the congregation were kind. They showed up for the classes I taught. They offered positive, helpful feedback after every sermon. And they surrounded Doug and Hannah with love and attention. That congregation made it possible for me to have the seamless life I once envisioned, even if it turned out to be more chaotic than I had anticipated. A cup overflowing.
Still, it made sense to add to the family now rather than later. Those health benefits! When I graduated from seminary that May, I was two months pregnant. Once again I was living with one foot in the future. As soon as the baby was born, I would start looking for a church to serve. Someday soon I would be ordained.
Clara turned out to be a Sunday baby. She was born during the church hour, just before noon on the second Sunday of Advent. Exactly one week after her birth, our family of four went to church together for the first time. I dressed Clara in a red velour outfit that someone had given us, like a soft sleep sack with a hood. It was perfect for a Minnesota baby born in December. I wore my black maternity slacks and my favorite blouse: ivory crepe with a black notch collar and black covered buttons.
When we arrived at church, Doug took Hannah to the nursery, which she loved, while I carried Clara into the fellowship hall—the same one Doug and I had first entered almost five years earlier, when we sat on folding chairs and heard a woman preach for the first time. Once again, Arthur was the first to greet me, which was no surprise. He was still spare and only slightly more bent than he’d been when I first met him. Then I was besieged by well-wishers. Any newborn is perfection, and Clara was a sleeping porcelain doll, with alabaster skin, pink petal lips, and long eyelashes adorning blue-tinged eyelids. I reveled in congratulations and joy.
Then it was time to go into the sanctuary for worship. Since it was Advent, the sanctuary was decorated with purple candles and red poinsettias and a tall, twinkling tree that reached toward the blue ceiling. On the pulpit stood a vase with a single red rose to bless the new baby. In the bulletin an announcement welcomed Clara to the world and congratulated all of us, including big sister Hannah.
Just a week postpartum, I was still sore and bleeding, but that only seemed right. Sitting in a pew beside Doug, holding our newborn, I felt like my life had come full circle. This was the church where I first felt welcomed as a woman, where Doug and I were married, where I preached my first sermon, where we had baptized one baby and soon would baptize another, where I had served in ministry. This was home.
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5, NIV). I had recently written a paper on this passage, and each line of the reading resonated with meaning. As the service progressed, Doug and I passed Clara back and forth between us without needing to say a word. When she got hungry, I unbuttoned my blouse and Doug arranged a baby blanket over my shoulder. The choir began the anthem, accompanied by piano and bassoon.
Comfort, comfort, you my people.
Tell of peace, thus says our God.
Comfort those who sit in darkness,
Bowed beneath oppression’s load.
As the music filled the sanctuary, I could hear the tiny sounds of my daughter suckling. I felt the pull of her taking what she needed from me, which my body was blessed to give.
Tell them that their sins I cover,
And their warfare now is over.
All of me had entered that sanctuary, and all had been received and welcomed. Body and spirit. Everything healed and everything unhealed. Past and present. Future and all that is yet to come.
EPILOGUE
A Letter to My Daughters
Dear Daughters,
The smell of curried cauliflower reminds me why I wrote this book. About a decade ago I was cooking supper and reading the newspaper when a news story filled me with passion. Hannah, you were away at college by then, and Clara, you were in high school.
Even years before that, I had suspected that I needed to tell this story. I just didn’t know how, or when, or if I had the courage to write it down. I was a minister, preaching every week and counseling people. I felt competent and honored that I could serve in ministry. But as you became young women, I was filled with powerful, conflicting feelings—mainly pride, but also worry. You were both so beautiful, so confident, and moving about in the world so freely. But you were so vulnerable! What manner of things might reach out to hurt you? A piece of me was afraid all the time. Yet I didn’t want my fear to taint you or to taint my interactions with you. In your childhood, I hadn’t been a fearful mother. And I didn’t want to become one. Still, I felt constantly torn between encouraging you to follow your dreams—“Go for it!”—and pulling you back to hold you close—“Be safe!”
