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Show Jennifer, you are resisting, Deb said, you are fighting your body. From my mouth, no, from my body, came sounds I could not have imagined I could make. Moans, deep, guttural, noises not my own. For a minute I worried I would scare Michael, scare the nurses, that they would leave me because they could no longer recognize me, because I embarrassed them, because I would not keep quiet, be polite, use my indoor voice. I closed my eyes. Other women have said that birth is not painful, and they are right. What your body experiences belongs to another realm. It is totalizing. You are the birth. You are your body. And nothing else. You cannot step away, take a break, reconsider. You, as you have always thought of you, cease to exist. I had a choice. Even as the contractions consumed me, I knew I had a choice. And I remember making the decision to go into the pain, to hand my body over to it, let it break me, halve me, leave me destroyed. I will let go, I thought. Not because I wanted to do it "right,!!not because I recalled previous failure, but because I wanted to see if I would survive/ For the first time in my life, I wanted to trust a body, my body, the one that refused to be controlled, the one that had betrayed mergrowrrhair, bled, and peed, the one that I had starved, the one rejected by John (you are like a sister), the one I had kept covered and contained for so many years, and see rT that body would hold. So I dove down, riding the next contraction into oblivion. Deeper and deeper I dove, searching for the heart of the pain, the beginning place. I swam past my brother lying on the bottom of the pool, his hair waving like seaweed in the wake of my kick, his disposable diapers bloated with chlorinated water, past the pocket I knew could never keep me safe, safe no longer even seemed like a reasonable concept, a thing worth 255 |