24. How They Broke Her
As my mother’s mind broke apart like glacial ice, as huge fragments calved off and plunged into darkness, as things that had been submerged began to rise from the depths, all of us, at separate times, had the same thought:
Something happened to her.
We knew her father had been cruel, of course; we knew she had been sexually harrassed at the Pentagon. But there was something else. And we asked ourselves, what was it? How did she keep it so silent, so separate, all these years? Why did she never feel, even after all these years, that she could tell us?
It was only later, so much later, after she was so long gone, that I realized: she told me.
When she was many years gone, when I was practically an old woman myself, I finally realized: She told me.
I didn’t hear her. But she told me.
My mother told me about my birth. She told me about the anesthesia, the drugs that left her in a fog those first precious days; left her uncentered, off kilter, unable to trust herself. She would tell it with a fire I couldn’t understand. I was out of it for three days, she would say bitterly. It made no sense to me. What was the big deal? Why this bitterness, this suppressed fury? It was so long ago; we were babies, we didn’t know any different; in any case we didn’t remember. What did it matter?
She had wanted to breastfeed us, as her mother had breastfed her, as poor women did everywhere in those days. The doctors were against it in the fifties, but my mother instinctively reckoned it was best, a true-North knowledge for which the doctors mocked her, made her feel like an animal, a fool, a woman, impertinent to question the supremacy of Modern Science. They circumcised my brother without anesthesia, because in the 1950’s Modern Science still believed that newborns did not feel pain; their neurological systems were not sufficiently developed, the doctors said. Yeah, right, you motherfucking morons, my brother said. But the doctors did not speak his language, so they cut him and let him cry. Wailing, bewildered, frantic, shuddering with grief, woozy from the hard drugs still in his bloodstream, my brother didn’t latch on to the breast properly, he bit down hard with his bony little gums, and my mother became engorged, inflamed, then overcome by a tidal wave of mastitis, burning up for days with fever and searing, fiery pain.
Nobody helped her. Nobody knew how. Or if they did, they didn’t do anything. So she iced her rock-hard burning breasts and took the bottle pushed by Modern Science. With me she never tried.
It was only later, after I had my own, that I realized: of course it matters.
But that’s only part of it.
I want to talk about my mother's anesthesia.
I want to talk about the unconsciousness.
I want to talk about how they entered her, un-centered her, how they knocked her whole brainbodybeing off its true North, began a slow unraveling.
I want to talk about how she knew this had happened to her, but she did not have words for it, she could not name it, and she could not see how to heal it. She could not stop the process, the bruise where the fruit begins to rot.
Something has been taken.
Something has been broken.
You have been mentally kneecapped. You are not structurally sound. You try to stand, to rise, but something gives way, something buckles and falls.
You try to see, but a grayness descends.
And like a wave it overwhelms you.
In 1958, the year of my birth, an article came out in Ladies’ Home Journal called, “Cruelty in Maternity Wards.” A labor nurse turned anonymous whistleblower wrote a letter to the editor describing what went on behind the closed doors marked “No Admittance,” where friends and families were not permitted. Then the letters came flooding in, a torrent of letters, a hurricane stormsurge of letters, women telling story after nightmarish story. They talked about the anesthesia, the drug cocktail euphemistically referred to as “twilight sleep,” a combination of morphine and scopolamine, a drug derived from the poisonous nightshade family, said to be equivalent to a chemical lobotomy. Women on scopolamine would lose all executive function, lose control over their bodies, lose the ability to form memories — but not, as it happens, the ability to feel pain. Sometimes they would be strapped down in four-point restraint, moaning, thrashing, hallucinating, flat on their backs for hours and hours as they labored, alone; sometimes lying in their own feces and vomit, in high-walled adult-sized cribs like cages. Sometimes they would come in and out of vague consciousness to discover their legs strapped up in stirrups, spread-eagled, naked, genitals exposed, as strangers moved in and out of the room, putting cold hands inside them. Sometimes their wrists would be burned and bleeding from struggling against the leather straps. Sometimes they wore padding on their heads to prevent injury, cotton in their ears, masks on their eyes. Sometimes black hoods were placed over their heads, like prisoners in Abu Ghraib.
Women on scopolamine could only vaguely participate in pushing their babies out, so sometimes doctors would reach inside them with metal forceps to seize the baby’s head and pull. Sometimes the perineum would be cut, sometimes without anesthetic, the woman howling like an animal in terror and pain, unable to understand what was happening to her, unable to think or speak coherently, unable to escape, as in a dream, powerless, voiceless, completely dominated.
Scopolamine crosses the placental barrier into the unborn baby, so scopolamine babies would often be born limp and blue, half-comatose, not breathing. Pulled out with forceps, they would be roughly held upside down by one leg and slapped until they too howled. Knock ‘em out and drag ‘em out, this kind of birth was called.
Depending on just what happened behind those closed doors, sometimes these mothers would awaken after birth in a state of traumatic dissociation. Women with prior sexual assaults, women with histories of physical or emotional abuse, women who were not white or middle class, women treated coldly and mechanically by medical staff, women who felt isolated and powerless, humiliated and dominated –- in other words, a very large number of women –– all these could be more deeply affected. A young mother might wake up remembering nothing, but feeling in her body the way the victim of a violent crime feels. Terror would pass through her in waves, she would tremble uncontrollably, her mind would falter and fail.
Or she would feel nothing. Her mind and heart would be numb. Cold. Inert. When her baby was brought to her, she would look at it as though it were a stranger, an object, a thing of no interest. Like an animal in a zoo, she would feel nothing for it.
And then, for both mother and child, for one day, two days, three days –– a fog, a grayness, a forgetting.
No one would recognize the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder when they appeared. The mother would continue to feel frozen, numb, dead inside; or she would find herself uncontrollably shaking, heart palpitating, vision narrowing in panic. She would have night terrors, wake up screaming. She would know something was wrong, very wrong, but no one would see it. They would tell her she was fine, she was lucky, she had a healthy baby! They would make her feel weak, self-pitying, hysterical. She would be told she was imagining things. She would be told to pull herself together, to get over it.
Even if her husband was kind, and desperate to help her, he would be bewildered. He would be unable to see. She would be alone.
So now, in her child’s first year of life, she feels nothing, and hates herself for feeling nothing. She does not want to touch the baby, she does not want to touch her husband, she does not want her husband to touch her. She hates her husband for wanting to touch her, hates herself for hating her husband, hates the baby for having brought all this on her, hates her husband for having brought the baby, and above all hates herself for all of it.
And all of it spirals down, and down, and down.
Lucille had seen her when she first came in, young Mrs. Gray, small, dark-haired, eyes the color of creekwater. She was one of those people who stood out from all the others who came through there; you noticed her, a light inside her, an intelligence. The next day she was a ghost. What did they do to her, Lucille thought. It made her feel sick to think about it. She heard the stories from the labor nurses. She had seen it when she did her L&D rotation. Women handled like slabs of meat, their bodies mechanically penetrated and manipulated, nightmare drugs that roiled their brains, left them hollow-eyed and lost.
Mrs. Gray was Dr. Emerson’s patient, they had said, Dr. Emerson who was one of the ones Lucille liked, an old man, a country doctor, courtly and gentle. Dr. Emerson didn’t like to use scopolamine. He would give his patients a moderate painkiller if they asked for it, but he’d been trained up in the old days, he knew how a woman could birth her baby. He knew how to be patient. He had a respectful rapport with the labor nurses, they would work as a team, the nurse holding the laboring mother’s hand, wiping her brow, helping her through. But Dr. Emerson had been called away suddenly on a family emergency, and his young partner, Dr. Smith, had two other patients in labor that night, one of them with a baby in a breach position, and so in the end they had given her to Dr. Peabody.
Lucille hated Leonard Peabody instinctively and intensely. He was a small-eyed man, peremptory and cold. His lips were full and red, with a set to them that made you ill at ease just to look at him. And then there was the way he looked at you: as though you were an insect, an object, and that’s if you were a trained nurse, fully clothed. Why did they let a man like that touch women, Lucille thought. There ought to be a law. But he was considered one of the top doctors at that hospital, he had a big reputation, it was like he was God’s gift to the maternity ward. Partly this was due to his reputation as one who would not hold back on the drugs.
But drugs are not what Mrs. Gray wants. She tries to explain this to Dr. Peabody, how she and Dr. Emerson had discussed the anesthesia, that she hadn’t responded well to it in her previous birth, she was very sensitive to medications. How Dr. Emerson had agreed she could have a little pain relief if she wanted it, but no scopolamine.
Dr. Peabody does not find this interesting. Oh, God, not one of those, he thinks.
“Is Dr. Emerson the physician in charge of your case tonight?” he asks, in the tone of a schoolteacher quizzing a student. “Or am I?”
Then he actually waits for her to answer him. “Hm?”
My mother’s face flushes red. “You are, of course, but––“
“Trust me, if we do it your way you’ll be screaming for mercy before you’re six centimeters dilated. And we don’t want that, now do we?” He winks, smiling. She’s a little cutie, he’s thinking. His tone of voice is parental, as though he were explaining the obvious to an impudent child. He looks down at her chart as she begins to say something else; he hears the words “preference” and “decision.” Now he’s annoyed. She’s wasting his time. He doesn’t like the way she looks at him. The questions she asks.
“Let’s get her prepped,” he says to the nurse, turning away from my mother without responding to her. He leaves the room without looking at her again.
My mother is left with the nurse, a narrow-faced woman with graying hair. The nurse doesn’t seem to like the doctor, but she doesn’t seem to like my mother either. To her my mother is a nuisance, an inconvenience, an irritation. For a conscientious person like my mother this is humiliating.
The nurse gives her a gown and tells her to put it on.
Alone, my mother slowly disrobes, her heart sinking. The pains are coming regularly, but they aren’t yet bad. Yet her heart is filled with foreboding. She thinks about her first birth. It is a blur. But her heart starts racing, palpitating so hard she has to sit down or feel faint. Carefully she folds her navy blue maternity dress, her sweater, her bra, slip, stockings, panties. She puts on the flimsy gown with its flimsy ties.
The nurse’s hands are cold and rough as she shaves my mother’s vulva.
My mother closes her eyes and waits for it to be over. Her feet in the cold stirrups, a large light shining between her legs, the gown slipping down so she is completely exposed. Dr. Peabody enters the room abruptly, leaving the door ajar, and my mother jerks in surprise, instinctively trying to cover herself with the edge of the gown. The sudden movement causes the nurse to cut her slightly with the razor. The gown falls back open.
“Hold still! There’s nothing there we all haven’t seen before. Sorry, Doctor,” she says, apologizing to the doctor rather than to my mother. “You’re going to have to stop all this wiggling,” she scolds as if speaking to a child. My mother flushes with shame and fury, heart pounding.
Peabody looks at the nurse without addressing my mother.
“I need to check her dilation.”
“Yes, Doctor.” The nurse is respectful to him. She swabs my mother’s genitals with a towel and backs away. Peabody washes his hands and dries them on a towel.
My mother feels a powerful wave of revulsion as he approaches her exposed body. He still hasn’t looked her in the face. He opens her labia and inserts his fingers inside her. They push against her cervix, hard. She gasps slightly with the pain of it.
“Try to relax,” he commands her, for the first time looking her in the eye, his fingers still in her body, still pushing. His look expresses total superiority, total control. He holds his fingers inside her longer than seems necessary.
Abruptly he removes his hand.
“She’s going to need something to make her relax if we’re going to get this baby out. Let’s get an IV started.” He barely glances at my mother.
The nurse now swells with her own professional importance; he is on her turf here. “I need to give her an enema first, Doctor,” she says.
He stares at her with an expression that says, don’t bother me with your trivial problems. “Well let’s get this show on the road, shall we?”
Without looking at my mother, he leaves the room.
The nurse, stung by the doctor’s tone, takes the same tone with my mother. “Take your feet out of the stirrups and turn onto your side with your knees pulled up, please.”
My mother mutely obeys, heart pounding, again trying to pull her gown around her as she repositions her unwieldy body. The nurse brusquely pulls the gown aside to expose her buttocks. She leaves my mother in that condition as she prepares the enema. My mother tries to breathe. The contractions are increasing in intensity, moving as waves of pain through her body, but they are nothing to the waves of panic and revulsion rolling through her.
Again she closes her eyes as the nurse inserts the enema into her rectum and injects the cold fluid.
Here it should go without saying, that when a procedure like this is performed by a person like this –– one who is cold, who is mechanical, who handles you as though you were an object, an annoyance –– it may empty more than your bowels.
When the nurse inserts the needle for the IV and tapes the plastic tube to her arm, my mother’s mind is almost drained. But some flicker of clarity remains. She asks what’s in the IV.
Mostly fluids, glucose solution, the nurse says evasively.
Nothing else?
A little something to help you relax.
No, my mother says, no. I don’t want that.
But the nurse has figured out where her weak spot is. She always finds each patient’s weak spot. For my mother it’s this: make her feel like a nuisance, make her feel like a crybaby. Make her feel like she’s wasting everybody’s time. If she wants to say no, make her say it again and again, while feeling your full displeasure, your full chill. Make her repeat it, no, no, no until she can’t say no one more time. Wear her down.
This is what Dr. Peabody ordered. I can’t change it without his approval. Do you want me to call him back in here now to change it? I’ll call him back if that’s really what you want.
Is that what you want?
Is that what you want?
Is it?
No.
No.
No.
“Trauma was not related to mode of birth, but to fractured inter-personal relationships with caregivers… for women in this study, their self-defined traumatic birth was experienced as violent and abusive… resulting in a profound sense of being disassociated from the childbirth experience… the findings expose commonalities between some descriptions of traumatic birth, and victim accounts of violent or abusive criminal offences…”
~Widening the trauma discourse: the link between childbirth and experiences of abuse, Gill Thompson & Soo Downe, School of Public Health & Clinical Sciences, University of Central Lancashire
In the morning Lucille brings her the baby. The mother is vacant, her eyes like fog. What did they do to her, Lucille thinks. Lucille is gentle. She tries to reach her. Tells her what a good baby she has, a sweet little girl. The mother barely nods. When the child is placed in her arms she holds her listlessly. The child starts to cry. Lucille asks, gently, if the mother would like to try breastfeeding; it says in her chart she wants to attempt to initiate breastfeeding. She also notes it says Stage 4 episiotomy.
No, the mother says. No. I can’t.
Lucille is gentle; patient. For a moment the mother meets her eye; a faint flicker of connection. They are two women who could connect, who could help and support one another. But not now. The spark dies. The mother becomes nervous, apologetic.
I’m sorry, she says.
The fog descends.
I changed my mind, she says.
I can’t, she says.
I’m sorry, she says.
The husband comes in later. He doesn’t understand. He’s sweet, but there are no words for this. How they hollowed her out. How they emptied her. He knows something has happened to his wife, something has changed, but there are no words for what happened, so in his mind it can’t come into existence. Like a shade beyond Lethe, it needs the warm blood of words, it needs to be spoken into existence, to be made real.
But his wife is a shade, she is wrapped in fog. So he joins her there. It’s all he can do. Something too painful to see has happened, so he joins her in not seeing it.
Later, when they try to make love, she will see Peabody standing over her, his hand inside her, pushing. She will see the general at the Pentagon, his hand on her breast, a hard bulge in his pants, pressing. She will see her father, his hand on the trigger, standing over a dead cat, laughing. She doesn’t want to be touched. She doesn’t want another baby. She wants to be alone.
Alone, at home, all day, with her two children, both crying at the same time, she empties further. Everything floods out of her. Nothing can come in. She is a shell. She can’t comfort her children. When she holds them, they cry harder. Her body is vacant. A ghost. She measures out their formula, she sterilizes their bottles, she changes their diapers, she does the laundry, she cooks and cleans, she takes them to the pediatrician. But her children know what she does not know: that there is no soul in her body. Their bodies know this. They try to tell her this, but she does not understand their language. They call to her, call to her soul, plead for her soul to come back to them. But it is gone, fled. There is nothing she can do. So she puts them down and lets them cry. She goes into the other room. She sweeps. She scrubs. She folds. She cooks.
When her husband comes home he holds them; he rocks them; they fall asleep in his arms.
She is a failure. She is alone.
Her life is running out from under her. Slipping away from her. She can’t focus. She can’t regain her balance. Irrevocable things are happening, terrible things, things she is not present for, not conscious of. She is a person falling asleep at the wheel. A person in a dream she can’t wake up from.
Her life, her children’s lives, are being shaped, being warped, being irrevocably unmade, by forces outside her, forces beyond her control.
“…fear, loneliness, separation from loved ones, and other emotional stresses can rip the soul away from the body… The soul wandering from the body because of injury, a loud noise, unconsciousness, including anesthesia… may be cured by a soul calling ceremony.”
~When an Infant Dies: Cross Cultural Expressions of Grief and Loss, Jodi Shaefer, RN, Phd, BULLETIN, a Publication of the National Fetal-Infant Mortality Review Program
A woman with two children and no soul, in a culture that has forgotten how to call her soul home, may send her brain out of her body and into the world, searching for answers. She sends it like a falcon trained to hunt. It soars overhead, scanning the landscape for clues, its wings muscular, its beak sharp. But the brain does not have the kind of sight needed to detect a lost soul, so instead it hunts for the things it can see. It goes in search of clear shapes, of geometric forms, of rational arguments, of scientific evidence. It brings her back the morning newspaper, full of information and political commentary. It brings her Bertrand Russell, Rachel Carson, Simone deBeauvoir, James Baldwin. It lays them down on the kitchen table, next to her cooling cup of coffee, like a falcon lays down its prey, to feed a bottomless hunger.
A woman with two children and no soul, once she gets some sleep, may discover that if the children are not awake, or not in the room, she can still think. She may find that thinking provides a kind of shelter, an architecture, a thing with boundaries, edges, an inside and an outside. She may find that reason and justice are mathematical, they are geometric, they are crystalline. That injustice, too, has clear names and forms. It is not nameless, formless.
It is not the thing that entered her, filled her with fog.
It is outside of her. It has boundaries, edges. She can see it, grasp it, push against it. She can resist it.
In 1958 the European Economic Community is formed. Kruschev takes power in the Soviet Union, DeGaulle takes power in France. Egypt and Syria unite to form the United Arab Republic. The world is reconfiguring itself, and my mother is with it every step of the way. The Supreme Court rules that Little Rock, Arkansas, must integrate its schools. The first nuclear submarine crosses the North Pole under water. Bertrand Russell launches the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. On the first day of 1959 Batista flees Cuba and Castro takes power. The Dalai Lama flees Tibet, and China takes power. Nixon debates Kruschev in Moscow. Violence breaks out in resistance to Belgian rule in the Congo. The first American military advisors are killed by Viet Minh guerillas near Saigon.
My mother’s brain tracks these events like a falcon tracks her prey. Alone, with two children and no soul, she educates herself, informs herself, noting each movement, detecting each pattern. She deepens her economic analysis, hones her political instincts, sharpening them like flint, like steel. When the US government starts gaslighting the American public over Vietnam, my mother is ready for them. At the Pentagon she had witnessed the secret shipments of arms, the ones she was demoted over, and now she sees the larger pattern, how they’re laying the groundwork, fabricating the agenda. When the US sinks its talons deeper into Vietnam, she is not surprised. She understands the geopolitical and economic motives, the rubber, the timber, the military bases that lie beneath the blather about communism and democracy. She is brilliant, she’s the fucking Noam Chomsky of the Forest Glen Garden Apartments, but no one knows this but my father, and even he can’t really follow it. He feels her power and takes her word for it. She lays it out for him at dinner, while washing the dishes, while sweeping the floor, and if I start crying, my father picks me up, bounces me, walks me around the room. My mother explains it while she scrubs the grease off the stove, her hand wielding the steel wool like a jackhammer, and my father comforts me while she explains it.