appointment. Ask your doctor about cord clamping. Ask your doctor about vernix practices. What happens to the placenta? Bring a cooler for transportation if you wish to eat it. My magazines had whole checklists you could cut out and bring with you, but I had forgotten them all.
Inside were Hazel’s doulas and several other women I had never seen, lit up from somewhere unearthly, their cheeks sun-flushed. They wore T-shirts that said things like The Clitoral Truth and Feminist Killjoy tucked into wide-leg canvas pants, and they smiled with their heads cocked to the side, lips pressed in feminine knowledge.
Hazel hugged me and led us to a back room. She patted my belly. “That baby in there wants to be a person in the world, I can tell.”
In the room there was a poster advertising a womb continuum class and little twiggy flowers in mason jars on every windowsill, a double bed with a pure white duvet. Everything smelled of peppermint and baked bread. She poured cucumber water from a pitcher into a glass and I downed it in a loud, shameless gulp. The water was crisp and cold. The more I drank, the more I wanted. I thought of how my mother used to drink alcohol as if it were water, no hesitation, no savoring. Just pure need.
“More,” I said, and she gave me more. She took a cloth and wiped dirt from my face.
“Pregnant women need a ton of water,” she said. “I hope you’ve been watering that little baby in there.”
I pictured myself pouring soda on a seed in the ground and expecting a garden. Useless. Perhaps the strange popping I’d been feeling was just the baby signaling for more water, begging for it, and there was not enough.
“You can wash here before you leave, too, if you want. Only if you want. No judgment.”
“There’s this weird feeling in my stomach,” I said quietly. “I mean, it could just be gas. It probably is. But what if it’s not, what if I’m doing this all wrong?”
“Pop pop pop,” she said. She tapped on the drum of me, enthusiasm unthwarted. “Like that?” I nodded. “That’s your babe kicking. It’s saying, ‘Here I am, Mom! Pay attention to me!’”
“It’s moving in there?” I said. This possibility felt obvious to me suddenly. Of course it was moving. Hadn’t the mama magazines mentioned this would happen? Yet I had felt certain these very normal things wouldn’t happen for me. I had dreaded deep down that this baby would never move, that I would not be a good-enough host. But here it was moving despite everything. Goose bumps sprang up on my arms and legs. I wasn’t in control of anything about the person inside me, a relief and a terror.
“Babies are known to masturbate in the womb, if you can believe it. They lick the wall of the womb, they suck their thumbs. It’s incredible. Oh, you poor thing. Did you think something was wrong? Just kicks!”
Poor thing. I smiled at her, but I hated those words. I wanted her to see me as a glowing mama in a new bodycon dress showing off my bump, smiling dear husband on my arm. Nursery almost complete. I wanted to put my feet up in my new rocking chair that I would nurse in, and think of baby names, think of nothing but the swell of my feet. But instead, Poor thing.
“Is she gonna be too small to push this thing out?” Florin asked, looking at my crotch.
“A woman from Fresno had her babe in here a few days ago,” a doula cut in. Her hair was pinned to the sides of her head in little bushes over her ears. “Eleven pounds, vaginally.” She looked dreamily at the ceiling, toward some unknown doula heaven of elastic vaginas, still in awe. “We made her placenta pills. It was a gorgeous placenta.”
“That’s a big-ass baby,” Florin said.
“They’re all coming in from the city now that unmedicated birth is in style again,” Hazel said. “She did amazing. Her mantra was ‘I’m going to get enooooorrrmmous.’ She kept saying that while pushing, ‘I’m getting enorrrrrrmous, I’m getting enorrrrrrrrmous.’ Never seen dilation like that. He came right out.”
“What if I can’t do it?”
“Nope,” Hazel said. “Don’t entertain that thought. Don’t give it an ounce of power. Your thoughts create reality.”
If my thoughts created reality I wouldn’t be in this situation now, I thought.
I lay down on the bed and she took my blood pressure. “Good,” she said. Then