The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,129
delivered my father and his four brothers a generation earlier, and had delivered my brother and sister before me (as well as nearly every other baby in the town). There was no prenatal care, no machines, no projected due dates, no epidural. My mother tells me she forgets how bad the pain was. Her stomach hurt the night of the sixth day of the twelfth lunar month of the Year of the Rabbit, and she rode a moped driven by my sister’s nanny the few dusty blocks. My father was not home. He was off somewhere trying to sell and deliver the last of our hardware business’s inventory before the new regime came to confiscate it and more. My mother lay down, and I came quickly. Nobody recorded the exact time that I entered this world, and my mother doesn’t remember.
Both my girls were born at St. Luke’s–Roosevelt hospital on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Mia, being the first, required an epidural, twelve hours of labor and an hour and a half of exhausting pushing that so concerned my obstetrician, she finally decided to use a vacuum to remove the baby. With the vacuum, Mia slipped effortlessly out, and within seconds, I was clutching her slippery, wiggling body at 5:56 P.M. Belle came quickly at the height of the summer heat; it was ninety-nine degrees that day, and I was burning up on the street. I was that pregnant lady who couldn’t get a cab—shift change or fear of having a pregnant woman deliver in the cab, I couldn’t say. So I desperately and impatiently took the subway uptown with my husband, breathing through the excruciating pains as everyone apprehensively looked on, and then walked across two long avenues to Tenth Avenue, where I was greeted by a wheelchair and a security guard who told me to think about ocean waves; I almost told him to shut the fuck up. I was already eight centimeters dilated, so I bypassed the usual admissions process and was rushed into a room where I got an epidural and the doctor broke my water. Belle came resoundingly into the world twenty minutes later at 6:23 P.M.
As ordinary and mundane as new human life is, even my young children, as shown by their insistence on hearing the stories, instinctively recognize that each new human life is anything but ordinary or mundane; they appreciate the uniqueness of each of their birth stories and, by extension, the awesomeness of their existence. Even at their tender ages, they wonder about where they were before they were here and how they came to be. We call it, in all of its triteness, the miracle of life.
A miracle is defined as that which cannot be explained by the laws of science or otherwise defies all known rules of the natural world. The miracle of life in some sense is not a miracle at all. The laws of science can explain how human life comes about—I received those weekly emails from babycenter describing what was happening within my womb while I was pregnant—egg meeting sperm, cells rapidly dividing, so many organs forming, so many systems developing. There is no mystery at all. And yet, it is the very creation of life, that undefinable spark that begins the process, that is the miracle. And then from there, a million and one things have to go just right, and fortunately for me and as far as we can tell—knock on wood—they did with respect to my little girls. The proper occurrence of those million and one things in the right time sequence is a miracle. As one who was born blind, I was particularly sensitive to the delicacy of that process that seems so ordinary, how easily something small with far-reaching consequences could go wrong. I suspect I fretted more than the average expectant mother.
These birth stories were what I wanted to write down when I learned that I had Stage IV colon cancer, in 2013; there were so many things, but these most of all. Who else could tell my daughters how I counted their fingers and toes to make sure they were all there? Who else could describe the magic and wonder of seeing them for the first time, their alien-like faces and still-damp, soft skin that strangely smelled of me and them, their nearly bald heads that begged for warmth and nurturing in their utter fragility? The scientific and factual mundaneness of their existence didn’t register with me; I could