Preeti Talwai: BIRTHDAY PARTY • Cleaver Magazine

Flash Nonfiction by Preeti Talwai
BIRTHDAY PARTY

The craziest thing about a C-section is that you don’t feel anything from the chest down, but you can still move and speak just fine.

So you make small talk with the nurses who call you mama even though you feel like the baby, and your husband drums his scrub-clad feet to “All The Single Ladies” blasting through the OR speakers, and you remember how your mother called you amma when you’d really messed up, like when you tore down your birthday decorations, and you wonder if you’re messing up now, all while the spinal block sets in, making you feel like you’re being crushed by a marble slab, checking if your toes can wiggle, peering down your nose, watching life unfold as the helpless star of the show, a show so well-choreographed that the slightest twinge is numbed before you know you felt it.

But it’s okay, because there are surgeons, and you trust them, because they’ve done this thousands of times, because they know what’s best for you, because they won’t hurl scalpels at each other behind the curtain, because if you say your stomach hurts or you can’t breathe, they’ll believe you, they’ll help you, because they’re professionals and this is the kind of place where nothing—not superstition, not infighting, not generational trauma—will compromise precision.

But just when you let yourself believe that and relax into their belly massage, you feel it—like two halves of your heart are being pulled apart, like the elastic between is about to snap, but not exactly, because it’s a sort of discomfort you have no words for—and they say that’s because we’re holding your uterus above your body, and each individual word makes sense, but strung together you can’t understand what that explanation could possibly mean, even as it’s happening.

But before you can ask any questions, they give you more pain medication and more and even a little bit more, until you forget the knife goes seven layers deep, forget they never prepared you for this possibility even though one-third of births end this way, forget the labor nurse bragging about the low C-section rates even as the fetal heart rate dropped, even as she kept moving you to all fours and back again, but before you can remember to be upset, the surgeon gasps look at his eyelashes and you remember:

the baby, the baby, the baby, this was about the baby the whole time.

And now there’s a scream this world has never heard, and blood dripping down the blue drape, down everyone’s gloves and arms, and your eyes go wide but they say these are good cries, look how much air he’s getting into his lungs, and this blood is necessary, no you’re not hemorrhaging, you’re fine and he’s fine and everything’s fine, and nothing about this seems fine—even in your small helplessness you can sense that—but you can’t feel or see much of anything from down there.

So you forgive them, because they have a much better view from their position towering over you, because they said so, because they let you wear your pajamas all day, because they made you giggle when they put the blue cap over your hair and said birthday hat! And because afterwards, they bring you graham crackers and apple juice, and it’s the best graham crackers and apple juice you’ve ever tasted because you feel so safe there, with all the beeping monitors, the nurses shuffling in and out, the warm blankets, the warm baby.

You feel so safe that you don’t realize until long after they’re gone that you’re moving through the evening feeling nothing, through your life feeling nothing, with no idea when the feeling will return, and only when it does will you realize the trauma you’ve been put through, but by then, you won’t have time to think about all that—you’re responsible for a whole life all on your own.

The craziest thing about a C-section is that someone was cutting life out of you, and for a moment, it felt like love.

Preeti Talwai writes from California, where she’s also a research leader in human-centered technology. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, 100-Word Story, Diode Poetry, HAD, and Prime Number, among others. She is the author of a chapbook, Chronic (Bottlecap Press). Find Preeti Talwai at preetitalwai.com