The Mother Lode

After recently posting the entry about my Birth Plan, I had to pause for some sincere and elaborate reflection on my own birth.

I only wish I could remember the first 24 hours after I began to exit the womb, but too many hard narcotics were involved. They hooked up Mom to some sort of intravenous drip, and very soon thereafter, I was hopped up on drugs, way too high to remember anything but the scantest of details. Naked, blood shot eyes, fidgety, face covered in my own slobber – but all of a sudden, I was surrounded by bright lights and masked/bespectacled people, and I was wailing at the hallucinatory and disorienting new reality. Was I a human in its larva stage, or a caterpillar dreaming to be a infant? Either way, it was not a gratifying scene . . . one of my grimmest, most desperate days to date.

But here’s the worst part: it was a c-section, so I wasn’t really “born.” There wasn't much "birthing" involved at all; more than anything, I guess I was extracted. It was like the hospital staff went on a mining expedition. (After all, in Waco in the 1980s, I think the doctors at the hospital actually were coal miners working the night shift for extra beer money. At some point, I’m pretty sure I received a swift blow to the temple from a pick axe.)

Forcefully (and surgically) divorced from the ceremonious passage into the world that most other humans experience, I was stripped of my dignity, left to question my very humanity. If I were perfectly honest, there are days when I’m still not sure that I truly, completely exist after not having been born. I’ve been coerced into this limbo, forever stuck in a weird hybrid anti-reality that I can only describe as somewhat similar to purgatory. In some ways, there can be no more grave a human rights abuse than preventing someone the right to be born, not allowed to fully experience the very process of becoming human.

I wish I could tell you that the drama ended there, but after my so-called “birth”, matters have only deteriorated. As it turns out, just because you’re delivered by a “Caesarean” procedure, that doesn’t mean you’re going to grow up to go gallivanting around in chariots, nor can you (legally) conquer/pillage Gaullist towns, and perhaps worst of all, you can’t even prance around sporting a laurel of gold-plated olive branches on your head. (Trust me, I’ve tried them all, and not once has the line “but I was delivered by Caesarean section” been received as an acceptable excuse). You can imagine how the whole shocking disappointment has taken some real adjustment, most of all for my mother, who was expecting her own Tirolean villa by now.