Not What I Planned

What follows is Yo-Yo’s birth story, taken from Our Book. It’s not a rosy story, but it is his story nonetheless.

But before I start, here are a few photos of Yo-Yo hauling wood.


You'd think he was hauling an entire tree, not just a measly armload of logs.


Don't look! He's going to explode!


Honey, don't lick the wood. It's supposed to be dry.


I'm starting to feel guilty. He's working too hard. I should probably call him in for some cookies and milk now.


Nah, he's just fine. You can't fool me. Keep working, son.

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Mom thought I seemed curiously detached and apathetic when she flew to Nicaragua to help take care of me, two weeks after Yo-Yo Boy’s birth.

I hadn’t planned on having a C-section. Absolutely not. I was going to push my baby out all by myself, and at home, not in some cold, chemical-smelling hospital. But then my blood pressure went up too high, so they induced me, and after three days of off-and-on labor and a tummy stretched so tight that I could no longer sense any baby kicks and punches, my water broke and ran green. Meconium. Baby in stress. The doctor insisted that we go to the clinic immediately. I sobbed. Mr. Handsome cried in the privacy of the bathroom. We went.

The nurse said she needed to shave me. I said no, but they did it anyway. I was thirsty, but they said I couldn’t drink. I angrily demanded water, and they finally gave me ice chips to wet my lips (I ate them). In the operating room I climbed up onto the hard table and tried to relax and breathe around the contractions. I asked, “Where is my husband?” No one responded, so I tried Spanish, “Donde esta me esposo?” Nothing. I got mad, squeezed my eyes shut, and yelled his name into the room. They turned me onto my side, pushed my knees up to my chest, pulled my head down, and jammed a needle in my back. Then I was laid flat on my back and my arms were tied down so my body made a cross. Maybe this was what it felt like to be executed. The doctor came in, wiped the tears off my cheeks with his finger, and said, “Don’t cry,” in his broken English. Then Mr. Handsome, a masked figure in green, entered and stood by my head.

I heard a squawling as they lifted Yo-Yo’s head out of me, and someone said, “He peed!”

When Yo-Yo Boy was one month old, the post-partum blues hit. I still didn’t feel like he was really my child. It made me angry that he’d been cut out of me. Cut out of me. It sounded violent and cruel, like I had been taken advantage of. My incision was so ugly that I avoided looking at it, a red slice through my pubic hair, with clusters of purple bruises extending in all directions. I didn’t know what it felt like to have a baby come of out me; that’s what really hurt. How could I be a mother if I hadn’t birthed my own child? It was small comfort that I knew what real contractions were like, and that I had felt the hot amniotic fluid gush down my legs. To grab up my freshly born child and hold him in my arms, cord still pulsing! Would I ever get to experience that? I was thankful for the experienced doctor and for the safe, clean place to give birth. My baby could have died without the medical intervention. But still, I grieved.

As a little girl I’d been crazy about babies. I’d pretended I was the mother of twelve children and spent hours keeping a journal of our crazy, imaginary escapades. Once, not even old enough yet for a training bra, I got tears in my eyes, seeing a baby in K-mart. Holding people’s infants made me jealous—no matter how good of a caretaker I was, in the end the child always wanted its mama. I yearned to be number one, the most needed person in a child’s life, the one who knew intuitively how to calm the shrieks. So when Yo-Yo Boy was born, my remote behavior was weird. I had heard Mom’s tale and anticipated waves of heart-swelling, maternal love.

He did, of course, eventually win me over, those wide-open, bright blue eyes staring up at me while he nursed, and then the dimpled smiles.

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And here’s a little more from the book (written when I was pregnant with Sweetsie), the working title of which is Cake From Scratch: A Cobbled Life. The following is most of the rest of the preface, the beginning of which was our stories of the births of our firstborns. Sharing this may just help you to make sense of our musings and meanderings and rantings, since I keep doling out bits and pieces anyway.

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Me: The other night I dreamed Yo-Yo Boy had died. I woke up sobbing. What would I do without my children? I don’t know. Though many times I don’t know what to do with them, and here I am carrying a third.

Like most everyone else, I suppose, I expect my life to be perfect. However, no matter how much I plan and connive, the stresses and strains keep sabotaging my efforts, forcing me to readjust my expectations. But what’s wrong with wanting the best out of life? I don’t think I’m dreaming too high.

My Mother: Is it so bad to have pie-in-the-sky dreams? Mm, cake-in-the-sky? Sure, the failures often come crashing down around one’s head. There’s no such thing as a dream life. But what if one dared never to dream or never labored and strove for fruition?

If you think about it, life’s about as predictable as cake. It’s sometimes a flop, sometimes soggily rich. The closest thing to a dream cake, though, is the cobbled one the cook frets over, dripping in a few salt tears. Flavor, flavor! Some trepidation accompanies the task because it means working from scratch, slopping around in the dry, sticky, bittersweet, and curdly fixings on hand. But otherwise, where’s the satisfaction? The surprise? The pride? Life’s messy like that—complicated and disappointing and onerous and fantastically astonishing.

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Happy Birthday, Yo-Yo Boy. I love you.