Labor

Suspended above the Delaware River, I can no longer time my contractions. The fierce waves of pain sweep up my facility to do anything but breathe. Breathe I do, with an equally fierce grip on the vinyl door handle of my husband’s pickup truck—never more thankful for its heated leather seats. As my insides constrict, my fingers squeeze the handle tighter. When my muscles release their grip, I release mine, measuring my breath with a will resolute. My body continues this rhythm the entire ninety-something minutes, eyes shut to the standstill traffic, shut to the rising sun that threatens to illuminate my fear in daylight. Fear the traffic may ebb too late, fear my first child will be born midair, suspended above the Delaware River.

It’s been nine hours since the first contraction that buckled my knees. From the floor of my closet-sized bathroom, I logged it with the others—calculating their duration and frequency, my only sense of control in an uncertain sea of first time labor. Rich had drifted asleep by then, worn out from the repeated after-hours calls to Dr. Vergara, from the hour and forty-five minute drive over the Delaware Memorial Bridge and back. I wondered then if I should have taken up the triage nurses on their offer: take a long walk around the hospital grounds to quicken my labor. Either that, or drive the fifty-two minutes back home and return when my cervix is dilated enough to earn entry into Labor and Delivery. I chose the heated seats of my husband’s pickup truck over scaling the hospital walls at dusk.

My body undulates with the river below me, and the sensation that soon washes over me is one of calm. New Jersey becomes Delaware as we inch the twelve miles to Christiana Hospital, but the river stays unchanged. Rivers know no borders, after all. With a river’s logic, I committed nine months ago to delivering my first child forty miles from home. What’s a border, a bridge, I thought, to the unconditional trust I had in Dr. Vergara who, like the river, remained steady and unchanged as a new life transformed my body from the inside out and I prepared to plunge headfirst into motherhood.

Trust is a privilege, I know. My body knows. We arrive at the hospital, and Rich offers to drop me off at the automatic glass doors to triage. I decline and insist on walking together from the parking garage instead, unwilling to separate from his safety. I halt midwalk, folding inward several times as my body continues to clench, preparing its life-giving canal. I scale the wall to triage and the fifth cervical check I endure in these twelve hours confirms I’m dilated five centimeters. Within minutes, I’m wheeled and escorted to Labor and Delivery. First, though, Rich and I do separate, while I answer standard admittance questions from behind closed doors. “Do you feel safe at home?” Yes. “Is anyone hurting you?” No. I wonder when such hurt became standard when another tightening wave folds me over and replaces the thought. In the time it takes to settle into my room, meet my nurses, and receive the anesthesiologist, my cervix dilates another two centimeters. In between contractions, I squeeze Rich’s hands until they lose their color while I receive the epidural. I didn’t trust my body to bear the discomfort any further, but I think the river spoke otherwise that third time we crossed the bridge and it ebbed and surged as I contracted, baptizing my body and mother-self sacred. The same water body that nourished my ancestors, the Nanticoke and the Lenape, for 10,000 years, would initiate my own birth and renewal—that of motherhood.

When I deliver my labor story to friends later, I describe those ninety minutes of stillness, suspended above the Delaware River, as a bodily and nervous system response I’ve never experienced, that of innate survival in the way it regulated my mind-body in crisis. I hadn’t known such a phenomenon—only its counterpart. Fifteen years living with an anxiety disorder taught me not to trust my instinct; most of the threats I faced until then were imagined—accustomed to my survival response betraying me, skin flushed, heart rate quickened, extremities cold, words frozen behind my lips. The river reoriented me toward calm, toward trust, as I adapted to circumstance. Like rivers and people adapt, so can our nervous systems.

Five years of motherhood are teaching me to regulate my stress responses—belly breathing and recognizing triggers—regulating in states of distress and modeling calm for my children. I’m learning to trust the river, I am, but it’s a labor like no other when traumas unresolved inhabit your body. If I could swim back in time, I’d swim through generations, collecting sea glass shards of hurt and then piecing them into my own reflection. Until then, the shards are my triggers, poking and pricking me to dysregulation—away from the mother I want to be. With measured breaths through pursed lips, I push, padding my body with presence as the past compels me like a whirlpool; I know there’s something in its vortex that begs to be pieced together. These pulls are a labor like no other.

Skin to Skin

I was three years old when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer the first time. It’s not out of any recess of my memory that I know this, but out of necessity. When I discovered that I possessed the BRCA1 gene mutation, my oncologic counselors and physicians sought my complete family history as a means of further calculating my risk. I have no memories, actually, of my mother’s two cancer diagnoses. In my home, we didn’t communicate such things or exchange anything substantive, really; rather, we spoke in surface gestures—levity, pleasantries—that, or cold passivity, dancing and tiptoeing around one another at a safe distance, terrified of our very humanity. Sometimes, before Mom left for her morning shift, she’d write notes on paper napkins and sign them with a heart, Mommie, saying more on paper, in gestures, than she’s voiced in my lifetime. When Mom underwent chemotherapy though, her body surrendered and she gave up the dance. At bedtime, she’d muster what energy she had left to read a few pages from my storybooks. Most nights though, as had always been the case in our home, the words ran out—with her strength. She’d lay down and close her eyes to recover but, to let me know she was still there, she extended her pinky finger—like dipping a toe beneath the surface of the water to see if one can bear the sensation. Mom tells me I held her little finger on these nights as if for dear life.

My adult self still longs to hold my mother’s hand—to share a moment, an embrace, free of guise. But such trust belongs to bodies that haven’t been betrayed. And to those whose reserve buckles, sinking them deep below the surface as they hold on for dear life.

Skin-to-skin was the first lesson of motherhood I learned. With trained swiftness, the labor and delivery nurse rubbed Anna clean of the creamy white coat she wore in my womb and slumped her eight pounds four ounces on my naked breast. Anna wriggled there for sixty minutes, mouthing her way around a cold new world as her temperature, blood sugar, and nervous system regulated—the latter, within seconds of our skin-meeting.

What danger the body has to endure for its fibers and synapses to cross. What violations, for a meeting so instinctive to our survival to prompt its dysregulation.

Much of a first-time parent’s instincts are those of survival. Maybe I didn’t trust my own, studying every bestselling parenting book, desperate to escape the generational gales of hurt that swept me up in their paths. I absorbed the science on children’s sleep, sure it would keep me grounded, rational, when my baby arrived. Of course, though, to be a mother is to go about life with your most precious parts on the outside of your body, and there’s nothing sensible about that. Like she does most things, Anna defied the science, and I spent the first two years of her life in this inside-out, survival state as I fought to secure her daily naps. She came to associate the soothing act of nursing with sleep and so, on most afternoons, she napped on my bare chest. To her skin, I surrendered, attuning daily to the way her body—and my own—regulated until disarmed, in spite of whatever contorted state my body assumed in an effort to accommodate hers. We continued this ritual until my body became uninhabitable—a new, rounded life sprouting from the inside.

With my second child, it was out of survival that I returned to the science. My body and my time otherwise occupied, I could no longer surrender to the magnetic force between our skin. With the research on wake windows, circadian rhythms, and sleep cycle consolidation, I sleep-trained Brynn, and she was an independent napper and sleeper by three months old. We adopted an eat-play-rest-repeat ritual and so, unlike Anna, her small body radiated with energy during our nursing sessions. Cradled by my body and nourished by my breast, Brynn would explore my body’s terrain, extending her tiny hands and fingers as far as she could reach, kneading my skin like a kitten. To her curious fingertips and infant-sharp fingernails, I surrendered, and most days she’d leave bright pink and red scratches on my chest, chin, and lips.

 I didn’t know such closeness before motherhood. And though with others, it repels me at times, the magnetic force between my skin and my children’s skin is just as strong now as it was then.

 What surrender the body has to experience for its fibers and synapses to discern love. What sanctuary, in those meetings instinctive to our survival, to prompt its healing.

Belly

I strip into my native state—clothes shed, hair freed, face bared—and step into a scorching stream of water. Lukewarm isn't enough, when there exists a steeled sensation inside you that demands you’re unclean. Though I’ve learned to breathe in oxygen to corrode its force, wet rust seeps into my consciousness at times.

 Like now. I’m happy. I sing in the shower while my two-year-old plays with a puzzle of plastic shapes just outside the door. She revels in her realization that each uniquely colored shape has its own space, that all of the colors and shapes fit neatly into their places, a segregated harmony. I wonder what lesson she’s learning as quickly as I think of ways to undo it. Actually, this is how I’ve come to understand parenting; most difficult is undoing the lessons that you yourself impart. Like now. I’m singing, but anyone could tell that something inhibits my voice. It fails to project because it never leaves my chest. It’s just me here. Why am I afraid? Brynn probably isn’t even listening… But if she is, I won’t teach her to be meek. I try singing from my belly instead, recalling the abdominal breathing I learned in therapy years ago. Unfettered, my voice leaves my belly and penetrates our four walls. I imagine it teaches Brynn fearlessness. And maybe it does.

I catch my breath and look down at my dripping wet belly. Once taut, now soft and scarred with faded purple stripes. Leaning back slightly, my abdominal muscles contract, exposing the canoe-shaped hill in between—postpartum diastasis recti. Brynn was just short of ten pounds at full term and my skin has yet to elasticize—muscles have yet to reunite. I’m learning to trust my belly, to admire it even, all of it. For harboring life—lives—and for sending me cautionary signals. Intuition may begin in our heads but it lives in our bellies, in the acid that tries to burn each threat we perceive. I think of all the “gut feelings” I’ve ignored over the years, of those I felt when men reached for me, with probing, hungry hands that sought to own me, devour me. Of those I felt when I traded my soul for belonging. I know now not to stomach those cautionary signals. Instead, when my belly speaks, I listen. Most times, it knows.

Like it knows intimately the clench of each contraction that brought me to my knees as it carried the weight of life and the lightness of innocence all at the same time—seven minutes, six minutes, five minutes apart and it’s time.

What the belly doesn’t distinguish at times is the difference between a real threat and an imaginary one, between fullness and hunger, cautionary urge and compulsory desire. I’m not sure this is something we can teach our children. The belly is a teacher—its lessons mold our limits, our discretions.

My belly is mine. Despite the loud, metallic sentiments of others, women’s bodies, bellies, are not mere “hosts” to life or to men’s desires, hosts for the next generation. Women, mothers, are luminaries of life and hope—our earthsoft lantern bellies protrude in silent, knowing agreement with the sun as we choose to keep feeding eternity with our light.

I keep singing from my belly, dry and clothe my body, and dump Brynn’s shapes into her rattan toy basket where they commingle. I suggest that we draw instead and, to that she responds, Mommy, I’m hungry.

-Katherine Bond

Katherine Bond, a teacher and mother, is enjoying her first opportunity to write creatively in her pursuit of an MA in Writing (‘24) at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. At Rowan, she teaches First-Year Writing, studies justice-oriented pedagogies, and acts as a Teacher Consultant for Rowan's chapter of the National Writing Project. Katherine is a 2023 and 2024 recipient of the Pat B. Tweedie Award for Creative Nonfiction and lives in Bridgeton, NJ with her growing family of four.