I'll Take a C-section and 2 Chicken Soft Tacos To Go, Please

Recently I was watching a reality show with SM. It was about a highly pregnant celebrity preparing to give birth by C-section. We watched in silence as the mother-to-be tried to come to terms with the impending surgery and birth and deal with her fears and anxieties. Since I've had 2 C-sections of my own, I nodded in sympathy as the lady sobbed on her husband's shoulder while he did his best to talk her off the ledge, in soothing, loving tones. Memories began parading through my mind, and I wound up railing at SM in that You-Know-What's-Wrong-With-This-World direction which always terminates in And-It's-All-Your-Fault.

"You just can't understand what's so surreal with the whole C-section experience," I said. "It's different from other surgeries. When you have your other body parts operated on, your entire responsibility in the operation ends when you hear, 'Now count backwards from 100, dearie', but in a C-section, you're there for the whole kit 'n' caboodle. First of all, you have to walk yourself to the operating room. That's like being a kid in trouble and your mom or dad telling you to go outside and pick your own switch. Then there's the whole epidural-trust issue. They tell you you won't feel a thing, but there's no perceptible change to let you know it's kicked in. You lay there like a trussed-up deer carcass wondering if the darn thing will really work. You're completely strapped down, and the only thing you can do is move your head from side to side. You can't see a thing because there's a surgical drape 5 inches from your nose, blocking your view. You imagine the doctor making the first slice and you levitating straight up like the Starship Enterprise. You watch your blood pressure on the monitor rise like Krakatoa getting ready to blow and wonder irritably why people keep telling you to calm down. Then you suddenly realize that the doctor's been in your abdomen for the last ten minutes. Hey, it really did work! No pain. Sweet hallelujah. (Although soon the uterus realizes what's happening and fights back. You DO get contractions. Crap.) And if that's not surreal enough for you, this terrifying, exciting, momentous, life-altering, thrilling milestone in your life is simply something to fill in the time between breakfast and lunch for the surgical staff. It's the biggest brick wall of your life, and for the staff it's another day, another dollar. You are among strangers, and unless your husband allows you to reach through his nose down to his kidney and yank it out, all that I'm-right-here-with-you crap is just going to make you mad. You are told by calm, professional people, in all seriousness, that you must walk through this brick wall in your life, and they see nothing strange about it. They've probably done it 6 times already that day, and the brick wall is very transparent to them. So you, laying spread-eagled and utterly helpless, are looking at them in bewildered disbelief, and they're talking about what to get for lunch. 'So I hear they opened up a new Taco Bell down the street. Wanna go after we wrap this lady up? Whoa, buddy, watch out for that liver! She's only got one. Hey, check this out - I can make her belly button poke in, poke out, poke in, poke out' (appreciative laughter from staff).

So then, after interminable minutes of sweating it out and mentally cursing, you hear your child's cry. It's the one thing that's kept you going, the light at the end of the tunnel. And you made it! You lived! And the epidural's still going! Yay! You're a mother! So you do what any sensible woman does, and you burst into tears. Your baby in all her wrinkled glory is brought to you and she glares at you for interrupting her in-utero naptime and plunging her into blinding daylight. You cry some more, because now you feel guilty right out of the gates, you're already a failure, and this is when your husband tells you he's so proud and that you will be a great mom. You want desperately to hit him, but he's holding the baby and has moved out of reach. You're wheeled to recovery, and for the next three days any attempt to get out of bed will, you are convinced, make all your intestines fall out. You devise clever ways of maneuvering in and out of bed when you go to the bathroom, and countless people show abnormal and unembarrassed interest in how long it takes you to poop and fart. All throughout pregnancy and delivery you've nursed the theory that this is all your husband's fault, and by this time you are well and truly convinced you are right, it is all his fault. However, you're in no position to chase him down and pound him for it. Once you have begun to deal with that disappointment, the baby blues slam into your psyche with all the fury of a hurricane. No one remembers anything about your C-section by now, except you. You, of course, will carry these memories to the grave, but to everyone else you were just one of many in the procession. You feel wretched. You have done the equivalent of crossing the Alps on an elephant, or at least looking like an elephant crossing the Alps. You want to relive the highs, the lows, and fully savor the victory, but no dice. It's over. Next chapter: how to stop your boobs from feeling like red-hot bricks hanging from your body, how to exist on 3 minutes of sleep a day, and how to get breastmilk stains out of everything you own."

And that, I told SM coldly, is why..."IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT."