Memoir Excerpt

White Wife/Blue Baby

Chapter 1: Oxygen

March 1969

Emmon was smiling at me. A big, gleeful smile.

“It’s a girl!” he told me, in what was almost a chirp.

The corners of his eyes were crinkled and his head tilted. He’d just seen the baby for the first time. It was 1969 — no one had yet allowed fathers in the birthing room. But it was almost as if I hadn’t been there either. Under total anesthesia, most women at that time gave birth without knowing it. Now I was flat on my back, trussed up with a huge pad between my legs. It was raw and cold in Chicago, and Emmon was sitting in the chair next to my bed, still wearing his rumpled trench coat.

“She’s got so much hair! She’s the hairiest one in the nursery!”

It had taken me a while to see this side of him. A year and a half had passed since we’d met, although so much had happened it felt like a decade. At first, what had attracted me to Emmon was his reserve, his gaunt baby face, like a CARE poster child who’d taken up smoking and sarcasm. Now his wide smile really brought out the contrast between his white teeth and dark skin.

Still only half-conscious, I could barely absorb what he was saying. My body weighed a thousand pounds, and my head was not sure anything outside of itself was real. At least the agony and panic had stopped. All night, enormous, unknown muscles had lunged and cramped. I hadn’t known that that much pain was possible, until another cramp dug even deeper. At one point I passed out and dreamed that a huge, loud combine with circular blades was starting to cut through me.

Leaning forward in his chair, Emmon held up his hands about a foot apart.

“She’s tiny. Unbelievably tiny!” he chortled.

 Carolyn had been born at seven and a half pounds, an entirely normal birth weight, but neither of us had any idea what normal was.

“The doctor says she’s a blue baby,” I heard Emmon say through the blur in my brain, “They’ve got her in the premature nursery.”

He didn’t seem disturbed by this. I wanted to know what “blue baby” meant, but I was unable to formulate a question. There was a rushing sound in my head as I fell back to sleep.

When I woke up again, the doctor was there, and Emmon was gone. Dr. McConnell carried his round belly straight out in front of him. His gray hair was slicked back and his chin was in the air.

 “Your baby is not getting enough oxygen,” he was now saying, talking to me from the foot of my bed. “As yet we don’t know why, but whatever is wrong, it is probably because you took drugs during your pregnancy.”

He used a matter-of-fact tone, with just the slightest hint of derision. A smaller, dark-skinned man, also in a white coat, was looking at me with big brown eyes.

The doctor telling me that the problem could be my fault stunned me in the true sense of the word. I couldn’t cry out. I couldn’t breathe. The guilt that had always followed me, that was always lurking somewhere at my shoulder, filled me with heat and shame. Dr. McConnell and his assistant stood at the base of my bed for a moment longer. Then they turned and walked out of the room.

The summer before, we’d chosen Great Plains Hospital’s maternity clinic because it had a flat fee for a normal birth. Neither of us had any insurance. At my first appointment with Dr. McConnell, he sat at his desk, examining the intake form I’d completed.

“What’s this you are taking?” he asked abruptly, looking up at me through his frameless glasses.

“Antidepressants,” I mumbled.

“A young woman like you should be happy!” he proclaimed.

I gave him a puzzled look. Half the people I knew were subsisting entirely on anger. Two monstrous assassinations were barely behind us, and a pointless war had boys my brothers’ age sending women and children screaming into the jungle. In the neighborhoods where Blacks had risen up in fury and grief, broken glass still lay in the streets. And the Democratic National Convention, with thousands of angry war protestors as uninvited guests, was only a month away. Chicago was entirely on edge, and I was maybe two months along in an out-of-wedlock, racially mixed pregnancy.

Dr. McConnell told me to stop taking the pills immediately, and I did. I was from Oak Park, a perfect oblong directly west of Chicago, and, its inhabitants hoped, the perfect opposite of the City’s chaos. There, doctors and priests and policemen were never questioned.

Now the baby had been born and she was in trouble. I tried to silence the alarms in my head by lying perfectly still. I’d done something unspeakable. I’d hurt my baby. The rushing noise returned, and I went under.

The same day or the next day, I couldn’t tell, a short, fifty-something nurse with a French twist in bobby pins gently shook my shoulder.

 “Okay, honey, here we go,” she urged softly but firmly.

I looked up and here was a baby girl, eyes shut, face serious. My first thought was that she’d only known the inside of me. She couldn’t tell who I was from the outside, but I didn’t know who I was, either. It felt like everything inside my body might simply flow out. Another nurse, younger, taller, helped me pull myself up, shooting pain through my stitches, a pain I ignored. There was only one thing going on right now. The young nurse stuffed pillows behind me.

“How’s that?” she asked with a note of pride in her voice.

Carolyn was wrapped tightly from head to toe, and when I took her in my arms, she was about the size of a large loaf of bread. The older nurse carefully pulled the gown off my shoulder, then grazed the baby’s cheek with my nipple. Without opening her eyes, Carolyn turned her head and took it. I looked at the wispy Black hair around her miniature ear while she sucked and sucked. I was stunned again.

I’d never seen a newborn baby before up close, but this one didn’t look blue. Her lips were a pinky purple. She was making a delicate grunting noise and breathing through entirely round, miniature nostrils. Something was necessary and right about how her skin smelled. After a while, her mouth let go and the nurses eased her away, saying I’d done a good job.

My naked breast and protruding nipple had done a good job.

 “Okay,” I whispered, trying to absorb what just happened.

 When I woke up again it was night, and a tall, round-faced woman in green hospital clothes was standing at the end of my bed talking loudly and cheerfully. It was dark in the room except for light from the hall.

 “Hi sweetheart,” she called out, “your baby is doing fine! I just took her off the oxygen.”

She gestured with her hands and chattered on, probably waking the woman next to me. Tight gray curls were knotted under her green hair net.

 “They told you she was a blue baby, but I know she’s mixed race. That’s why she looks a little dusky. She doesn’t need extra oxygen. Don’t worry, okay? You get some sleep, okay?”

 I nodded so she would stop. Off she went.

I didn’t demand to know what was going on. I didn’t get up and head down the hall, trailing bright spots of blood and letting the hospital gown flap open, yelling for a doctor. Instead, I lay in the bed picking through ideas in my mind. Maybe the doctor had told her to disconnect Carolyn’s oxygen. But she hadn’t mentioned a doctor. Still, she probably knew what she was doing. I was 21. In my mind, anyone in a hospital not pushing a broom was an authority figure. I fell back to sleep.