Kissing the Mother Wound
How regret emerged from my 20-year-old cesarean scar demanding to be acknowledged.
One night recently, as I lay in bed reading, the incision that was the emergency, life-saving portal through which my daughter Lila entered the world began to ache. I felt heavy, dull cramping punctuated with sharp, stabbing pinpoints of pain that felt as if the nerve bundles deadened by the surgeon’s scalpel twenty years before were coming back to life.
All these years—through two full decades and several rebirths of my own—that grim smile across my pubis has felt numb to the touch, even with all the scar tissue massage I’ve done to try to help it come back. That six-inch silver line has been an essential and missing part of my body—a reminder flashing in the bathroom mirror after every shower that we almost didn’t make it.
My morning Pilates practice must have awakened the tissue with new blood flow to long-ignored core muscles. I placed my hands over the scar and breathed deeply, letting the warmth fill me while images of that pregnancy and birth flooded my mind. The dog lifted her snoring head from her pillow at the foot of the bed to glare at me as if she could hear what I was recalling, which was a thing that I had never spoken aloud, a thing I had never even thought of across the decades. It was as if my incision opened like a mouth to spill out the truth, and I watched it unspooling from my body like a film, showing me everything I’d tucked away so I could move forward.
I became pregnant with Lila when her father and I were in a long-distance relationship—him in Ohio and me in New York. My job at Time Magazine required me to work 40 hours a week in four days, including one overnight shift from which a company car would shuttle me back upstate at six in the morning once that week’s issue was put to bed.
Chris owned (and still owns) a machine shop with two of his three brothers, and he agreed to walk away from that. He came to live with me in my apartment in the lower Hudson River Valley, intending to find similar work. This arrangement would allow me to continue building my career and more importantly, continue to share custody of my ten-year-old son Tyler with his father. It all seemed to be working well until I was six months along and Chris told me he couldn’t live in NY and needed to go home to his business. And so he did and once again a man chose my reality as simply and surely as picking an apple out of a bowl and digging his teeth into it, knowing without question that it belonged to him. I realize, of course, that this is only a partial truth, but it’s an image that’s stuck in my mind that illustrates how powerless I felt at that time.
When I try to remember the chronology of events from the day he left to drive back to Ohio to the day I had to let go of my dream of home birth and instead moved into the hospital, mostly what I recall is living in a fog of uncertainty, stress, fear, and exhaustion. Details are jumbled and likely out of order. I know I worked and that my overnights now included a comped hotel stay because the nearly 2-hour commute was unmanageable. I know I had Ty with me on my days off, reading stories, building Legos, managing playdates and meals, and sleeping as much as possible. Friends and family threw me a baby shower. Life went on. Chris and I talked on the landline phone, accruing long-distance charges, about what it would look like for me to move to Ohio. I felt defeated and resigned. I didn’t want to take Tyler away and wasn’t sure I’d even be allowed to, but I said we’ll figure it out and Chris began looking for a house we could all call home.
Five weeks out from our due date I had a visit with my midwife to go over the home birth plan. This discussion never happened because my blood pressure was so high that she told me to go home and pack a bag. Later that day, I met her at the small Catholic hospital on the New York-Pennsylvania border where her partner OBGYN practiced. With a new diagnosis of preeclampsia, I was admitted to a private room (thank you Time for such incredible health benefits) where I lay on my left side as much as possible until Lila’s lungs were strong enough to induce labor. Every morning, the nurses wheeled me down to radiology for an ultrasound, friends brought me food and kept me company when they could, and I read novels, watched TV, worried about the baby, worried about Tyler, worried about the future, and slept poorly in thin slivers of time.
Chris arrived with a stack of real estate printouts in hand and we narrowed it down to a raised ranch on four acres on the southeast edge of his county. Ty’s dad had said he needed to move to New Jersey to help his mom who lived alone with dementia. He said I should take the kids and go to Ohio. We would figure it out. Everything was falling into place, but I felt like all I could do was nod and say okay to huge life choices that felt like no kind of choice at all as I lay there trying to keep myself and our baby alive.
Finally, after ten days, the lung measurements were good. We could induce. My mom came with Ty and several girlfriends set up shop in the room providing a bubble of protection and love for the journey, we played Scrabble and waited for the Pitocin to work, but nothing happened. It was July 3, and they called it at dinnertime and said we’d try again in the morning. Everyone went home except Chris, who walked Ty and my mom out to the car. I got up to pee and there was blood. Not a lot, but also not an insignificant amount. I rang the nurse’s station but no one came except Chris, who turned right back around and went in search of a nurse. There had been three emergency cesareans that day and the staff were getting all of the moms and babies settled in for the night.
When they arrived a half hour later, the bleeding was heavier and I watched all of the familiar friendly faces become stony, their expressions unintelligible. The doctor and my midwife arrived as a nurse pushed an ultrasound machine into the room. He stepped close to watch the screen as the nurse rolled the wand across my belly, “Kelly, your baby has gone transverse—no longer head-down, but sideways. The bleeding is likely because the head was keeping pressure on blood clots and now that pressure is gone. We’re going to need to take your baby now.” As he spoke, a nurse pulled down my sheets and lifted my gown, a Bic razor in hand. She smiled at me and said, “It’s ok. You’re in good hands.”
Six days later, I returned to my sunny apartment in Chester, NY, overlooking black dirt onion fields and Goose Pond Mountain. I lay on my bed in the air-conditioned room holding our healthy daughter, Lila Grace—most definitely not the boy, Wyatt, I was so certain I carried. Mom stayed and helped me pack then returned to Massachusetts, Ty went with his father to organize his belongings for the move, and after the staples were removed from my incision and I was cleared to drive, Chris returned to Ohio. Friends checked in often, and my sister and her husband came to meet their niece. Then for a month, I was mostly alone with a newborn, lost in a fog of breastfeeding, wound care, attempting to feed myself, and finishing packing to move to a new life in Ohio.
Here’s the detail I remembered the night my scar tissue came to life: every time I stood up with Lila in my arms, I envisioned the incision splitting apart and my insides spilling down my legs and across the floor. Sometimes I stumbled and nearly dropped her because the imagining was so visceral. Many times a day I saw myself splayed open, collapsing with Lila in my arms and bleeding to death on the floor. Imagined her being able to nurse until my milk ran out then hopefully her crying would alert a neighbor. Imagined her suffocating, smothered by my heavy breasts. Day and night the tears flowed onto her tender, puckered face, her hunger and my flow thankfully aligned, and the incision throbbed as she fed, and I tucked those fears inside again and again until Chris returned, loaded my life into the moving truck, and drove us the 409 miles to our new home in Ohio, like sliding the whole bowl of crisp, shiny apples to his side of the table.
These memories played through time and space as I tried to relax alone in my bed in the house I’ve lived in ever since my marriage with Chris fell apart and ended in divorce nine years ago. My body pulsed with pain and a longing to go back and do it all again, differently, and yet I also knew I would do it all the same because I certainly didn’t see what else I could do at that time. And that’s a very new way for me to look at regret. I’ve rarely given myself even a sliver of the grace I extend to everyone else in my life.
Tears slid down my cheeks, soaking the pillow and pooling in my ears. I shouted into the dark room, disturbing the dog again, “You didn’t even ask me if I wanted to go.”
And I realized I wasn’t talking to Chris. I was talking to myself. I never asked myself if I wanted to go. Somehow as that thought faded, the pain and my tears subsided.
Reader, I’m telling you this at the same time I am telling myself, and I am telling us all with my whole body: I did not want to go.
And yet, of course, I’m glad I did.
These midlife reckonings, boy, howdy.
I recently opened a Google doc in which I am writing a growing list of questions I want to ask my mother. She got pregnant with me when she was 16 and still in high school at a time when girls got kicked out of school for being pregnant. I wonder if she wanted to marry my father who got drafted at the same time and left for boot camp and then his Vietnam tour of duty in Germany the day after their wedding. The photos from that day could be of a girl at her Confirmation or her sweet sixteen if not for the baby-faced nineteen-year-old in uniform beside her and the wedding cake between them. I wonder if she wanted him to return after nearly two years of raising me alone. So many questions I wonder if anyone has ever bothered to ask her; about what she wanted, about how she felt, about who she was. Questions I’m so sorry I never thought to ask before.
I imagine sitting with her at the maple kitchen table at which she fed us throughout our childhood and teen years, the table we still share meals at when I visit the home I left at 19 so certain I would choose a life radically different from hers. I imagine asking if she wanted to be a mother. I imagine she answers “yes” and then follows that up quietly with, “and no.”
In this reverie, we sit in silence for a moment and then I slide my chair across the floor—like a bowl of apples across the table—to join her on her side. I take her hand and tell her, nodding, “Of course. Don’t you love that both things can be true?”
There's so much to love here, but especially the author. The apples! The scar as a smile! The love and support you had in crisis and how that inevitably falls away for new parents (usually mothers) or grieving humans. Regret and grace. Both can be true.
Kelly! I'm so glad to see you writing here on Substack. I'll say more after I read this. Yay!