“The decision to have children has always struck me as an essentially selfish one: You choose, out of a desire for fulfillment or self-betterment or boredom or peer pressure, to bring a human into this world. It has never seemed more selfish than today”
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Living out in all that damn nature — a 25-minute drive from just about anything — felt claustrophobic. I missed home. I yearned to hop on the subway. Trade gossip with the self-proclaimed mayor of my block. Stumble home and stop, shame-faced, at the corner bodega for a bag of expired Goldfish crackers. Engage with that pulsing, beating, bleating hum of humanity that is New York City.
The doctor gives me bad news — the baby is in breech. The hard, round protrusion jutting beneath my rib cage is, indeed, the baby’s head, not his rump as I’ve been trying to convince myself for weeks. We schedule a version— a procedure where a doctor tries to turn the baby right-side down — for the following Friday.
Returning, then, to my certainty that I am perfectly well, high blood pressure or no, thankyouverymuch. We could call it denial. We could also call it a particular cocktail of white, able-bodied, and socioeconomic privilege. After all, none of those risk factors applied to me. The decision to have children has always struck me as an essentially selfish one: You choose, out of a desire for fulfillment or self-betterment or curiosity or boredom or baby-mania or peer pressure, to bring a new human into this world. And it has never seemed more selfish than today. From a global perspective, having a child in a developed nation is among the most environmentally unsound decisions you can make — a baby born in the United States adds another 58.
The truth is that we’re the lucky ones. We won’t be sleeping in our cars outside Half Moon Bay High School, hoping that the Red Cross can find us a hotel room. We have a safe place to go that will accept us and our veritable menagerie in the middle of a pandemic. My in-laws live an hour’s drive away. And for once we’re grateful they’re on the far side of Santa Cruz.
I press my hand against my stomach, cupping what I now know is my son’s head. I dig my heels into the sand. I know with every fiber of my being that this child is not ready to be born. He has literally put his foot down. Wildfire evacuations? Smoke-clogged skies over the Bay? A global pandemic? Nah, thanks, Ma. I’ll stay inside.
Things at the hospital go well until they don’t. The baby flips; the cheerful dry-erase board is decorated with a beaming sun, the names of the on-duty nurse and physician, and the words “Preeclampsia: Mild.” The next morning, my blood pressure soars, and “mild” is replaced with “severe.” The blood-pressure cuff is now accompanied by a catheter and an IV that pumps me up with magnesium to reduce the risk of seizure. The bumper pads are up now, too.
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