Every July, I find myself returning to my daughter's birth. I remember the bright-blue hydrangea we bought when I was out walking the neighborhood to see whether my labor pains were the real deal, and how we carried it home in a hurry when they turned out to be very real indeed.
I have written before about being pregnant in Japan, caught between conflicting tides of information and advice. It was very noisy in my head. The western male-dominated medical model jangled my nerves, totally at odds with the pro-woman midwifery movement championed by Ina May Gaskin. Mystifying advice from New Zealand was banging around too. Then there was Japan beating its urgent cacophony, boasting that the medical approach keeps an uneasy truce with midwifery and the rates of maternal and infant mortality are lower than in the USA. Most baffling were the midwives themselves, full as they were of maddening imperatives to keep my swollen sweaty feverish body WARM, of all things.
There was no possible way that I could have followed all of the advice, because much of it was contradictory. From here I marvel that I even tried, but at the time I was suffering from early motherhood, where you question each and every thing you ever thought you knew. Becoming a mother was a confusion of pain and joy and darkness and light, with some ludicrous thrown in just for fun.
I gave birth to my daughter at 5 in the morning, and it seemed like days until the sun set again, what with the love and the pain and the milk and the bewilderment. But when dusk finally fell, mercifully lowering the temperature, I limped outdoors with Ryan holding our baby in his arms so that we could show her the stars. We drew calm breaths for the first time in 24 hours and tried on the label 'parents.' I almost certainly cried a little.
Two women in their twenties were walking down the quiet street by the birth house, and they stopped to coo at our sweet bundle. I glowed with shy pride at the chance to show off our little jewel, my joy, but instead of looking at her beautiful face they stared openly at my stomach, which was still swollen and full. (And which for the record is totally normal even though some Japanese women seem to pop back immediately not that I'm sensitive about it in the slightest.) Horrified, they looked up at me, pointed at the baby and then my stomach, and asked in English, "Twins?"
They're lucky I wasn't armed. Never insult a postpartum woman. I laid into them in quick-fire Japanese:
"Twins??? Yes, I thought I'd just pause between pushing out one child to walk around outdoors before I have the other. This is what real women look like after they give birth, you idiots!! Now get away from my baby!"
They backed off, eyeing me nervously.
It was my first taste of mother rage, in Japanese no less. There beneath the lovely stars.
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