Pain made me delirious. The women I worked with became a clucking brood of hens dropping seeds at my feet. When I refused to bend and eat, the batty birds chased me to the hospital where Nurse Ratched tied me down in a circus tent and popped the water balloon I’d been living in. During the flood that followed, clowns rehearsing for their big act piled in and out. A tiny man, with an enormous light-bulb nose, juggled vials and syringes; his grin came and went like a Cheshire cat. My brother-in-law appeared from a magic box wearing a velvet cape and a top hat, yelling Opa! or Mazel tov! in Portuguese, and the nursing staff stopped dancing mid-chorus line when I suddenly shouted my daughter’s exact birth weight in ounces—as if I already felt the full measure of what I had lost.
The First Time I Gave Birth
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