Postpartum
by Samuel Freeman
On a cold, rainy, April morning, Catherine called to tell me our baby was coming. Her gynecologist was sending her straight from the clinic to the hospital. The baby—our first—had stopped growing and needed to come out, even though her due date was a month away. I packed our things and rushed to the hospital, where I found Catherine in a mint green gown with an IV in her arm, sitting calmly on the bed.
My days of delivery room duty were a few years behind me by then, but as soon as I stepped into the birthing unit, my old reflexes kicked in. I was used to waiting for babies to be born. As a pediatric resident, I spent countless hours standing in delivery rooms, often in the middle of the night—eyes crusted, breath thick with slumber—in case the baby came out and couldn’t breathe. Before long, I became so practiced at resuscitation and the sequence of simple maneuvers it required—dry, stimulate, suction, ventilate—that I could do it in my sleep.
The deliveries I attended almost always went well. Almost: the word was a window onto horrifying alternate realities. While Catherine and I cuddled on the hospital bed, watching Treme on a tablet waiting for the induction to kick in, my mind took me on a tour of medical horrors—maternal hemorrhage, infant brain damage, months in a NICU incubator, a life lived in vinyl recliners amid the beeping of monitors and the nauseating scent of hospital cleaner.
Complications, however unlikely, loomed like so many threats. They were the risk, the price some people paid for becoming parents. I knew it, and yet I protested to myself. Not me. I couldn’t possibly. I simply wasn’t willing.
***
The sun set. Catherine’s contractions intensified. Staff unfolded sheets, cracked sterile packages, and rearranged furniture. The Montreal skyline sparkled through the rain-streaked windows, and I could see Chinatown and the illuminated sign of our favorite dim sum spot a few blocks to the west.
Catherine laboured in the way she approached other hardships, with a mix of resolve and surrender. She pushed through waves of pain with all her strength and focus, but she barely made a sound. She was formidable.
And then, after one last push, our daughter emerged, slick, purple and silvery, like a trout reeled from a lake. As the obstetrician presented our baby to us on two outstretched palms in that typical, precarious way, no one seemed to notice she wasn’t breathing. There was a fuss about cutting the cord, shears in my hands, a flash of stainless steel, but I saw nothing except our still, silent daughter. As the pressure of each breathless second bore down on me, I realized I had to act. I had to save her. But in the moment it took for my thought to become action, she released her primordial scream. I must have waited only a few seconds for that first cry, but it felt like an eternal instant. In that instant, I became a father.
We named her Amy, after Catherine’s mother.
The nurse directed me to take my shirt off and gave Amy to me. Back when I attended deliveries, that euphoric moment, the meeting of infant and parent, newborn and world, was my cue to step away. A breathing baby meant a job well done, and over time I became inured to—even bored by—the remarkably similar exclamations of joy that new parents made (almost without exception, they said “hello”).
But there would be no stepping away for me this time. It was my turn to feel my baby’s damp, uncanny body against my bare chest, to be giddy with relief that she was born and alive, to speak to her in words she couldn’t possibly understand. And it was my turn to discover what came next.
***
After the delivery, Catherine and I admired Amy: her huge eyes, the way her upper lip looked, surprisingly, like my dad’s. She was a few ounces shy of five pounds and premature. She looked like a baby bird—all beak and lids and featherless pink skin—but I ignored her fragility. She was our baby, so she had to be okay.
After two days in hospital I decided we should go home, even though it was protocol to keep infants like Amy under observation for longer. Catherine didn’t protest, but now I wonder if I gave her the chance. Did I consider her physical condition? Did I ask her how ready she was to leave? Or did I just decide, unilaterally, what was best, because newborn medicine was my turf?
I had no trouble convincing the wiry, weary pediatrician to sign us out; a knowing allusion to my experience caring for babies far sicker than Amy was all it took. By the time we got home it was late evening, and Amy felt cool to the touch. I checked her temperature: 35.5 Celsius, a degree below normal—hypothermia, in medical terms.
“Must be the thermometer,” I bluffed to Catherine and in a way to myself, feigning nonchalance. I knew from medical training that copping to a mistake was the option of last resort. Infallibility was part of a doctor’s aura, an illusion that underpinned medical care more than most would like to believe. Breaking the illusion led to all kinds of headaches: dubious patients, skeptical nurses, critical bosses.
I put Amy in a onesie and a pyjama, swaddled her in three blankets, and crowned her with a hat made by hospital volunteers (I pictured an army of permed ladies, knitting their aging hearts out). She was a joke in that giant white beanie and layers of stiff vestments, like a tiny pope in her bassinet. But the joke was on me, and its punchline was my own bad judgment: I had failed at the primal, animal task of keeping my child warm.
Competent doctor, adequate father: not one, but two illusions that might shatter at any moment.
***
After her temperature righted itself, Amy’s feeding became a problem. She was too small and weak to breastfeed and wasn’t gaining enough weight. During a home visit, a nurse taught me to place one end of a small plastic tube in a bottle of Catherine’s pumped milk and thread the other end into Amy’s mouth while she breastfed. Through that involved procedure, Amy got extra milk while practicing the motions of breastfeeding.
“Get the milk, she’s sucking,” Catherine’s voice woke me urgently in the half-light. As I struggled with the spaghetti-thin tube, adrenaline flooded my bloodstream and my hands went clumsy, just as they did when I inserted other tiny tubes into even tinier spaces—a rubbery umbilical artery no wider than a pin, a larynx the size of a payphone’s coin slot—while a life hung in the balance and others looked on, waiting for me to fail.
This time the stakes weren’t life and death, but if Amy didn’t gain enough weight, we’d have to return to the hospital, face that dour, skinny pediatrician again, and admit that I’d been wrong all along.
***
The tube feedings were painstaking, but they worked. By two months, Amy didn’t need them anymore. She was wonderfully pudgy, with large, almond-shaped eyes and full cheeks and thighs. Still, her feedings set an unsettling precedent—such a simple, natural act rendered complex and demanding.
Amy never stopped crying. No amount of rocking, singing, or midnight walking soothed her. It seemed she never slept, and Catherine, who shared a bed with her, slept even less. I fared a little better, but the atmosphere in our small apartment was deranged, as if we were each in our own state of permanent jet lag.
At work I saw babies for checkups all the time. The babies were usually healthy but their parents were often struggling and desperate for advice. They hung on my every word. Little did they know I was making it up as I went along. Or maybe they knew but couldn’t afford to admit it; I was all they had. I knew all about pediatric medicine and I had the diplomas to prove it, but I didn’t know the first thing about raising a baby, about sleep and formula and all the rest. I offered bromides so vague they couldn’t help but be correct (every child is different… trust your instincts… most things get better with time), but what I really wanted to say was, I don’t know. Please stop asking me. This isn’t really my job.
So when Catherine wondered, from the depths of her sleep deprivation and wholly earned despair, if there was something wrong with Amy, if she was broken, I replied reflexively, with one of my platitudes: everything would be okay. In truth, I wasn’t convinced. My mind returned compulsively to the alternate realities I’d pictured in the delivery room—life-changing diagnoses, heartrending conversations, and the vanishing dream of an easy, healthy child.
Jeanette Winterson writes that “babies are frightening—raw tyrants whose only kingdom is their own body.” I felt tremendous relief when I chanced upon the passage, the kind that comes when someone puts into words what you’ve been living but can’t express. As a servant of Amy’s baffling body, I eyed her with fear. Healthy or not, she carried in her the potential to upend our lives. In some ways, raising her meant watching that potential be fulfilled.
Or maybe I had it the wrong way around. Maybe Catherine and I were the problem: defective parents, stunted adults, coddled by our childless years and permanently depleted by our careers. Maybe we harboured a deep flaw that made us impervious to the natural joys of parenthood.
And why we? Was I just a coward taking cover, refusing again to acknowledge my fallibility, hiding my “I” behind a “we”? Catherine was devoted to Amy and unflinching in the face of adversity—nothing could deter her from nurturing her daughter. I, on the other hand, was as ineffectual at home as I was with my patients—all empty words and inept action.
How did I feel after helping a baby breathe? Satisfied, of course. A job well done. But that wasn’t all. As I walked out of the delivery room and left the cloying scene behind me, there was something else. A burden lifted. A bullet dodged. Good riddance.
There was also that.
***
Catherine’s fun-loving nature re-emerged around the time Amy turned six months; she became herself again. Every evening, she set Amy up in a Jolly Jumper and watched, enraptured, as she giggled and bounced away to “Get Down on It” and “Celebration.” I, on the other hand, stood off to the side, smiling wanly and forcing laughter, puzzled at why I couldn’t feel the joy.
At work one evening, I entered an exam room to find a man in his mid-twenties: tall, soft paunch, baseball cap, Vans sneakers. He was there with his fifteen-month-old, who cried for hours every night.
The kid was in his stroller, babbling, blowing drool bubbles, his mouth smeared with apple-blueberry sauce. I asked my questions and examined the child, but I knew he was fine the second I walked in the door. He didn’t cry once over the course of the fifteen-minute consultation.
When I was done I sat down and turned to the man.
“I see this often. Kids cry for all kinds of reasons; most often it’s not a medical problem. I’ve examined your son and—” He didn’t let me finish.
“Doctor, I didn’t come here tonight to be told everything’s fine. Does he have an ear infection? An allergy? I want some tests done. I need answers.”
I was done with platitudes, done with bromides.
“I’m giving you the answer,” I snapped. “I’m not going to stick a needle in your son because he’s crying like every other kid.” He stiffened, then sighed and shook his head with disdain.
He didn’t want to be reassured. He wanted something to be wrong, something to explain the profound disruption his son had visited upon his life. The ingratitude of it repulsed me, and I felt an ugly urge to defeat him, to silence him once and for all. This, I wanted to yell at him, is what you get. Deal with it! And count yourself lucky. But I didn’t. Some doctorly impulse in me prevented it. I patched things up, he went home, and I didn’t do any tests.
Nonetheless, something in me shifted after that. I fantasized about doing the wrong thing, about falling short of all expectations and absconding from my obligations. I spent hours online researching long trips that would grant me an escape: rugged Patagonian treks, or solitary train journeys through Europe. I was desperate to get away, and yet the impulse terrified me.
I watched Amy bounce the following evening, and in a pause between songs she stopped her belly laughing, cocked her head, and looked straight at me, oscillating lightly on that giant spring. So, she seemed to ask, what are you going to do?
***
Amy turned one, and soon after she learned to walk and talk. Catherine went back to work, we split the childcare, grew apart a little, and then closer again. Amy started daycare. We lived. But life, it seemed, was mainly getting through things—diaper changes, outings, trips in the car, meals, bedtimes, pickups, drop-offs. It was all-consuming and relentless, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I didn’t enjoy any of it, that it bored me. This isn’t really my job. Although of course, it was.
I didn’t leave—I never could have—but even though I stayed I somehow wasn’t there. The idea of my absence ate away at me. I developed a compulsion of trying to recall Amy when she was one month, three months, six months, a year old. I scrolled through my phone, staring at all the photos and videos—Amy in the bath, Amy in a swing, Amy in my arms—trying to feel the scenes and prove to myself that I’d really lived them. It didn’t work—my recollections were bland, like a perfect but tasteless apple whose impression on my tastebuds was less like flavour than its lack.
Then, on a late summer day, something came in the mail. It was a photo of Amy running on a Cape Cod beach. What appeared to be an ordinary memento of a family trip gave off a mysterious charge, a secret, melancholy signal that seemed destined only for me: the hidden frequency to which the world vibrates.
I saw my child, so beautiful and alive, racing toward the ocean, propelled by curiosity, undaunted by the vastness. Her legs were strong, her body was healthy, she was fearless—there was nothing wrong with her. On the contrary, she was magnificent. And she was growing up, gradually, imperceptibly. One day, she would leave. The photo proved it—she belonged to the sea, to the world, to herself.
I realized then—it was so obvious—that I was just like that crying boy’s father. Since Amy’s birth, I’d fixated on what I had lost—my couple, my comfort, my sense of my own rightness, of having all the answers. Perhaps most of all, I grieved my freedom to walk away, to make a brief appearance and move on. Good riddance.
When that father came to me, wishing for something to be wrong, something that might explain his inability to cope with his crying son, I wanted to destroy him. But what I really wanted to destroy was the part of myself that wanted an out, the part of myself that lacked the courage to surrender to capacious, uncertain love.
There’s a story I heard as a kid—a Jewish folktale I think—of an ambitious man who crossed oceans and scaled mountains seeking his fortune. He came home empty-handed, a failure, only to find a sack of gold hidden beneath the floorboards of his bedroom.
“So, what’s the moral of the story?” the Hebrew school teacher asked.
“Sometimes the most valuable things are right there in front of you.”
“Very good, Samuel. Very good.”
I hardly notice that photo of Amy on our fridge anymore. Sometimes though it catches my eye and the hidden frequency vibrates again. In those moments I see Amy running to the water, the waves, the salty spray. I see fine sand, azure sky, glimmering ocean, pure motion, strands of hair—my daughter’s!—a life, just beginning, forever at risk of slipping away.
And yet also here, right in front of me.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Samuel Freeman is a physician, writer, and podcaster in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. He was a finalist for the Missouri Review's 2022 Perkoff prize for nonfiction and his writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Huffington Post, the Montreal Gazette, and La Presse, among others. He is currently at work on a novel. @practicingpod on Instagram. sfreeman.net