26- Importance of family

Now he was angry. And I was 

angry with a black anger at this part of me which refused 

to push, to separate, to lose.

“Push! Push! Push with all your strength!”

I pushed with anger, with despair, with frenzy, with the 

feeling that I would die pushing, as one exhales the last breath, 

that I would push out everything inside of me, and my soul 

with all the blood around it, and the sinews with my heart 

inside of them, choked, and that my body itself would open 

and smoke would rise, and I would feel the ultimate incision 

of death.

The nurses leaned over me and they talked to each other 

while I rested. Then I pushed until I heard my bones crack­

ing, until my veins swelled. I closed my eyes so hard I saw 

lightning and waves of red and purple. There was a stir in 

my ears, a beating as if the tympanum would burst. I closed 

my lips so tightly the blood was trickling. i\\ly legs felt 

enormously heavy, like marble columns, like immense marble 

columns crushing my body. I was pleading for someone to 

hold them. The nurse laid her knee on my stomach and 

shouted: “Push! Push! Push!” Her perspiration fell on me.

The doctor paced up and down angrily, impatiently. “We 

will be here all night. Three hours now. . . .”

The head was showing, but I had fainted. Everything was 

blue, then black. The instruments were gleaming before my 

eyes. Knives sharpened in my ears. Ice and silence. Then 

I heard voices, first talking too fast for me to understand. 

A curtain was parted, the voices still tripped over each other, 

falling fast like a waterfall, with sparks, and cutting into 

my ears. The table was rolling gently, rolling. The women 

were lying in the air. Heads. Heads hung where the enormous 

white bulbs of the lamps were hung. walking, the lamps moved, the heads came near, very near, 

and the words came more slowly.

They were laughing. One nurse was saying: “When I 

had my first child I was all ripped to pieces. I had to be sewn 

up again, and then I had another, and had to be sewn up, and 

then I had another...

The other nurse said: “Mine passed like an envelope through 

a letter box. But afterwards the bag would not come out. The 

bag would not come out. Out. Out. . . Why did they keep 

repeating themselves. And the lamps turning. And the steps 

of the doctor very fast, very fast.

“She can’t labor any more, at six months nature does not 

help. She should have another injection.”

I felt the needle thrust. The lamps were still. The ice and 

the blue that was all around came into my veins. My heart 

beat wildly. The nurses talked: “Now that baby of Mrs. L. 

last week, who would have thought she was too small, a 

big woman like that, a big woman like that, a big woman 

like that. . . The words kept turning, as on a disk. They

talked, they talked, they talked----”

Please hold my legs! Please hold my legs! Please hold my 

legs! PLEASE HOLD MY LEGS! I am ready again. By 

throwing my head back I can see the clock. I have been strug­

gling four hours. It would be better to die. Why am I alive 

and struggling so desperately? I could not remember why I 

should want to live. I could not remember anything. Every­

thing was blood and pain. I have to push. I have to push. That 

is a black fixed point in eternity. At the end of a long dark 

tunnel. I have to push. A voice saying: “Push! Push! Push!” 

A knee on my stomach and the marble of my legs crushing 

me and the head so large and I have to push.round blazing white light is drinking me. It drinks me slowly, 

inspires me into space. If I do not close my eyes it will drink 

all of me. I seep upward, in long icy threads, too light, and yet 

inside there is a fire too, the nerves are twisted, there is no 

rest from this long tunnel dragging me, or am I pushing my­

self out of the tunnel, or is the child being pushed out of me, 

or is the light drinking me. Am I dying? The ice in the veins, 

the cracking of the bones, this pushing in darkness, with a 

small shaft of light in the eyes like the edge of a knife, the 

feeling of a knife cutting the flesh, the flesh somewhere is 

tearing as if it were burned through by a flame, somewhere my 

flesh is tearing and the blood is spilling out. I am pushing in 

the darkness, in utter darkness. I am pushing until my eyes 

open and I see the doctor holding a long instrument which he 

swiftly thrusts into me and the pain makes me cry out. A long 

animal howl. That will make her push, he says to the nurse. 

But it does not. It paralyzes me with pain. He wants to do it 

again. I sit up with fury and I shout at him: “Don’t you dare 

do that again, don’t you dare!”

The heat of my anger warms me, all the ice and pain are 

melted in the fury. I have an instinct that what he has done is 

unnecessary, that he has done it because he is in a rage, because 

the hands on the clock keep turning, the dawn is coming and 

the child does not come out, and I am losing strength and the 

injection does not produce the spasm.

I look at the doctor pacing up and down, or bending to 

look at the head which is barely showing. He looks baffled, 

as before a savage mystery, baffled by this struggle. He wants 

to interfere with his instruments, while I struggle with nature, 

with myself, with my child and with the meaning I put into 

it all, with my desire to give and to hold, to keep and to lose, 

to live and to die.