ABSTRACT
I remember my pregnancy with you as a time of elation no desire ever perturbed, which ended in violent childbirth. You, my beloved tenant, must have been happy, since I had never felt so well before, and since getting you out of there was so unpleasant. I loved to dance with you in my big belly. In Tattari, one gave birth at the hospital, for the midwife system had been wiped out by modern medicine. I was so absorbed in my tantric joy the night before my water broke that I wanted to go to a dance party at a country house accessed by an unpaved road. Perhaps my body was so afraid of the hospital that it wanted to run away. Your dad ignored me and insisted we stay home. Then he drove me to the maternity guard. I remember a twelve-hour night of labor alone in the guard’s hallway looking at the shaft of an unused elevator. The nurses were playing cards and wouldn’t hear my calls. No one even looked at my birth canal or measured my dilation. Then the delivery room filled with angry voices. It was 5 a.m. The doctor got up and realized I was ready. I lay supine on the stretcher. He and the nurse jumped over my stomach and pushed over my belly. A big cut over the lower vaginal labia and wall, a strong pull of the forceps, and finally they managed to get your head out of there. The doctor sowed his stitches over my live flesh, and then sent me away as one who didn’t “push well.” For years I fantasized of getting even with him in the Lorena Bobbitt way.
