After the Afterbirth

What no one tells you about having a baby is that, afterward, there is a woman whose job it is to jam your uterus back into place. I mean, a nurse who will physically force your watermelon-sized womb-sack back into its rightful pear-shaped perch inside your abdomen. She arrives throughout the night after you have just delivered a new soul to the earth, and her nonchalance at first makes you believe that it will be like reshelving a book—maybe she says something about ‘massaging’ it back into place. But her touch is excruciating. After her first whole-body push causes the edges of your vision to blur and you remember how you didn’t black out during actual labor—not even during the worst parts of physically excising a baby from your body through the locked door of your pelvis—but you wonder if you might just pass out now. Your tongue is sharp and leaden in your mouth. The next time you see her, you begin to sweat before she crosses the sterile room to your bedside and lowers that rail with an unwelcome thud. It always seems to be a no-nonsense woman with square shoulders and impossibly strong hands and an expression on her face that says, you are someone’s mother now, don’t you dare cry. After she is gone, you distract yourself by wondering if it is always the same nurse who is the uterus masseuse or if each shift they draw straws to decide who will go from room to room brutalizing the newly unpregnant women like mounds of unwieldy, elastic dough. You marvel that you thought your body would be yours again—revert to its rightful owner—after you pulled forth your baby. But now you know that it is still not yours, not ever again.