California

When I was 19 I briefly lived in California with an aunt and some cousins.  I will go to my grave saying that it was my sense of adventure that led me to move across country and not that I was following a brown-haired boy who I was convinced wanted to marry me.  Anyway, while there, I got a tattoo because: A. I was living in California-where it’s pretty much mandatory to have one, and B. It’s possible that the aforementioned boy had decided to marry someone else.  Whatever.  Anyway, my cousins and I all went to this tattoo parlor and I chose the Chinese symbol “Faith” and had it put on my...wait for it...wait for it...lower back.  (No one reading this should be surprised.)  Now I’m gonna fast-forward the story five years.  

I’m in the hospital with my even handsomer brown-haired boy and we are about to have our first child.  I was convinced I was going to do an all natural labor because (and this is seriously what I kept telling myself) that’s how Mary, the mother of Jesus did it.  That was the first and last time I compared myself to her.  

Anyway, I was so sure this was how it was going to go I never read up or learned anything about anything else.  So when it started to hurt...or as I like to say...when it felt like the alien inside of me was ripping itself out in all directions with razor sharp claws and possibly teeth...I got a little nervous.  I got more nervous when after an overnight induction and a long day of labor we were still not holding a baby.  The doctor had said I was progressing well and even broke my water.  Point of fact: the term “water” is exponentially misleading.  Whatever came out of me did not resemble water in any way.  That baby was not swimming in a crystal clear pool in the Caribbean.  It was more like the murky waters of the Dead Sea.  So I had progressed just fine but the baby was banging its head on my pelvis every time I had a contraction-which, if I remember correctly, was every 2 seconds.  When that happened her heart rate would drop significantly.  The doctor gave it some time and just when they rolled in the “it’s time to push” cart, she decided that the baby was in too much distress to safely get her out the traditional way.  She told us that I needed a C-section.  And about 5 seconds later I was being moved into a room where a man gets paid $250,000 a year to shove a needle into my back to numb me from the pain of a knife slicing me like a watermelon.  

You’ll remember two things here.  First, up until this moment I KNEW I was going to have a natural vaginal birth so I had NO CLUE what an epidural needle looked like.  For those of you that also may be in the dark: it looks like the needle they would use to give an elephant a vaccination.  It’s huge.  Oh, and if they miss just a little bit on the placement you can be paralyzed for life.  So no pressure, Dude.  Second, you will recall that I have a super cool tattoo on my back that means “Faith.”  So Anesthesiologist Doctor who is a tall, attractive, Asian man gets himself all ready to drive the 5 foot long needle straight into my spine and says to me, “So...you’re a teacher?”  And I say, “Nope.”  And he says, “Well, your tattoo means: ‘To Teach.”’ And I say, “No, it means Faith.”  And he says, “No. I’m Chinese and it definitely means ‘To Teach’ now stay completely still so I don’t miss.”  

November 18th is a special day for me.  It’s the day I found out what my tattoo really meant.  Oh, and I became a mom, too.