生娃记 Having a Baby

AI-generated translation.

If you ever talked with me in my twenties about my life ambitions, you definitely heard me say I wanted to be a mum. Years later I have finally fulfilled that wish — and discovered I am, after all, like Lord Ye who claimed to love dragons until he met one: ignorant and therefore unafraid. My baby is about to turn six and a half months old. I’m writing this run-on diary to record the past year-plus of my inner journey, while it’s still fresh enough to remember.

Pregnancy and Childbirth

The process of being pregnant was, on the whole, joyful — full of anticipation, but threaded through with anxiety. Early on, I worried that the heartbeat and the embryo wouldn’t take. After being diagnosed with gestational diabetes I worried that my diet was bad and the baby’s growth would suffer. Later, after controlling my diet for a while, I was told the baby was too small, and I beat myself up for being too obedient to medical advice, and cried at the door of the consulting room. Looking back, I realised very early (anxiously) that once a child arrived I would lose my freedom, and the moment I learned I was pregnant I rushed off in the last window of time to go and play, as if blowing through inheritance money. At a month-plus, I climbed Yuelu Mountain in Changsha and looked out toward Orange Island. At two-plus, I stretched my legs at Puwa East in Fangshan. At three-plus, camping at Jinhai Lake. At four-plus, the Simatai Great Wall. At five-plus, Universal Studios. At six-plus, Badaling for the first snow. In late pregnancy I often walked in the garden near my office, watching the magnolia buds plump up day by day — somehow felt synchronised with myself. I didn’t stop going to work during pregnancy. On the day I went into labour, I had lunch with colleagues at the Jilin provincial office in Beijing — guobaorou (sweet-and-sour fried pork) and liuroduan. At about eleven that night my water suddenly broke; once I got to the hospital, I was admitted into the labour room.

Early in my pregnancy, Huiping gave me the Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy — an encyclopaedia covering everything from pre-conception to newborn care. Over a few months I leafed through every chapter, with the single exception of the section on Caesarean section. I don’t know where my confidence came from, but I had firmly decided I would be one of the lucky ones who had a super-fast natural birth with no episiotomy. The irony: on the morning of my third day in the labour room, with the cervix at five fingers, the active phase stalled, the foetal heart-rate monitor went abnormal, and I was hard-dragged in for a C-section all the same.

In those three days in the labour room I saw the medical documentary “Human World” with my own eyes. There was a labouring woman who moaned and groaned all night, unable to sit or stand, repeatedly calling for the doctor to request a C-section and being refused each time; the next day she was still arranged for a natural birth. There was a labouring woman who, within ten minutes of entering the delivery room, set off the alarm — abnormal foetal heart-rate — and over a dozen doctors and nurses rushed in to do an emergency Caesar. There was the super-fast lucky one who came in for labour in the morning and was moved to the post-natal ward after lunch. And there was a pitiful one who, with the cervix only a finger open, was already running a fever, vomiting and in unbearable pain.

For most of my time in the labour room, my left hand had an oxytocin drip in it; my fingers were swollen, but the cervix was not opening. On day one I didn’t even have contractions — no pain at all. The other labouring women were either going through the agony of the cervix beginning to open or had already been put on an epidural and were quietly waiting for the next stage. I, on the other hand, was strolling around, unbothered. The nurses, seeing how bored I was, brought me a yoga ball and showed me various positions to help labour. They also took photos for me, saying they would use them as the hospital’s “case study of a happy birth”; I don’t know whether I’ll ever have occasion to come back to this same room and see my photos on the wall. I leaned back on the wall with the yoga ball and felt very comfortable; I told the nurses, “This feels great, get the others to try it too!” One of them looked around and said, “Right now you’re the only one in this room who can stand up.” Not only could I stand — I was also the one in the room with the biggest appetite. Every time the orderly brought food I’d light up, hurry back to my bed, sit cross-legged and pull out the little tray. The other labouring women would moan that they couldn’t eat anything; I, meanwhile, often wanted to ask whether I could have a few more dishes. The hospital had assigned me a gestational-diabetes meal, which was bland; after every meal I felt unsatisfied, and I would close my eyes and savour the memory of yesterday’s guobaorou, liuroduan and big bones, painting myself an imaginary feast.

On the morning of the second day the doctor told me that, since the cervix hadn’t opened after twenty-four hours of induction, I now met the indications for a C-section, and could choose to go in for one. I could feel envious glances coming from the corners of the room. But I didn’t want a C-section. I wanted a super-fast natural birth with no episiotomy. This was only my first; I wanted to have a second, third, fourth, fifth — I wanted to raise a whole team! Seeing my firm position, the doctor said she’d check again in an hour; if the cervix still hadn’t opened, she’d still recommend the C-section. My son must have heard the cry in his mother’s heart — at the next exam, the cervix had actually opened a finger! The doctor agreed to give me another day to try to deliver naturally. To speed things along, I refused an epidural. The doctor broke my waters manually, adjusted the dosage of the oxytocin, and I began to feel contractions, increasingly strong. In the afternoon, when the contractions were worst, I closed my eyes and focused fully on inhaling through my nose, exhaling through my mouth. In my mind, unbidden, I saw scenes from diving: one moment, in the South Sea around Swan Island, meeting a whale-shark mother with her calf; the next, in the Indian Ocean around the Maldives, surrounded by a swarm of manta rays; then, in the Similan Islands, watching a swirl of barracuda. Each time I leaned in to look closer, the contraction would pass. I remembered my diving buddy little Yulu joking that I kept saying I wanted to be a mum, while throwing myself into activities that had nothing to do with motherhood. In the gaps between contractions, I wanted to tell her: look, look, who said the things I’m enthusiastic about have nothing to do with being a mum?

Holding out until five in the morning of the third day, the cervix was still only at five fingers. The foetal heart-rate monitor had begun to alarm. After consulting, the doctors decided on a C-section. I lay on the operating table and told the doctor: keep my incision small, I still want to have a second (and silently, third, fourth, fifth) baby. The doctor said with resignation, “Not many women want a second child at this moment. Stop talking, please.” Later in the post-natal ward at least three different mothers asked me, “Are you the one who stayed at five fingers without an epidural?” Every time I was asked, I beamed with pride. So in those first days after birth I felt I was brave, strong and cheerful — I liked myself even more. Even though the process didn’t go smoothly, I was slow to register, until I picked up the discharge report, that what I’d been through actually counted as a difficult labour.

First Experiences of Motherhood

“Pain forgotten once the scar heals” must just be human nature; or maybe because the pain of the birth itself didn’t feel that intense, I quickly forgot the labour pain. The agonies of raising a child, however, far, far exceeded my expectations. First was breastfeeding pain: my nipples were bitten open by the baby, bled, scabbed over. The tiny person’s mouth has very strong suction. With every pull, I felt nerve pain shooting down one whole side of my body. I imagined the famous “death by a thousand cuts” of imperial-era torture could not be much worse. At about five months, my baby fell ill for the first time with diarrhoea; for a week I was at the clinic almost every day, and I cried each time I went. Even casual remarks from doctors made me feel guilty. A few days after the diarrhoea eased, the baby started coughing and a runny nose, sleeping badly through the night for several nights in a row — physical and emotional exhaustion at once, a kind of suffering I had never known.

Becoming a mother has made me more tolerant of others, and more honest with myself. Whether to marry, whether to have a child, whether to deliver vaginally, whether to breastfeed — these are personal choices, and should be respected. In the mother-child relationship — and, extending out, in every other relationship — I am more firmly opposed than ever to personal sacrifice. We are first of all ourselves; everything else is a role on top of that. A few years ago, when my dorm-mates were having their first wave of babies and were discussing buying school-district apartments, I was unmoved. Big-sister Xiao Yao said: “Mumu, once you become a mother you’ll understand — every parent wants to give their child the best.” Now that I’m finally a mother, I still don’t want to give my child the best. If anything, I see my own “selfishness” more clearly. When I was putting together my hospital bag, the things for me were imported luxury brands; for my baby, anything I could find on Xianyu (a second-hand marketplace) was good. As he has grown up, I have come to admit that I am not that saintly. I used to hear about a certain mother who, for the sake of her baby, overcame countless obstacles to breastfeed until age two, and naively assumed I would do likewise. Now all I want is to wean him before his teeth come in — please, no more pain inflicted on me. Baby, mum has brought you into this world; the road from here is yours to walk.

The last few weeks I’ve been slowly adjusting to the rhythm of returning to work, and getting a first taste of the working-mother dilemma: scrambling at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid while pretending I still belong at the top with self-actualisation. A typical day: up early, pump milk, deal with my baby’s poo, feed solids. By a little after eight, my mind is already blank. A meeting I’d expected to coast through suddenly calls on me; then I get pulled into a smaller meeting to debate who owns which piece of work; mind goes offline, I give up completely, and sigh. Whenever I talk with other working mothers around me, we say: men and women are two different worlds, and women with and without children are also two different worlds — without going through it, it’s hard to truly empathise. Beyond that mutual recognition, the mothers also keep giving me new perspectives: how to turn risk into opportunity, how to ask for help. How to put it — it feels like I’ve just finished one big war and I’m walking straight onto a new campaign. The challenges keep coming, and I don’t have full confidence in myself.

After becoming a mother I have come to feel even more deeply how important freedom is to me. For a long stretch before getting married, I lived alone, and at the time I longed to make a family. Now, one of my sources of happiness is imagining the days after the baby grows up and is independent — free and easy days. Sleep my fill, eat simply, have plenty of my own time, do the sports I like, read, sunbathe, paint, play the cello, drift around doing nothing. Maybe that lovely wish, too, is just another Lord-Ye-loves-dragons; I won’t know until I get there.