Final act

I am laying in the hospital bed looking red, my legs are spread out on metal bars. In between them, a nurse, an intern and an obstetrician are playing relay with various medical instruments.

The nurse keeps saying “push, push, one more time PUSH!”

The Epidural had worn off, something the sadistic nurse had done on purpose so that I “could feel what was happening” .(bitch!I am a western woman born with a european passport and a medicare card! I do not need to feel my vagina stretch to alarming proportions. I am allowed free drugs NOT to feel that!)

The feeling, can only be described as unnatural. The pain of your body being splayed to expel a foreign body that has been growing inside your womb for nine months can only be compared to an intense empathic-kinaesthetic experience while watching the movie Alien.

I did not find anything magical in that moment, until the foreign body was out.

After cutting the umbilical cord, they took Noam on to the scale, things were still going on between my legs but I didn't feel a thing. My entire mind was focused on this little being. They did the apgar test, I remember thinking that all I wanted was for them to leave him alone and give him to me.

They finally put him on my stomach his head next to my breast. He didn't suck at first, we just looked at each other. This was the magical moment, love was filling my heart at the speed of light.All I wanted to do was to care and protect that little baby.Then he put his mouth around my nipple...

The magic was broken with that first suck, my whole cosmology was shaken, the start of the basic definition of myself was suddenly being shifted from human being to mammal.

I became a milk bar.

And for the next 9 months, I remained a milk bar on a leash.

At times I felt as though I had been taken hostage by an angry leprechaun who had drugged me so that I would attend to his every needs and indulge his every whims. Thankfully for me, I am suffering from a severe and incurable Stockholm syndrome.