Munchausen Marriage - Part VIII
I never stopped to think what married life would be like with Werner Forman. I really didn’t know my partner very well, and from the beginning I could sense that things were going to grow stranger and more confusing with each day.
THIS IS PART 8 of a TEN-PART STORY
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10
Image: Alexander Krivitskiy
Curiously, Werner and I got along extremely well from the seventh month of my pregnancy till I went into labor three months later. Because I’d had some cramping and bleeding at sixteen weeks (due to my conviction that it was fine at that point to smoke and drink alcohol), I was considered a high risk pregnancy and had to spend a lot of time on bedrest. And the more you lie around in pregnancy, the bigger you get -- so there I was with a belly like the prow of a ship.
To prepare myself for labor, I’d joined a small Lamaze class. There were six of us, and all but one were American (the odd woman out was Irish). Except for me, we were all due at about the same time (I was due three weeks after the others, in mid-May). The Irish woman’s belly was bigger even than mine, and when she had a stillbirth on April 15, my birthday, I went nuts. I decided I simply could not wait another three weeks, couldn’t go through all that fear and frustration, had to give birth ASAP. And so I did something I’d never done before: I focused my mind so intensely on a desired outcome that the world dropped away and there was just me, standing still as a statue at the kitchen counter, and nothing else but a dim whoosh of light. Presumably I was deep in prayer. But this was different from prayer: stronger, all-consuming, a little bit shocking. The moment passed; my body felt as huge and pregnant as it had all of this final trimester. But when I went to the bathroom about an hour later, I saw a thin line of blood in my underpants and suddenly my large body seemed -- hormonally speaking -- to take a nosedive, as if I were a plane coming in for a crash landing. I remember thinking, What have I done? And I remember being terrified.
My daughter, Jofka, was born two days later. It was a straightforward birth, sixteen hours of labor, no drugs except at the very end when a med student stuck his hand up my birth canal in the middle of a contraction and I started screaming.
Werner came to visit me early in labor and when I kicked my feet in pain, he said, “Vat you have is normal. But I have sto-match ache and that could be serious.”
Baby Jofka
Typical Werner. He seemed happy to meet his daughter, walking around her crib moments after she’d been born, clutching his briefcase and staring at her out of his bright blue eyes in awe and amazement. It wasn’t till the next day that the troubles began.
Cover Image: Chayene Rafaela