Red Water

Yesterday

As Bette eases me into the birthing tub I feel the water she prepared is warm, not too hot at all, and I’m grateful to her. Any feeling of something not fucking ripping me in two pieces is incredibly welcome to me. I’ve been breathing through round after round of painful periods of contractions for a good while and this baby doesn’t seem to be coming easily. I watch the strain of concern on her face as I bleed streams of red into the warm water.

“Tina? You’ve been bleeding a while. Do you still think this is OK?” Her voice is not too tense yet but she’s serious about an answer. I have about a minute left before I start screaming again. My labor doula, Kim, answers thankfully.

“Bette, Tina’s three minutes apart now. Bleeding is very normal as the baby comes.”

My time is up and I scream.

Fear does something to Time. I don’t know what, but it fucks with it somehow, and when a minute becomes longer you know you are on the edge of something unusual, something awesome, something terrifying. A minute is filled with so many thoughts when time stretches like it is now, and I feel I may be dying while giving birth.

An image in my mind floats by along a streak of pain. How unfamiliar this is from my picture of childbearing – always with a husband in it, and a white family. Then by twist after turn I am here instead, on the floor in a tub in our West Hollywood home screaming into Bette’s neck as her vein throbs, and I face my utter vulnerability to her. I sob against her chest panicked, as nothing about my childbirth feels safe to me any longer. Another twist of horrible pain begins and my mind splits away.

I think of years ago…

People assumed that because I’m blonde and pretty, and Bette, the obvious Alpha, that I must’ve been some sort of sexually possessed and clueless nitwit. Or worse – her co-dependent threat manager. You would think people would be more sophisticated, more aware that dominance is empty brags of strength and control without its opposite, surrender to receive it. But I had never found a lover with her brand of unbounded attraction to even explore along the edges of polarities. I knew nothing, absolutely nothing about what happens when two perfectly matched people are drawn together.