you won’t hear this

My mother was dying. She was lying in a bed with tubes protruding from her body, in an overpopulated hospital with people littered throughout the hallways waiting to be examined. My mother had given birth two days prior, but now … she was dying.

Two days before, she was lying in a hospital bed getting ready to give birth to me. I’ve seen pictures from the day. My aunt loved taking pictures, so there were tons of photos of the day. Pictures of mom in the hospital bed, of me, sticky with eyes squinched, of blood on the floor, and even some of the alien-looking placenta. Every time I see pictures of my freshly birthed self all I can think about is how long my head is and how hard my mother must have squeezed me before I finally slid into the world. I wonder if it was her way of giving me one last internal embrace.

When mom would tell me the story of my birth, I always imagined the hospital room was dark, like the only light was coming in from the hallway or maybe a small nightlight plugged into a far corner of the room. But in the pictures, it’s not dark; light comes from above though the room does have a dingy sort of glow. I try to imagine being in that room, in 1997, seeing my mother with the bags under her eyes, her hair becoming increasingly frizzier as she turns her head side to side, tracking family members and nurses across the room or maybe trying to shake away the pain radiating up from below. I imagine myself taking her hand, trying to comfort her. I wonder if her hands were cold or did clenching her fists through every contraction heat them up. I wonder how it smelt in there. The usual smell of chemicals in the hospital? Or maybe it smelled like the perfume that my aunt or grandma might have been wearing. Did it smell like the inside of a human body? I want to lean over her and kiss her head, in thanks, in guilt, in sorrow because I know what she’ll go through. I know how often Black women die in childbirth. I don’t know what the numbers were then, but I know what they are now, so I can only imagine the suffering, the lives lost. 

I know she’s tired, but I want to ask her if she knows why. Why she’ll end up near dead in the next couple of days. I want to ask her if she knows why this happens to so many Black mothers? I want to ask if she knows why Black women are more likely to die due to pregnancy and childbirth-related complications? I want to ask if she knows that it’s probably because doctors don’t listen to them. Does she know that they don’t listen when a Black mother says something’s not right? Does she know that they don’t listen when a Black mother says she’s in pain? Does she know that they don’t listen? That they won’t listen? Does she know?

Maybe she does. Maybe she’s heard stories. Maybe she’s suspicious of doctors like I find many Black people to be. Maybe she has an idea, but soon she’ll know with absolute certainty. She’ll know that they don’t listen. She’ll know that they tell Black women in excruciating pain that nothing is wrong. She’ll know that they think Black women are overreacting, are overexaggerating, are lying. She’ll know all of this two days after giving me life.

And I want to lean over and kiss her head. In sorrow, in guilt, in thanks.

I know the details. I know them so well from how often I’ve asked my mom about it. It’s almost like a history book that I keep shelved front and center in the library of my mind. I open it often. I read and reread and memorize the facts.

It goes like this. After spending about twelve hours in the hospital waiting for the moment she would bring her daughter into the world, thirty-year-old Willette Mathis had finally dilated ten centimeters. She was instructed to start pushing. She would not finish pushing until three hours later at 6:35am on June 13th, 1997. Throughout the delivery, everyone kept asking her, “You can’t push that little baby out?” This woman, hearing a refrain of “1,2,3 push, 1,2,3 push,” having contractions rip through her body, feeling the tightening and releasing of her muscles for three hours, was continually asked why she couldn’t push that little baby out. Her husband, her sister, her doctor asked her this throughout the three hours. All the while, she repeated “My chest hurts, my chest hurts,” but all she heard was “You can’t push that little baby out?”

At a certain point, when she’d had enough of her husband telling her to push the baby out, she screeched, “Didn’t I tell you my chest is hurting? You push that motherfucker out.” During this three-hour long game of push and berate, her doctor told the nurse to retrieve him when the head was out because her daughter would seem near crowning and then would retreat into the warmth and safety inside her. The doctor told the nurse that he would be taking a nap in the room next door. About an hour later, around 6:15, the doctor came back and said, “You haven’t pushed the baby out yet?” He then proceeded to get what Willette would later describe to her daughter as a suction cup and he yanked the baby girl out.

After spending so long in the birth canal, I swallowed some of my mother’s urine and developed an infection that would cause me to spend the first few days of my life housed in a room with infants rocking in a cradle between life and death. My mother, on the other hand, was not as lucky. She was discharged two days after giving birth and went home feeling as if she had a cold. Thinking she was just a little sick, she sent my cousin to the store to buy cough drops. Her doctors had cleared her to be discharged, so why would she think anything was seriously wrong? My mother lied down to rest and soon she felt like death was upon her. She scared herself awake. She got her friends to rush her back to the hospital while my grandmother stayed behind to watch my brother. At the hospital, my mother had a hard time catching her breath and when she attempted to tell the medical staff what she was feeling they asked her why she was talking weird; she replied, gasping, “I …  don’t … know.”

Eventually, they determined her body was drowning her. Her lungs had filled with fluid because her heart had stopped pumping properly. The doctors told my mother that she had gone into congestive heart failure. The blood and other fluids that were supposed to run like a life-sustaining river through her body had backed up inside her lungs. Before she left the hospital a few days later, she would have fourteen pounds of misplaced fluid flushed from her body. All my mother’s doctor had to offer was “I’m sorry.”

My mother was close to being one of the many Black women who die because of a prejudiced medical staff. She would’ve been another forgotten statistic. After the ordeal, she had to stay on numerous medications for a few years, and, for the rest of her life, she will have to take high blood pressure medication.

Sometimes I find myself asking who should apologize to my mother. The little baby who refused to be pushed out? The doctor who ignored her complaints of chest pain? Hospitals that employ indifferent doctors? The system of racism that has influenced how Black women are perceived? Who is going to look at my mother and say “Ms. Mathis, I’m sorry I almost killed you”?