Unbridled Beauty

I awake in white light. A soft haze washes over me and I question whether I’ve ascended to the next world. There’s a man in a door frame; “Shaelah” he calls, “Shaelah, come on.” I yawn and rub my eyes, unwilling. It’s only as a woman approaches from behind him, that the sleep begins to roll off of me. Her olive skin stretched tight at the middle, I recognize this woman as my mother; my pregnant mother. She’s calm, but visibly strained. I’m sitting upright on the side of my bed, looking at her and my stepdad, being told to get up. She’s going into labor.
We descend into the cold winter air, full of tension. It feels like there’s a spotlight following us around and my mother is at the center of it, enduring with dignity and grace amidst the frantic energy of my younger siblings, and my concerned stepdad. The car jostles as we pile in. As the oldest child, I’m aware that my mother is in pain, but my role is to sit still, to be mature, to observe and protect. Though my younger siblings are in a kind of drunken fever. Still in pajamas, clutching Nintendo DSs on a school night, this is a chance to play hooky. I can barely hear over their restless excitement as I try to sneak into the conversation happening up front. “How far apart are your contractions?” my stepdad is asking, then my siblings garble my mother’s response.
We spent months, as a family, making assumptions about this baby: What she’ll wear, what she’ll like to do, what she’ll look like. This was our way of molding her, of setting an expectation before she was born. And most of what we discussed resembled the beauty we’d seen on television. I thought about the body I’d seen in the media, the body I wanted but didn’t have, when entering into these conversations with my family. “She’s going to have a slim body that’s round in all the right places, and a white radiant smile,” I said sheepishly, over dinner one night. My mother’s eyes gleamed, but my stepdad put his fork down. He swallowed, then paused, like he was going to rebuke me. “Well you know what, I think she's going to be incredibly hairy. She’s got Italian in her, after all.” To which our family erupted in laughter, and responded with phrases like “could you imagine,” “as if,” and “oh my god.” Frankly I didn’t understand the jokes. I believed these conversations would make her beautiful, as if our words were instruments of the divine forces that were creating her.
I listen to spoons scrape the bottoms of bowls, straws sucking the last drops from empty cups. The hospital doesn’t know what to do with all of these children. I guess it’s not standard that a mother would bring her four kids with her into the delivery room. So my siblings and I wait in the food court and snack on pudding and chocolate milk, thumbs on Nintendo DS’s giving tangible sound to my nervous energy. I consider where my mother might be, how she’s feeling, why they can’t make space for us kids in the room with her. I’m agitated; and for a moment, I question whether I’m gonna throw up. My stomach lurches and then coils into itself, like a tape measurer snapping back into place. More clicking buttons on the DSs. There’s the ticking of a clock on the wall, next to our table. A constant buzzing noise coming from the sterile, fluorescent lights on the ceiling. The sound of serving dishes banging against garbage cans as the food court staff prepare to put out more hot food. I hear the voices of other visitors as one muddled, torturous whisper. It feels like a whole garbage disposal of sound is shredding me in my heightened, anxious state. Then, a voice emerges, clear as day amidst the noise. “They’ve given us a suite! Follow me.” A hand on the back of my neck pulls me out of it.
We follow my stepdad down a hallway in the maternity ward, past a window into the newborn nursery, where babies swaddled in white cloths lie in rows of stainless steel bassinets. I pause by the window and try to envision my soon-to-be sister lying with them. Her face framed by a white blanket, her porcelain skin, her teeny nose and her squinted eyes. I suddenly realize that all the newborns look the same to me. But mentally, I’m making a space for her in this nursery, putting a label on the side of her bassinet with her name on it. I’m imagining a label with her full name, and underneath it, a paragraph detailing what she wears, what she likes to do, what she looks like. Now, the rows of newborns squirm against their blanket-cocoons.
Around six months into my mother’s pregnancy, she picked me up from school and took me with her to an ultrasound, where a black and white screen let us look inside her womb. We marveled over every new development–the baby’s fingers and toes were visible by this point–and listened to it’s small, steady heartbeat. Then the screen froze. The ultrasound technician clicked a button on her keyboard and it cut to a zoomed-in portrait of the baby’s face; a clay-like image that made her look more alien than human. The technician moved her cursor around a gray space in the frame, right above my sister’s lip, then froze the screen again. “Do you see that gap there?” the technician turned to face my mother. “Unfortunately, your daughter is going to be born with a cleft lip. Now there are plenty of things you can do to fix it…” she continued, before giving my mother a chance to respond.
The birthing suite looks like a big bedroom. It has wooden floors, linen curtains, and a couple couches next to a window. There’s a bed in the middle of the room but it’s not ordinary; it has a remote to adjust its position and stirrups attached at the foot. Everyone has calmed down a bit since we got here. My siblings are curled up on the couches, dozing off. My mother is lying in the strange bed with her arms folded behind her head, talking to my stepdad in a voice that I don’t recognize. I’m watching television. There’s no longer a sense of urgency, but rather, a concentrated stillness, a liminal space, that’s allowing us all a moment to breathe.
There are boobs on the television but neither of my parents have noticed yet. I’m the only one paying attention. The boobs on the television are bouncing in slow motion, covered in oil, and I note; are much larger and perkier than mine. Then the camera pans out to three bikini models, with tight waists and wide hips, jumping up and down on a trampoline. I glance over at my mother, and consider asking her to change the channel; this is no show for a newborn baby to watch, I think to myself. Though she’s not here yet, I’m prepared to make a space for her. Surely this can’t be on the television when she gets here. Still, my gaze lingers on the shiny bikini bodies, jumping up and down. Suddenly I become disoriented and drowsy. My eyelids grow heavy.
I awake in pulsing red light, to the sound of screaming. My nerves are live wires, and the clamor of metal, a baby crying, and a woman panting are the spark of a lighter against them. It takes me a minute to discern if there’s a war happening outside. Then the sleep begins to roll off of me, and I realize I’m seeing from behind my eyelids. Now I see three nurses huddled between my mother’s legs. An overhead light illuminates their bodies so that I can only see their hands moving quickly. They form a kind of shelter around my new baby sister, wailing from somewhere within. Behind them, the television is still on. Except there are maybe a hundred bikini models on the screen now. They’re lined in rows of ten, each jumping on their own mini trampoline, moving in tandem. One of the nurses lifts my new baby sister to her chest, then turns and sets her on a stainless steel bassinet. My siblings crowd around her. I can see her cleft lip from where I’m sitting and it’s the most beautiful feature I’ve ever seen.