All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his. 

                                                        -- Oscar Wilde

Honey, you can tell me anything, 

You came out of my vagina for God’s sake

                                                             --- Me

She is 15 and I still love to watch her sleep. She looks like an angel curled up in her flannel sheets, hugging her pillow and surrounded by three sleeping cats, one of them snoring.

I don’t find her much like me at all, thank God, but of course, it is still early.

She was two weeks late, a week later than her older brother, which is just like her, obstinate and competitive. She came out when she was damn good and ready and not one minute sooner.

I wanted a girl so badly.

When I was 7 months along I went to a psychic to ask if the baby was a boy or a girl. Ultrasounds existed, but my midwife didn’t routinely offer them and I had no insurance to cover one. For Christmas, my father had given me a gift certificate for a psychic named Mrs. Mohur.  She looked like any middle-aged woman in bland middle-aged woman clothes and not dressed up like a gypsy as I had imagined, but what should I expect of a psychic that sells gift certificates?

Mrs. Mohur asked to hold a piece of my jewelry, preferably something metallic so I handed her my watch. From that she gleaned that I would travel fairly soon and offered what turned out to be a fairly accurate description of where we would go. Thankfully, she did not tell me why. I didn’t care about that, I just wanted her to tell me that I was carrying a girl, but she couldn’t or wouldn’t and implied, without risking anything definitive, that my baby was a boy. Even with a psychic, I guess it is still 50-50.

Two weeks past her due date, a check up of her vital signs suggested some potential for fetal distress. These concerns and the need for pitocin to urge the baby out forced me to check into the hospital, instead of meeting the midwife at the cozy, post-hippie appointed birthing room. As I never seriously considered squeezing one out without an epidural, this was only a minor disappointment.

Once you get to the hospital, they won’t allow you anything to eat but ice chips. After a very long labor with my son, I knew enough to make a stop at McDonalds on the way.

When I arrived, they strapped a heavy seatbelt like monitor over my belly and asked me to roughly stroke my own nipples. Apparently, this can naturally induce labor. So there I am, topless, huge and covered with stretch marks while an elderly candy striper is telling me to play with myself in front of her while she monitors the fetal heartbeat.

I was mortified, but I wouldn’t have been had I known that there were so many more indignities to come. Did you know that when the baby finally makes its descent, the pressure forces a bowel movement? It squeezes right out onto the delivery table in front of your loved ones. No one tells you this stuff, but I will.

After each episode of nipple stimulation, the heartbeat kept decelerating, which is bad. Upon inspection it appeared that the baby was retreating instead of preparing for arrival. The midwife consulted an OB/Gyn about a possible C-section, which I was adamantly against, because as far as I was concerned, you can ruin either my belly or my vagina, but not both. I had already delivered my son vaginally, so I was reluctant to give up on this point. At my insistence, they gave it another look. Upon further inspection, it became evident that the nurse had forgotten to catheter me and as my bladder filled up, it was obscuring the baby’s progress. It wasn’t any closer to coming out, but it wasn’t headed in the wrong direction either. C-section called off on account of pee, my belly was safe.

While you contract and suffer and worry about your baby’s life, nurses come in and say stupid things to you.

Are you comfortable? Can I get you some ice chips? I’ll bet you are having a boy.

It seemed to me that all of the nurses smoked. They’d come in, stinking from a smoke break and check my cervix, probably without washing their hands first, which, by the way, is an excellent recipe for a bladder infection. My water hadn’t broken yet. Water breaking is when fluid rushes out of your vagina, runs down your leg and splatters on to the floor, which ordinarily would be bad, but if you are very pregnant, is a good thing. In any case, mine hadn’t, so they punctured the membrane with a more “official” looking version of a knitting needle.

Water didn’t rush out. My baby was so late that not only had she begun to dry up, but she had already passed meconium, in other words, pooped, inside of me and with each contraction, amniotic fluid and fetal shit dribbled out of me. The smell of oozing unborn baby poop and cigarette smoking nurses walking in and out of the room was enough to make me vomit, so I did.

I wanted a girl so badly. I wanted a girl so much that I felt guilty about it. I worried that if it was a boy, maybe I would feel disappointed. Before your first baby is born you can’t imagine what it will be like. You dream about puppies and kittens and all you can really think about it how much it is going to hurt coming out. At the time I chalked it up to being only seventeen, but it seems at any age, if it’s the first baby, the process seems incredibly unreal. I couldn’t believe an actual person was going to come out of me. The general lack of understanding of the first pregnancy is replaced by fear in the second one. Fear of everything that can possibly go wrong, that you were previously ignorant of, and the fear that you could not possibly love this new baby, this interloper into your established family unit, anywhere near as much as you love the first one. 

Two weeks and twenty hours late, she made her way out, blotchy, dried out, and covered in placental muck, exactly when she was damn good and ready and not one minute sooner.

The hardest thing for a mother to accept is also the hardest thing for a young woman to do. Everything you are and everything that you have done is your daughter’s challenge to get over.

You don’t see it when they are little. You are too busy keeping them alive. Don’t run into traffic, don’t eat poison, don’t drown, don’t talk to strangers. Don’ts are simple, do’s are much more difficult. I spent the lion’s share of my adolescence safely in my room masturbating and watching television. I didn’t end up dead in a ditch, but when I look back I wish I had learned to play an instrument or studied a foreign language. You have these free years during which you have so many choices and so little responsibility. You can use them to try new things and build momentum for your future, or you can look back on a decade of network programming and learn to achieve orgasm within the span of a typical commercial break. I blame my mother for my crooked teeth and for not insisting that I develop some hobbies.

Girls are complicated beings. They come out your body and fix their gaze upon you. It’s as if they know instantly who is to blame both for the rude awakening and for everything else that will come to pass in the next forty years.

With that stare, they begin their first and most complex relationship. Girls are all about relationships. We are always somebody’s something. First a daughter, but quickly, many more relationships form exponentially. Friend, best friend, second best friend, friend because she lives across the street, girls we hate, girls we want to be, pop stars we admire. Boys don’t have these fussy ranking systems. If there is another boy nearby who is not actively punching you, he is your friend.

A girlfriend, an aunt, a hostess, a sex object, a nurturer, a wife, a daughter in law, a mommy, a mother. From that first lasting gaze, we are held to the standards of all of those roles and the people who fulfilled them before us and we are judged. Somewhere early on, we know that to be a mother is most important, and to be a bad one would be the worst thing of all.

Girls think too much.